Trek

Social media platform for Gen - Zs have one common theme - to create an online identity. Trek captures it all by creating a dedicated forum for users to log their day and activities.

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Inspiration

The idea for this app came from a simple desire: to build an online identity that feels authentic and meaningful. I found myself increasingly interested in documenting my experiences, interests, and perspectives—not just for others to see, but as a personal archive of the things that have shaped me over time.

Many of the platforms we use today allow us to express fragments of who we are, but very few provide a dedicated space to capture the full picture. There is something deeply satisfying about curating your interests, experiences, and memories into a place that reflects your personality. It creates a sense of continuity, allowing you to look back on your journey while giving others a more nuanced understanding of who you are.

As technology has evolved, social media has become one of the primary ways people communicate identity. What began as broad social networks like Facebook and Instagram has gradually shifted toward specialized platforms built around specific interests, experiences, and communities. Increasingly, people are looking for spaces that help them express not just what they do, but who they are.

Many of today's most successful social platforms follow this pattern. Beli allows users to document and rank restaurants, creating a visible food identity. Letterboxd lets movie enthusiasts catalog films, share reviews, and showcase their tastes. BeReal captures authentic snapshots of everyday life, while Strava transforms workouts and athletic achievements into social experiences. Each platform serves a practical purpose, but their real strength lies in helping people build and share an identity through action rather than self-description.

This led me to a question: what if these experiences didn't have to live in separate apps? What if there were a single platform where people could document their interests, activities, discoveries, and memories while naturally building a richer picture of who they are?

The vision is to create an app that combines the best aspects of these platforms—a place for logging experiences, sharing recommendations, discovering new interests, and expressing individuality. Something that is useful as a personal archive, engaging as a social platform, and meaningful as a representation of one's evolving identity.

At its core, this is not just about documenting where you've been or what you've done. It's about creating a living record of your experiences and interests—a digital reflection of the person you're becoming.

What it does

Emerging social media platforms amongst Gen Zs such as Beli, BeReal, letterbox, Strava, Good Reads, Pinterest - All have one very common theme in itself- it curates an identity online. We created a dedicated place for one to record their experiences, to show their interests, thus, organically promoting connections.

This app lets you log your day, or trips, or anything, lets you see your friends days that they posted, shows the route, how much they traveled, how much they spent, how long they spent it. It can document a bar crawl, it can document a date, it can document anything you want to share, use it to document a fun plan, use it to blog a hike day, use it to find good restaurants, use it to see what your friends are up to, use it to bookmark places, use it to make friends, idk.

How we built it

We first drew up a hand drawn wireframe, fed it into Claude Design, and after multiple iteration, made a plain HTML MVP with some basic features that would make this idea make sense to my teammates. Then, we started getting to work. First, Dylan used Supabase to setup the backend infrastructure, while Daniel used React Native to start coding up the front end. We utilized version control tools like Git to track our changes, and utilized Claude Code to help us with further integration. We ended up wiring the backend with the front end, and tested out many mapping API, and at the end decided with FourSquare. We set up Redis for caching, and are aiming to use ASI One for specialized searches, as it is designed to know what the user likes, which we can sought a lot of value in using.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was the UX roadblock we ran into, at first, this app was on the fence for either being a itineary planner, with less weight on the social media aspect. The more we developed, we found the app to be more scalable if we went with the other direction, committing that change sacrificed a lot of time and set us back.

The biggest technical challenge we ran into was the actual integration of the backend with the front end, more specifically, the place suggestion functionality. Initially, the integration only worked on one of our teammate's computers and the rest of the team had to connect to the backend thru their IP. This made it so all of the team's activities (place suggestions, profile fetching, etc) were able to be seen on the one teammate's computer which was not right. We fixed this by identifying that the routing was hard coded to only work on the initial set up IP despite changing our environment variables. This taught us that what we think could be the problem might end up being a deeper problem within.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to ship out a practical, fun to use full stack app with live server, live email authentication, live database, supports posting following, message integration, in 1 day.

What we learned

Don't scope creep, get some sun.

What's next for Trek

We would first implement minor UI changes to make the app more well rounded, but, on a business aspect:

Since discover page suggests popular restaurants near, we can offer paid promotion for restaurants or business to try to drive traffic.

Implement machine learning models trained on users past places to learn about user preference, and suggest places or plan out trips for them (sometimes you run out of plots, or you and your significant others can't decide what to eat - we got YOU) or even some hidden spots , these are paid features.

Roll out creator program, to increase traffic, or allow users to post videos, and that is when we start implementing something like reels to get them addicted, and we'll utilize UGC content marketing and do mukbangs for different restaurants.

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