StudentNest

StudentNest is a peer-powered app that helps international students find housing, jobs, and local perks—all in one place, verified by real students.

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📘 Project Story – StudentNest

🧠 About the Project

As international students ourselves, we’ve faced the exact struggles we set out to solve with StudentNest. Whether it was the stress of finding safe housing before arriving in Canada, hunting for part-time work that didn’t drain us, or spending hours on Reddit and Facebook groups to figure out where to get a student Presto card — we realized there was no centralized platform to help international students settle in and grow. That’s where the idea of StudentNest was born — a digital home built by students, for students.

💡 What Inspired Us

The initial spark came from seeing thousands of repeated questions in student forums:

“Where do I find a legit basement for rent in Toronto?”
“Any free events for students this weekend?”
“How do I apply for a Youth Presto card?”

We thought: What if there was a verified, student-powered app that answered all of this — and more?

We realized that every year, new students restart the cycle of uncertainty and overwhelm. Our goal was to break that cycle and make information accessible, trusted, and crowdsourced from real students using their .edu or .ac emails.

🛠 How We Built It

We focused our MVP on:

  • A clean UI with access to curated housing options
  • A city-specific “Perks Hub” showing free or affordable student events and offers
  • A system where students can submit verified information for others (e.g., Presto discounts, SIM cards, bike rentals)

We used:

  • Figma for UI/UX prototyping
  • Firebase (planned) for user auth and crowdsourced data
  • Notion & Slack to collaborate and assign team tasks
  • (Optional) Flutter for a lightweight front-end demo

🧩 Challenges We Faced

  • Narrowing down scope: There are so many problems to solve — we had to focus just on Housing + Perks for MVP
  • Sourcing credible data for market size (TAM/SAM/SOM) that aligns with our business model
  • Balancing trust and moderation in a community-driven platform without making it too locked down

🌱 What We Learned

  • That lived experience makes the best user research
  • How much clarity comes from writing down assumptions and testing them fast
  • Pitching isn’t about sounding perfect — it’s about being clear, confident, and focused on value
  • Building a startup in 36 hours is chaos — but the kind we’d do again ❤️

StudentNest is more than just a hackathon project — it’s the start of something we wish we had when we arrived. And now, we’re building it for the next generation of students.

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