DormMart — Financial Independence Track

Women in dorms already buy, sell, and offer services to each other — secondhand clothes, home-cooked food, henna appointments, notes, pre-ordered goods from abroad. But it all happens through scattered WhatsApp groups: no way to search old posts, no trust signals, no way to know if something's still available, and no way to actually build income from it. DormMart replaces that chaos with a real, searchable, trust-based marketplace — helping women like Sara, a student who sells henna slots and secondhand clothes, turn what she already has, makes, or knows how to do into real, trackable income inside a community she already trusts.

How we built it

We started with a real person in mind — a student like Sara who sells henna appointments and secondhand clothes through a chaotic 200-message WhatsApp group — and worked backward from her problem. We planned the full feature set and screen-by-screen spec in Claude before touching a builder, then used Genspark as our main platform: one clear, complete prompt to scaffold all five core screens (auth, home feed, post listing, item detail, profile/dashboard), tested every flow in the live preview, then sent batched follow-up prompts to fix gaps and add features — custom categories, a two-tier seller verification system, an About page — rather than rebuilding piece by piece. Each team member owned testing one part of the app end to end.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the reserve/interest logic right took the most iteration — we didn't want the app to auto-confirm a sale, since real transactions happen in person and in cash, so the seller needed full control over who they actually sell to. Balancing scope against our hackathon clock was the other constant challenge: several features we designed (multi-photo carousels, unified search across listings and sellers, custom category moderation) were more complex than a one-day build could safely support, so we made deliberate cuts to protect the core working demo instead of risking it on features that wouldn't move the needle with judges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a genuinely complete marketplace loop — post, browse, express interest, seller confirms, review — that works end to end on a live deployed link, not just a mockup. We're also proud of the trust layer: dorm verification, an earned two-tier seller badge instead of automatic trust, and a fee model that only charges at the one moment the platform actually controls, leaving every in-person cash sale untouched.

What we learned

That the sharpest constraint on a one-day build isn't the tool, it's discipline — writing one precise, complete request beats five small ones, and knowing what not to build is as important as knowing what to build. We also learned a lot about designing for trust in a peer-to-peer marketplace: visible verification, transparent fees, and giving sellers real control over who they sell to matter as much as the UI.

What's next for DormMart

Real payment integration via bKash/Nagad instead of a simulated fee, in-app messaging so buyers and sellers don't have to leave the platform to coordinate, photo-based listing search, and expanding dorm verification into a lightweight admin review flow for reported listings and community-suggested categories.