Inspiration
As someone who moved 40 times in my childhood, I was forced to make connections with new people all the time. One of my tactics would be to find local events to go to. But what I really wanted to do, was to find people interested in the kinds of things that I am, and have an ad-hoc get together. The web is great for finding people of like minds, but meeting them in person is a challenge.
Opportunity
Online, it is easy to promote a structured event, but there is no good solution for creating a spontaneous event. Solutions like MeetUp and Eventbrite for example, only represent 36% of all available opportunites. $10-$40 per month may be a fair price for a Meetup, but it is a barrier for someone who wants to have a random, spontaneous event, or anyone who doesn't have a budget for hosting events.
Solution
With a very low barrier to entry, DownForIt allows you to create a spontaneous get together with anyone who's interested. Using nothing more than 140 characters you can propose or join a gathering with random people on the fly.
The App
As a creator of an event, all it takes is a tweet using special hash tags.
The home page features an event feed that allows you to see all current open events. If you are interested, you can hit the "I'm Down" button and you enter a chat room with others interested in that event. At any time, if you see an event you think you would enjoy, you can add that event to your Following channel. You will then get alerts from any of your Following channels in your subscription and hop in a chat if you see something interesting.
Revenue
- Businesses can advertise to niche groups DownForIt groups
Challenges
Our team has a wide gamut of technical talents and feats, but the area we faced the most challenges was mobile development. None of us are mobile developers but we thought we will would use hybrid Javascript libraries (Cordova and Ionic) to kickstart this project. However, little did we know that the technical hurdles like the lack of conventional debugging in Cordova made it challenging to know what went wrong with our code.
Team Accomplishments
We are proud to produce DownForIt. While we would love to spend more time polishing the features and interfaces, we developed a product that address our own needs. We would like to soon seed this app for public use and understand what works and what does not. We strongly believe DownForIt will help change microcosm level activities and usher in a new era of opportunities for all locals.
What we learned
- There is a steep learning curve for Ionic Cordova
- Cordova does not offer friendly debugging tools
- Staying overnight has its perks (get free blankets and ice creams)
What's Next
We want to continue polishing the app and interface. We want to ship a beautiful and functional app and believe believe we came close to that in less than 48 hours of work. We want to introduce this app to our friends and families and solicit feedback and allow them to use it. We would love to see where this app goes and how much opportunities it will bring for locals.
Built With
apache ios javascript xcode twitter moment.js firebase atlantic.net-cloud-servers angular.js ionic google-maps sinch gun.io
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