rekomi

After a long day, we relax with movies, anime, or books. Recommendations get lost and media is scattered across apps.Rekomi brings them together so friends can share, recommend, and connect each other

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Inspiration

Media is part of our everyday comfort. After a long day, we turn to a movie, an anime episode, or a book to relax, escape, and sometimes even feel understood. Naturally, we want to share those moments with friends. But too often, recommendations get forgotten, lost in chats, or scattered across notes and apps. We built Rekomi because we wanted a better, more intentional way to share what we love with the people we care about.

What it does

Rekomi is a social platform that brings all media into one place with movies, anime, manga, and books. Users can track what they watch or read, leave personal ratings and thoughts, and share them on their profile for friends to discover. You can send direct recommendations to friends, who receive a notification and decide whether to add it to their library. Rekomi also offers shared lists, allowing friends to plan movie nights, date nights, or book clubs together.

How we built it

Frontend: React styled with Tailwind CSS Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL) to handle user accounts and all the complex social features like friends and shared lists. Data: We integrated three major APIs : TMDb, Jikan, and Open Library to let users track movies, anime, and books in one single app. Design: Started with a Figma prototype to nail down the UX before we wrote a single line of code.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered many challenges through this hackathon, wether it was finding a middle ground for opposing opinions when it came to design time to any technical bugs we had. Working with 3 different APIs we had to write a helper function to map all the data to one common format so that it would make our queries consistent. We also had a lot of difficulty writing Supabase Row Level Security (RLS) because while wanting to make our app more safe (to avoid user errors), at some point we were denied permission for things we should have access to during testing time, so fixing that was really something.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re are so proud of having a MVP, though we did plan more features but couldn’t implement them all, we are still very happy of the social platform we built during this hackathon. From personalized profiles and intentional recommendations to shared lists that encourage real interaction, Rekomi feels like a product people could genuinely use. Most importantly, we’re proud that the app reflects the value of human interactions over algorithms.

What we learned

Building rekomi was a great lesson in balancing technical complexity with a simple user experience. We learned not to underestimate a feature, as things that seemed simple on paper (like a shared list) became much more complex once we had to manage database permissions. We eventually figured out how to navigate Supabase RLS without locking ourselves out of our own app. Despite all the technical hurdles, we're really happy with what we built and how we managed to turn such a big idea into something that actually works.

What's next for rekomi

After making some of our friends test out our app, we already got lots of great feedback for what’s next. We would like to implement the features we wanted to but didn’t have time to do (category/genre filtering). Aside from new features, we would like to review and refactor our code before we deploy it to make sure everything is secure. Eventually, we’d love to make a mobile version to make it more practical for users to check and share recommendations on the go.

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