OFFSITE

Inspiration

Challenges: WEHack General Track + Fidelity Challenge Track

Study the past. Fund your future.

As women in STEM, we are constantly surrounded by professional events, LinkedIn connections, and networking opportunities, and somehow still feel like we have nobody to call. Not in the real way. We are in every room. We belong to very few of them.

Most social spaces built for women in tech are really just professional spaces with better lighting. Nobody built the space for the version of us that just wants to sit with people who get it and not talk about work for one evening. That absence is what OFFSITE started from. Not a product gap. A personal one.

Then the WEHack theme arrived and something shifted. We started looking at the women who came before us. Walker, who built the first female self-made millionaire empire in American history starting from $1.50. Lamarr, who invented the technology behind modern WiFi and never saw a cent in royalties. Wu, who proved a Nobel Prize-winning theory while two male colleagues received the award. Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm for a machine that did not exist yet.

Their stories are not just inspiring. They are instructive. Buried inside the history of women is some of the most practical financial wisdom that has ever existed. It just was never framed that way.

The gender wealth gap is not a capability gap. It is a design gap. Women delay investing, avoid salary negotiations, and retire with less, not because they lack the ability, but because financial tools were never built with their lives as the starting point. History already wrote the lessons. We just built the platform to deliver them, with real community, real events, and real women from the past making the present feel possible.

What it does

We created OFFSITE, a social and financial wellness platform for women in STEM that helps users build genuine friendships through shared interests and become more confident with money.

It is built around fun, meaningful experiences rather than career milestones or transactional networking. We wanted to create a space where women can meet others who think like them, participate in activities they actually enjoy, and build connections that go beyond surface-level introductions.

Users start by taking a short, personality-style survey that maps them to one of four archetypes, Pioneer, Connector, Resolver, or Visionary, each inspired by a historical woman. Based on their results, users are matched into small, like-minded groups, making it easier to connect with people who share similar mindsets and energy.

From there, the experience becomes both social and interactive. Users are introduced to curated activities such as museum visits, workshops, or casual group events, creating opportunities to meet in real life and build authentic relationships. The focus is on creating a relaxed, engaging environment where connections feel natural rather than forced.

Alongside the social experience, each user is also guided through a financial learning path tied to their matched historical figure. Instead of overwhelming users with complex financial tools, OFFSITE introduces simple, everyday habits such as saving small amounts, tracking spending, or learning the basics of investing. These habits are designed to feel approachable and easy to maintain.

We also incorporated features that make the experience more engaging and motivating. This includes a cinematic archetype reveal that adds excitement to the onboarding process, group-based progress through collective savings to reduce pressure and comparison, and a lineage feature where users reflect on the women in their own lives who have influenced their mindset and decisions.

By combining social connection, real-world experiences, and financial growth into one platform, OFFSITE creates an environment that feels both fun and meaningful, helping users build relationships while also building better habits for their future.

How we built it

OFFSITE was built in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic) using Claude Code as our development partner. Every product decision came from us. Claude Code wrote the implementation. We wrote the vision, caught what was wrong, and pushed back until it was right.

Framework: React Native, Expo, TypeScript

Navigation: React Navigation

Styling: React Native StyleSheet with a custom jewel-tone design system validated for WCAG AA contrast compliance

Animation: React Native Reanimated for the cinematic figure reveal

Fonts: Playfair Display and DM Sans via expo-google-fonts

State and storage: React Context for global state, AsyncStorage for local persistence

Data: All content in local JSON files. No backend, no database, no external API dependencies at runtime. All matching logic is deterministic and rule-based.

Build and deployment: Vite, Netlify, GitHub

Accessibility: WCAG AA throughout. Minimum 4.5:1 contrast, 44pt touch targets, text labels on all color-coded indicators.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was not technical. It was philosophical. How do we make history feel urgent without making it feel like homework? The risk was that the historical framing would feel decorative, a theme applied to an app that could have worked just as well without it.

What resolved that tension was a simple rule: let the history do real work. Not as inspiration. As instruction. Lamarr's lesson is about emergency funds not because she represents resilience but because she literally lost a billion dollar invention because she had no financial protection around it. Every time we caught ourselves using a historical figure as metaphor instead of as evidence, we went back and made the connection more direct.

The second challenge was designing two paths, the survey track and the interest matching track, that felt equally valid. We did not want users who skipped the survey to feel like they had opted out of the real experience. Building the interest path as a genuinely different first class experience with its own matching logic, its own event type, and its own financial track took more iterations than anything else in the product.

V1 is an accountability layer, not a payment rail. OFFSITE shows you what you have saved and prompts you to move it. The user completes the transfer. That was not a limitation. It was a trust decision. We believe users should understand and approve every financial action before we automate it for them. A deeper Fidelity integration is on the roadmap for v2.

Time was the final constraint. We made deliberate cuts and protected the core: the survey, the reveal, the group match, the financial curriculum, the event, the archive, the lineage. Everything that makes OFFSITE what it is rather than what it could eventually become.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that it works. Not just technically but experientially. When you take the survey and the reveal plays, something happens. The archetype appears. The figure's name builds letter by letter. The color floods in. And for a moment you feel like you have been seen by a woman who has been dead for a century. That moment was the hardest thing to design and the thing we are most proud of getting right. We are proud of the financial literacy system. Sixteen lessons across four figure curricula, each one connected to a specific moment in a real woman's life, each one building on the last, each one ending with a concrete action that costs nothing to start. We did not build a budgeting app with a history theme. We built a financial education system that happens to be the most human one we have ever seen.

We are proud of the no LLM architecture. Every matching decision in OFFSITE is deterministic, auditable, and explainable. For a product that handles financial habits and personal data, we believe that matters. We could have added AI inference at multiple points. We chose not to, and we would make that choice again.

We are proud of the lineage feature. It was the last thing we added and the one that surprised us most. The moment we framed it as: who in your life already taught you everything you need to know about money, and you just never called it that, everything clicked. The women in our personal lives and the women in history are the same kind of teacher. OFFSITE just built the space to honor both of them. And honestly we are proud that we built it at all. In the time we had, with the tools we had, as the users we are. That felt like the most OFFSITE thing we could do.

What we learned

We learned that scoping is a product skill. The hardest decisions we made were not about what to build but about what to cut. Every feature we removed made the core stronger. Knowing when to stop is not a limitation of the process. It is the process.

We learned that deterministic systems are underrated. We made an early call to build all matching logic without AI inference and it paid off. The app is faster, more predictable, and easier to debug than it would have been with a model in the loop. For a product handling financial habits and personal data, explainability is not a nice to have.

We learned how to use AI as a collaborator without losing ownership of the product. Claude Code wrote the implementation. We wrote the vision, caught what was wrong, and pushed back until it was right. The distinction matters and we got better at holding it throughout the build.

We learned that accessibility is not a checklist. WCAG compliance forced us to rethink color choices, touch targets, and information hierarchy in ways that made the product better for everyone, not just users with specific needs. We would have missed all of it if we had treated it as an afterthought.

We learned that the best products come from building for yourself first. Every decision we felt uncertain about, we resolved by asking whether it would feel right to us as users. It worked every single time

What's next for OFFSITE

City by city expansion comes first. Dallas, then Austin, then wherever the demand is loudest. We are not trying to scale before we have proven the model works in one place.

The venue partner program opens next. Women-owned small businesses can list their space on OFFSITE for curated events. They get visibility and a community that shows up. Members get spaces built by people who understand them.

The sponsor layer follows. Brands that want genuine access to women in STEM can back events or subsidize tickets. Core features stay free. Premium experiences get funded by partners who earn that access, not buy it.

On the AI side, the next version of OFFSITE introduces personalization that the current rule-based system cannot do alone. A recommendation layer trained on engagement patterns will surface the right activity at the right time for each user. The financial curriculum adapts based on how a user is actually logging, not just what lesson they are on. If someone keeps skipping the daily check-in, the lesson does not just wait. It adjusts. Natural language input replaces form fields in the lineage section so users can write freely about the women in their lives and the app structures it for them.

On the API side, the Fidelity integration deepens in v2. Users connect their account via OAuth and transfers happen in one tap, fully authorized and user controlled at every step. Calendar APIs replace the current manual add-to-calendar link so event dates sync automatically. A maps and location API powers the distance matching in real time instead of relying on static mock data. Push notification infrastructure via Expo replaces the current no-notification state so daily challenge nudges actually reach users.

On the product side, a real backend replaces local JSON storage, expanded figure libraries ship every quarter, and host onboarding lets community members run their own events.

New figures every month. New groups every month. The archive fills. The curriculum grows. The community compounds.