Orbit

When I moved to a new school during high school, I struggled to find people I could genuinely connect with. During my senior year, I worked with an ESL teacher to start an international student club, and over 70 students signed up on the very first day. That experience taught me something important: people often share interests, experiences, and goals, but simply don't know how to find each other.

We built Orbit around that realization. Whether it's a concert, a workshop, or an activity you've been wanting to try, finding something exciting is easy. Finding people you'd actually want to experience it with is much harder. We wanted to bridge that gap and turn shared interests into real-world connections.

Orbit turns the pages you browse into plans and helps you find people you'd actually want to go with. Through our Chrome extension, users can save an event, activity, or experience directly from their active browser tab. Orbit transforms that page into a saved ticket and ranks potential connections based on compatibility.

Instead of matching users solely through shared interests, Orbit considers their hobbies, location, age preferences, preferred group sizes, and what they know versus what they want to learn. For example, someone who speaks Spanish could connect with someone looking to practice it. Someone interested in attending a concert could discover others with similar music interests and compatible social preferences. Our goal is simple: turn online discovery into meaningful, real-world experiences.

We developed Orbit around a backend API, and a personalized compatibility system.

We integrated Clerk for authentication and session management, allowing users to securely sign in and maintain individual profiles. Our backend API handles saving and retrieving user profiles and tickets, keeping information associated with the appropriate account.

Our matching system ranks users based on multiple compatibility signals, including shared interests, geographic preferences, age, and preferred gathering sizes. One of our key design decisions was distinguishing between what users already know and what they want to learn, allowing us to identify complementary connections rather than simply identical interests.

We also designed the matching architecture to accommodate richer personalization signals, such as music preferences and social lists, as the platform evolves.

One of our biggest challenges was figuring out how to differentiate Orbit from traditional social and friend-matching platforms.

We realized that finding compatible people was only half the problem. We also needed to provide a reason for those people to connect. That led us to focus on saved activities and events, transforming passive browsing into opportunities for real-world interaction.

Another challenge was designing a meaningful compatibility system. Two people sharing an interest doesn't necessarily mean they're a good match. We needed to account for differences between hobbies and interests, complementary knowledge, location, age preferences, and preferred group sizes.

We also had to address practical issues surrounding authentication, user-specific data, and incomplete profiles. For example, we made sure that a user without a completed profile is treated differently from someone who simply has no saved tickets.

Balancing these considerations while building a functional hackathon prototype pushed us to prioritize the features that mattered most.

We're especially proud of taking a personal experience and turning it into a working product designed to help others form meaningful connections. During the hackathon, we built:

User authentication and onboarding through Clerk, allowing users to establish personalized profiles.
A Chrome extension that saves the active browser tab as a ticket for an activity or event.
A compatibility-based matching system that ranks potential connections using interests, complementary skills, location, age, and preferred group sizes.
User-specific profile and ticket management, with handling for missing profiles and empty ticket collections.
An extensible matching architecture designed to support future music and social-platform integrations. What excites us most is that Orbit doesn't stop at suggesting people who might get along. It starts with something someone genuinely wants to do and helps them discover who they could do it with

We're building toward a future where a saved concert or a spontaneous activity can become the beginning of a friendship. Orbit: The tab becomes the plan. The plan finds the people.