Saciva

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  Landing page Saciva

Inspiration

Being an international student myself who's faced multiple challenges in a new country in a new city with some culture shock and knowing nothing of the ways here, and virtually knowing no one before landing here. Getting reliable information firsthand from the other international students going to the same university had been very difficult. finding suitable accommodation and finding roommates that shared similar preferences for food, lifestyle, and other things like smoking drinking preferences was quite difficult. In my research, i got to know that every year for the past 8 years, except for the pandemic hit years, more than a million students have come to USA from other countries on F1 visa. most of the students have no clue as to find reliable information regarding the neighborhoods, culture, communities of people from their country in USA, events for the festivals from their culture, important information regarding their visa and immigration, the rules for working and many more things.

I have done a podcast, video interviews and also a Survey in Chicago with 250+ students have participated and i found out insights such as more than 90% of them stayed off campus and a majority of them shared their house/ apartment with roommates to reduce the rent. the average time a student stayed in a house was about 6 months. they changed their house frequently as finding people that share similar preferences was such a hassle. currently there are only social media groups or individual school portals but the scope and features of these platforms is very less. social media groups and other listings based classifieds platforms are filled with spam where there are multiple posts for the same ad. social media groups have the contact information available for everyone on the group attracting spam, unwanted attention for women and girls, Unasked for advertisements in DMs and more. hence i came up with saciva, meaning a companion/ secretary in sanskrit.

What it does

its a student only platform that verifies the student email id to prevent the problem of fake profiles on social media, it has dedicated channels where students from any university in a given city can get relevant information on the places to explore, the neighborhood news and events, job search, academics, ride sharing, lost and found and more. it matches the users who are looking for a roommate with students with similar preferences. students can post subleases on the platform for other students to find. students can buy and sell their used items similar to a market place.

How we built it

I have created a prototype on figma and taken help from a couple of friends to create a prototype using Node.js in the back end and react in the front end. its still under works.

Challenges we ran into

integrating the back end and front end, integrating a chatroom application with SSO that seamlessly works with saciva to help users access dedicated channels for their needs as students, especially international students.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

created a functional backend that verifies the email id, takes preferences and matches the users with similar preferences, let users upload subleases and find one, an AI assistant chat bot that answers information on important things such as CPT, OPT visa related questions etc for international students.

What we learned

started working on the issue and learned how to do user experience research to identify the pain points to create features for the product, learned many technical things that helped me collaborate with developers in their language, learned how to create prototypes in figma, did surveyes, video interviews of other international students. I learned many things such as prompt engineering, creating data pipelines, database management and more and still continuing to do so.

What's next for Saciva

i started working part time on the product a few months ago and I came across the hackathon only a few days ago and tried to finish the MVP taking help from a couple of friends for the back end and front end. Hopefully we would finish the product soon and refine it's UI and launch it and if it gains enough traction, we would be investing in it full time and scale it up.

Built With

• figma
• javascript
• node.js
• react