Copa | Devpost

Inspiration

With rising rent and living costs, millennials often cohabitate homes and co-own property within them. We wanted to help people combine their consumer power, to share their material wealth and leverage their assets sooner.

What it does

Copa helps groups manage the process of purchasing and managing shared assets, from buying a new flat screen for the dorm to splitting a mortgage for a condo. Our Google Chrome extension enables users to see group purchasing power at a glance. Users can easily discuss wanted items, track the assets they already own together and settle up with free Interac e-transfers anytime.

How we built it

We built this using a standard javascript stack of React, GraphQL, Serverless functions and AWS resources (DynamoDB, etc).

Challenges we ran into

No major challenges, more time would permit a higher level of feature completion, but this was good to flesh out an early prototype and see how everything would interact with the Interac APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We designed a great product proof of concept. The click-through prototype is compelling and everyone we've told our idea to seems to think we're tackling a problem that is worth solving. We made some amazing connections with the folks at TD and are excited to continue working with them to launch our product at scale.

What we learned

We knew it would be difficult to go for the full vision right away, so we kept our project scope small and focused on purchasing items between roommates. We learned it was actually relatively easy to spin up a chrome extension and overlay information on top of Amazon to demonstrate the benefits of group purchasing power, at a glance.

What's next for Copa

We want to enable people to execute more and more complex purchases. From two brothers buying a car together to a group of middle-aged working professional friends who want to go in on a property together, each owning a suite, and paying down a portion of their own mortgage. We don't think anyone in their 20's should spend a decade paying down someone else's mortgage by renting when instead they could be paying down a portion of their own split mortgage and building a wealth portfolio sooner.