FemmeNest

FemmeNest Logo
Our team! ❤️
Listings Page
About the team
Example Listing Amenities
Required Leasing Info
Relevant Commuter Information that links to Google Maps
Direct contact with landlords
Student status verification
Leasing application + payment processing
Listing search functionality
Mobile View Menu

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from our shared experiences of struggling to find safe and reliable housing as young women navigating internships away from home. We understand firsthand the challenges of avoiding scams and finding housing that aligns with our preferences and is trustworthy. This personal journey inspired us to create FemmeNest, a platform that simplifies the process of finding housing by connecting young women with verified listings and housemates. Our mission is to empower young women like us to find housing that meets their needs and promotes a sense of safety and community.

What it does

FemmeNest is a community-driven platform that aims to provide the best co-living experience for young women. With FemmeNest, you can find safe and reliable housing from verified women in your community. Whether you're looking for a roommate or a place to live, our app connects you with like-minded individuals in female-friendly environments. Additionally, with our smart-tagging that organizes listings by categories such as city, housing community, cost, lease length, room type, and amenities. Most importantly, users have to go through a strict verification process before they can post or view listings to our platform to ensure they are also students/part of an educational institution. Our application also supports secure SSL checkout to ensure that financial transactions can be made safely! Explore our application today and find your ideal residence at your future place of work.

How we built it

As a group that hasn’t used Squarespace before, we used it to develop the UI of the website to make sure the experience of looking for a listing and creating a listing was a seamless process. For certain parts of the website where we needed customization, we used HTML/CSS to embed ways to input files and more information into the forms that we have.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into revolved around displaying our listings all together. We finally came up with the idea of making a sort of “online store” which supported “products” aka listings that each linked to their own listing page. In the process of that, we learned how to support images and additional information that was needed. Another challenge we had was the focal point of our application - security and verification of users. Initially, we had wanted to use AI to verify student IDs but after looking into that, we decided there was too much potential for fraud. Instead, we had to support file upload and a manual way to verify IDs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the process of planning the website, we considered first and foremost the needs of the women who use our website. We wanted to create a service that was personalized to the experiences of women and unique from other services. We personally interviewed women in the hackathon to evaluate which features to provide. In addition, we paid a high attention to detail to the usability and intuitiveness of our website to ensure a seamless and stress-free experience for our users. We are proud of our attentiveness and how closely we work with potential users.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the process of housing and also how to create interfaces that are easy to use from a user's perspective. We did research into housing sites and what kind of information is available and needed to lease places. As mentioned before, we also interviewed women firsthand to learn what kind of information they would uniquely like to see. We learned a lot about how to outline an idea for solving a problem that young women face when looking for housing to accommodate them. On the more technical side of things, we learned a lot about how AI can override our security checks and thus the advantages in manual ID verification to eliminate any illegitimate users into our platform.

What's next for FemmeNest

We want to flesh out the application by actually receiving access to a database of viable students that are attending higher education to improve our verification process and provide a less manual way of verification. Using a developer front end framework would also be on the radar since we would want more customization as to how we receive data and display listings for the users of our application. In the future, expanding to a mobile application would also allow more women to use our service!