CommunityFund

Inspiration

A much needed pingpong table at RBG.

What it does

How we built it

Claude, and a lot of debugging.

Challenges we ran into

Coming into the Claude Builders Club Hackathon, we were quite ambitious. The vision? A platform for communities to invest in themselves. Ping pong table in RBG? Trip to Watkins Glen with your best buds? Through our product, Community Fund, we wanted to emphasize sustainability and responsible consumption by empowering communities to benefit from shared goods. The act of coming together to invest in our community and achieve shared goals would create a deeper sense of connection that is essential in creating a more resilient world. Our society expects the individual to have everything figured out and be completely self-sufficient, discouraging individuals from asking for help. Our web app debunks this societal norm, teaching users that goals can and should be completed through teamwork.

We faced many challenges when working on our product, and were unfamiliar with the coding workflow. We started by planning everything out and giving a long set of instructions to Claude to build the website all at once. However, we did not budget our time well. In hindsight, we spent too much time on product ideation and didn’t anticipate how long it would take Claude to process the instructions. Our instructions were too specific for a minimum viable product. When Claude finally did create our first prototype, it needed extreme debugging, which was immensely time consuming. Fixing one bug would create new bugs. We also struggled with work distribution and delegation of tasks. Since we spent so much time on the ideation phase, we weren’t very clear on how to implement the product, and needed to be more systematic with our attack strategy. Despite these struggles, we learned a lot about how to effectively work together as a team, gained greater insight into product development, and were able to successfully create a minimum viable product.