Inspiration
Every single one of us on this team moved here. Not just to a new city, to a completely unfamiliar place with no network, no familiar faces, and no idea where to start. Soham, Aryan, Svarna, and myself all felt the exact same thing when we arrived. You have a roof over your head but nothing around you feels familiar. You walk past neighbors every day and know none of them. You wonder if anyone nearby speaks your language, shares your culture, or has kids the same age as yours. The loneliness is not dramatic. It is quiet. And it lasts longer than anyone talks about. We looked at what existed. Products such as - Nextdoor is a feed of complaints and Meetup requires you to already know what you are looking for. Nothing was built for the specific feeling of being brand new somewhere and needing to find your people.
So we built it ourselves. Not because it seemed like a good idea. Because every person on this team lived it. Welcome Home is not an app we imagined. It is an app we needed.
What it does
Welcome Home is a neighborhood community platform built around four layers that together solve the full problem of moving somewhere new.
Safety Net - gives new residents an immediate sense of security. It shows a live danger map with official safety data and community reported incidents, finds culturally relevant essentials nearby, grocery stores, religious centers, cultural spots, pulled directly from the user's profile, and lets neighbors report dangers in real time.
Connect - solves the loneliness problem. AI reads your full profile and matches you with 2 to 3 neighbors who genuinely fit, same culture, same life stage, same interests, and explains in plain language exactly why. Once matched you can message them directly. The app also suggests real local activities based on your shared interests so you always have a natural reason to meet.
Belong - turns individual connections into community. Users join AI-suggested groups based on their background and interests, see a live neighbourhood feed shared by everyone in their ZIP, and create or join local events. Every event automatically gets a group chat so attendees can coordinate before they even show up.
Neighbourhood Watch - keeps the community safe and accountable. A single emergency alert button instantly notifies all connected neighbors. Community members can post and upvote local reports. Verified neighbors get a badge that builds trust across every interaction in the app. Every layer feeds the others. Your profile powers the matching, the matching powers the activities, the activities become events, the events build the community, and the community keeps each other safe. That is the full loop Welcome Home closes.
How we built it
We built Welcome Home using React and Vite as our core frontend framework, everything you see in the browser is powered by it. For the animated 3D globe on the splash screen we used Three.js and React Three Fiber, which let us render real-time 3D graphics directly in the browser. The interactive safety map with live pins and neighborhood markers is built on MapLibre GL. All the smooth screen transitions and animations are handled by Framer Motion, and the entire dark glass-panel visual style is built with Tailwind CSS. On the AI side we used OpenAI GPT as the brain behind every personalized feature, neighbor matching, activity suggestions, community feed posts, local event recommendations, and group suggestions are all generated by GPT based on the user's profile. To keep the API key secure we built a lightweight backend in Node.js and Express that sits between the browser and OpenAI, so no sensitive credentials ever touch the client. For authentication we used Google OAuth via the @react-oauth/google library, which opens Google's real sign in popup for one-tap login. The entire app is built and hosted on Replit.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest technical challenge was integrating live APIs into a working app under time pressure. Getting the Claude API, Google Places API, and Firebase all talking to each other correctly, and handling the cases where they did not, took far longer than we expected. The second was data. Welcome Home needs a lot of it. User profiles, matches, connections, messages, group chats, events, and safety reports all pulling from the database simultaneously. Structuring Firebase so that all of that data could be fetched quickly and stay in sync across every screen was one of the most demanding parts of the build.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We shipped a real working product, not a mockup. You fill out a profile, get a real AI match explanation, see real local places, create a real event, and land in a live group chat, all in one flow. We built something we actually needed, and we made it feel human. That was always the point.
What we learned
We learned that personal pain builds better products than brainstorming ever could. When every person on your team has lived the problem you are solving, every decision you make is grounded in something real. We also learned that AI is most powerful not when it replaces human connection but when it removes the friction that stops it from happening in the first place. One of our biggest realizations was how massively underweighted cultural identity is in the way existing apps think about matching people, your language, your background, and your traditions matter more to belonging than your ZIP code ever will. And finally we learned that one working flow demoed with confidence will always beat ten half-built features, no matter how impressive the vision behind them is.
What's next for Welcome Home
We want to build out the full vision we had from the start. The next step is live safety mapping combining official data with community reported incidents. We want to add crime and incident verification so every danger report is validated before it appears on the map, a full neighbor verification system so every user is confirmed as an actual local resident, and transparent data reliability standards so users always know where information comes from and how current it is. Beyond safety, we want to add a neighbourhood feed for everyone in the same ZIP, a cultural resource finder for groceries, temples, and cultural centers, real-time translation between neighbors powered by Claude, a one-tap emergency alert to connected neighbors, and a native iOS and Android app so Welcome Home lives in people's pockets from day one in a new place.
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