Rentible

It's craigslist but for rental, not buying

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Inspiration

We met at 10pm the first night. Two of us are high schoolers, none of us had ever been to Bitcamp, and we were all eager to build something amazing. We had, in total

  • One iOS developer
  • One Backend Web Developer, and
  • Two Front end Web Developers, one who knew React, one who didn't

We gravitated towards each other, and all agreed to talk until we came up with an idea everyone liked. This proved very beneficial, because it allowed us to forget about ideas that weren't optimal. We ended up focusing around crowd-sourcing and consumer-facing applications, for example: a bus delay calculator and a health-based tracking app were two of our first ideas. These led to our final idea: a website and app which let you connect with local community members to either share or rent objects.

What it does

This app and website allows you to browse, make, and take advantage of local offers for object rental. If you have a lawnmower that you don't use very often, you can rent it to neighbors who need one but don't want to buy one. Say you really want to play Shadow of the Colossus, but don't want to buy a whole PS2 just for one game. You could rent a PS2 for a weekend from a neighbor, and get that experience for a fraction of the price.

How we built it

We had a great workflow, in which

  • our backend developer, Milo, worked on the API in node.js
  • our iOS(swift) developer, Shayan, worked on the design of our app and how it communicated with the API
  • our frontend web designer, Max, worked on designing the web layout in HTML and CSS
  • and our react web developer, Dan, integrated Max's mockups with react and the API through javascript and JSX

Challenges we ran into

One trouble was the connection to the internet. It really brought to us the feeling of 1980s but without the screeching dialup beeps.

But, joking aside, we had very few issues, because of how much planning we did. The only issues were, perhaps, in coming up with better ideas and having to rework things, but all for the betterment of the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the idea behind this application, and our organization in implementing it. For a team that came together late on the first day of the hackathon, we had amazing communication and calculation

What we learned

Towards the end, Max and Milo were close to done with their work, so they learned how to help Dan with react, a highly structured javascript-to-html framework. It was interesting learning about this, because the only frameworks for server-to-frontend were essentially cut-and-paste(ex. PHP, Flask, and Jade).

What's next for Rentible

This application is one which will be hugely popular. It is extremely easy to use, and we have already seen the popularity of such sites as Craigslist. Rentible is very viable for profit, as it is specifically market-facing. We have high expectations for Rentible!

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