Lunch.ours

Lunch.ours matches members of the community for surprise blind lunches.

Comment

Inspiration

In one of my most stressful semesters, I suddenly realized how long it has been since I last made a new friend. I resolved to join more clubs and events the following semester but I simply didn't have time and energy to widen my social circle with the stress and fatigue. Looking down at my lunch from food truck, I realized - wouldn't it be nice to take the lunch hour to have lunch with someone random in Penn and get to know him/her in a casual conversation?

Why Lunch.ours

  • Time-effective and no-fuss way to step out of social circle. 
Easily make new connections for friendship, dating, networking.
  • Offline quality conversations over lunch. 
Not just texts, not just acquaintances.
  • As and when you want a lunch buddy.
  • Serendipity and surprise.

What it does

Lunch.ours matches members of a school community (students, faculty, staff) up for surprise blind lunches with one another. Users can choose to join an existing lunch or post a new lunch with date, time and their tagline. Nothing else about the lunch buddy is revealed.

How I built it

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Working prototype: Lunch.ours has a working prototype which includes a landing page, sign-up form, scripts for matching and sending automated personalized notification emails.

  • Substantial real world concept testing: With the prototype, we have matched more than 160 students and faculty at Penn and Columbia over the last few months. We have received substantial and overwhelmingly positive feedback, as well as specific user pain points that we want to target in solving.

  • Nice mockup: Mockup can be viewed here.

  • Developed frontend of progressive web app

What I learned

Before the hack, building the full-stack app at one go has been a significant challenge that stalled us. Jorge (mentor and judge) affirmed our UI design and reminded us that we should start with the frontend, before building the backend and the database. With this, we quickly embarked on frontend development. Through this hack, we developed a basic knowledge of the MERN stack and how to create components in react. We also experimented in designing with css and app storying boarding with figma.

We also learnt that presentation, pitch and sharing of our vision is super important in any hackathon. And we are excited to share our story and vision with everyone tomorrow.

What's next for Lunch.ours

This hackthon has pushed us forward in completing the mockup, planning of features and data structures and frontend development. We will then work on the backend and database integration and adding the PWA features.

Share this project:

Updates