Wayd

On demand platform for social activities

Comment

Inspiration

Mehul and I have been friends for over a decade. After college, we both moved to different cities (he came to SF, I moved to Chicago). We found ourselves constantly having trouble planning events and were annoyed by the lack of solutions. Furthermore, repetitively texting people was both time-consuming and irritating. After expressing our mutual frustration, we realized there was potentially an opportunity to change how people planned and did social activities.

What it does and how we built it

Wayd is an on-demand platform for social activities. We wanted to create a personalized, convenient experience for people to do the regular activities they enjoyed doing. We built it using a combination of react, express and firebase. A web app made sense because people could easily use it/share with friends without having it downloaded on their phone. This is why integrating with Twilio's API made a lot of logical sense. Instead of having to text friends individually or on a chat, your friends would just get a notification with the title of the activity you were doing with a link to easily signup. Firebase allowed the count to be dynamically updated in real time to give it an almost video-game lobby like experience.

Challenges and Accomplishments

We ran into a couple of major challenges. One was that most API's of companies relevant to this space were unavailable or expensive. Additionally, it was impossible to execute the ML features with no real data. Despite this, we were able to create a minimalist discover section that we think would appeal to our target demographic.

What we learned and what's next

The biggest thing we learned was the value of being able to concisely explain your problem/idea. Next, we hope to grow wayd and start iterating and improving features with a small, sticky user base that sees real value in what we're trying to do.

Share this project:

Updates