Lavoir

Inspiration

The most important factor to our happiness is the number of our quality relationships. However, friendships are dwindling in the modern age. The number of Americans who say they have 0 close friends has quadrupled since 1990. We are allegedly more connected than ever with many "social" platforms.

That is where the idea for Lavoir came from. We wanted to create a platform that makes it easier to actually talk to new people rather.

What it does

Lavoir is a platform intended to create friendships. You join a room with a small group of people from your community and enter a video call. But instead of just putting a bunch of strangers in a call and expecting them to somehow start talking, we give them a shared activity or icebreaker. The activity itself is trivial. The point is that it gives everyone a task and forces conversation. The name Lavoir comes from the French word for washhouse. In 1800s France, these washhouses were places where spontaneous and random conversations would happen. In the same way, Lavoir is meant to create interaction between people in your community.

How we built it

We built Lavoir using React, TypeScript, and Vite for the frontend.

We used LiveKit for the video calls and Supabase for the backend, including authentication, the database.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was completely changing our project halfway through the hackathon. We originally started with a music-related idea, but realized that it did not have a strong enough use case, so we decided to pivot to Lavoir.

Another major challenge was merging everything together. Different parts of the project were being built separately, so bringing multiple versions together and getting the frontend, backend, video calls, and session logic to all work together caused a lot of problems. In the end we had to simplify

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of how well we worked together as a team. Most of us met each other for the first time at the hackathon, but we were still able to split up the work and work extremely efficiently.

We are also really proud that we were able to get a working demo, especially considering that we completely changed our project halfway through the hackathon.

What we learned

The biggest thing we learned was how insanely important planning is. There were points where everything started to fall apart because different parts of the project were being built without everyone being fully on the same page.

We learned that taking the time to think through design decisions together before immediately jumping into building saves a lot of problems later