Tava | Devpost

Inspiration:

As builders, we often struggled to find collaborators who shared our vision. We realized there wasn’t a centralized way for students across universities to share ideas and connect with like-minded people. Tava was created to solve this problem.

What It Does:

Tava lets students post startup and project ideas on a public forum. Others can discover and connect with posters through an AI-powered search or a Tinder-style swipe feature that matches people with shared visions. Users can also visualize their network in a node-edge graph showing direct and secondary connections as well as explore an interactive map to see who’s building what, and where.

How We Built It:

Our app was built with React Native and Expo tooling. We used Mapbox for the map functionality and Firebase to handle all the user authentication, creation of posts, and storing all relevant user data.

Challenges We Ran Into:

At first, we struggled to define our niche. Once we realized this was a problem we faced ourselves as builders, we directed the app toward solving it for our community. As we were developing, many visual features (like graphs and maps) didn’t work as intended at first, and we had to iterate heavily to get them right.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of:

Creating a platform that builders like us actually want to use.

Getting complex visualizations (node graph, map) working smoothly.

Designing a unique way for students to connect around shared visions.

What We Learned:

We learned how to pivot from a broad idea to a focused niche. In other words, we learned how to take a problem that has been solved in general and address it uniquely for a specific community. We also learned how to divide tasks based on each team member’s skill set, which made us far more productive and efficient as a team.