UW Marketplace

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  Listings page with an example listing

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  Checkout page

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  Cart page with total

Inspiration

We drew inspiration from Jalesh, a student barber at UW–Madison who built his business after going viral on TikTok and Instagram. His story highlighted how powerful student talent can be when given visibility. At the same time, we recognized that countless other students have valuable skills and goods but don’t have the algorithmic luck needed to reach their peers. And on the flip side, many students are actively searching for affordable services and products on campus but have no simple way to find the people offering them. That disconnect inspired us to build UW Marketplace—a platform that empowers every student to connect, offer, and discover value within their campus community, not just the ones amplified by social media.

What it does

UW Marketplace provides a safe, seamless way for students to participate in a peer-to-peer campus marketplace by enforcing a wisc.edu requirement on accounts and by offering intuitive features to navigate the app. Listing a good or service is simple—just add a name, price, category, description, and photo, and it’s instantly visible to the entire community. Powerful search, sort, and filter tools make finding the perfect listing intuitive and efficient for customers. Payments, powered by Stripe, are secure and flexible, supporting credit cards, CashApp, and even cryptocurrency.

How we built it

We built UW Marketplace with scalability at its core. Using Flutter for the frontend and Serverpod for the backend, we can target every major platform—web, Android, and iOS—all from a single Dart codebase. We started by mapping out the core functionality of the app, defining how items, listings, and transactions should work, and creating model classes to represent these fundamental components. Once the backend, powered by Serverpod, architecture was solid, we shifted to the frontend, using Flutter’s widget system to present these elements with a clean, streamlined visual design.

Challenges we ran into

There were many bugs that confused us, and since only one of us knew how to program with Flutter and Serverpod, the rest of us had to learn as we created UW Marketplace. Often, we were discouraged by the lack of functionality of our app, but we persevered despite being fatigued by the long hours of coding. It was the entire team’s first hackathon too, so we were experiencing something new. We also had a lot of technical issues with Git and Vscode, so a big chunk of time was spent resolving those issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of creating a functional app and overall just completing our first hackathon even though we ran into so many challenges while we were creating the app.

What we learned

All of us definitely learned more about programming the backend of the app, and we gained a lot more experience in Flutter, Dart, and Git. We also learned what the experience of developing an app in such a short time frame is like.

What's next for UW Marketplace

We hope to grow UW Marketplace into UW–Madison’s premier peer-to-peer marketplace. To drive user growth, we plan to enhance the overall experience by refining the interface, eliminating bugs, and introducing new features such as product recommendations, consumer reviews, and buyer–seller chat. With these improvements, we aim to strengthen the campus community by making it easier for students to support one another, share their talents, and build connections.

Built With

• docker
• flutter
• serverpod