Topia

Topia turns wellness into economic opportunity, using AI to connect everyday people with nearby businesses that pay them to create content as they train, recover, and thrive.

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Inspiration

Topia began with a question: as AI changes what society considers work, could taking care of ourselves become part of how economic value is created?

Sam Altman’s Moore’s Law for Everything helped inspire me to think about how people might live as AI takes on more traditional labor. I believe one of the healthiest possible transitions would allow people to spend more time improving their physical and mental well-being while pursuing more meaningful forms of work.

Today, fitness and wellness are usually treated as expenses or time away from earning. I imagined the opposite: opening an app and seeing a map of nearby places offering paid opportunities connected to training, recovery, nutrition, and wellness.

That is where the name Topia, shortened from “utopia,” comes from. Getting paid to create around experiences that improve your well-being feels like a small but practical step toward that future.

UGC is Topia’s starting point. Local businesses need authentic content, while everyday people already have meaningful experiences in gyms, studios, recovery spaces, and wellness communities. Topia connects those two groups.

What it does

Topia is an AI-powered, location-based UGC marketplace for everyday fitness and wellness creators.

A creator confirms their location, chooses their interests and travel radius, and sees paid opportunities nearby in a map view or list view (whichever they prefer). Instead of presenting an overwhelming feed, GPT-5.6 recommends one strong match and explains why it fits.

When the creator opens a campaign, GPT-5.6 transforms the business’s rough notes into an actionable checklist covering:

  • Where to go
  • What to capture
  • Important safety constraints
  • Submission guidance
  • Objective approval requirements

The creator can accept the campaign, schedule a visit, check in, complete each capture moment, and submit one link to the finished UGC piece.

On the other side of the marketplace, the business receives that same submission, reviews it against the original requirements, and approves the creator’s payout. The creator’s earnings update immediately, completing the journey across both user perspectives.

Businesses can also enter rough campaign ideas into Topia. GPT-5.6 converts those notes into creator-facing deliverables, safety requirements, and approval criteria before publishing the opportunity into the marketplace.

How we built it

I built Topia as a mobile-first progressive web application using Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, OpenStreetMap, and the OpenAI Responses API.

GPT-5.6 powers three core workflows:

  1. Matching creators with relevant nearby campaigns
  2. Simplifying business briefs into structured creator checklists
  3. Turning rough business notes into complete campaign drafts

The AI routes use Structured Outputs and Zod schemas, giving the application typed, predictable results instead of asking the interface to interpret unstructured text.

I used Codex as my primary engineering collaborator throughout Build Week. Codex helped me:

  • Turn the product concept into a complete two-sided marketplace flow
  • Scaffold the application and typed data architecture
  • Build the mobile design system and creator/business interfaces
  • Implement the GPT-5.6 workflows
  • Connect geolocation, campaign discovery, submissions, approvals, and earnings
  • Diagnose mobile, hydration, deployment, and map-rendering issues
  • Write Playwright tests covering the complete creator and business journeys
  • Continuously refine the UX based on how the product felt during real mobile use

I retained the core product and design decisions while using Codex to accelerate implementation, debugging, testing, and iteration.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was making two different user experiences feel like one connected marketplace. The campaign accepted by the creator needed to appear naturally in the business review flow, and its approval needed to update the creator’s earnings. Building and testing that full loop was more important than creating disconnected screens.

I also had to make generative AI output reliable enough for a product workflow. Structured Outputs allowed Topia to transform uncertain natural-language input into consistent data that the interface could render and act upon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that Topia is not simply a collection of interface concepts. It is a working, mobile-first PWA with one continuous marketplace journey across two different users.

A creator can confirm their location, receive an explainable AI recommendation, understand a campaign, accept it, complete the assignment, and submit the finished work. A business can then review that same submission, approve it, and the creator gets an earnings update. The business can also use AI to create and publish the next campaign.

I am especially proud of integrating GPT-5.6 into three purposeful workflows instead of adding a generic chatbot. Each use of AI removes a specific point of friction for creators or businesses.

Topia also works as a genuine mobile experience: location is user-controlled, the opportunity map adapts to the creator, the full flow is touch-friendly, and the application is deployed for judges to test without creating an account. The creator and business journeys are covered by production-build end-to-end tests.

What we learned

I learned that trusting gpt 5.6 in terms of its accuracy to estimate what is feasible during agile development sprints is essential as a solo developer / founder. There were times where I believed I could fit in more features and GPT let me know what was realistically possible and not possible within the time constraints, in order to deploy the best possible functioning MVP. So now we have a roadmap for future features and integrations.

What's next for Topia

The next stage is to turn the Topia MPV from its current state into a trusted network for creators and local businesses. That includes creator and business profiles, reputation, secure campaign funding and payouts, messaging, notifications, submission verification, and stronger location-based trust and safety. Then we will incorporate strategic partnerships, as well as some of the features in the roadmap that will improve the financial model.

From there, Topia can expand beyond UGC into additional opportunities connected to fitness, recovery, nutrition, and longevity. The long-term goal is not simply to build another gig platform. It is to explore a new category of economic participation where activities that help people remain healthy, capable, and connected can also create meaningful value.

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