Work Packers

Giving people the ability to work in stable jobs while travelling and getting paid in benefits/assets rather than all cash

Comment

Inspiration

During my internship in Thailand, I met many start-up's, sme's and even students who want to get started with a product, idea or business but they either lack certain type of skills or resources. One of the people I met offered to let me stay in his house for free with food and is willing to pay and process my visa application in exchange for building his application. I lived in a country with spending almost nothing and was getting paid in benefits/assets rather than a standard status quo "salary" and this did not cost him much as he already owned most of these assets to give but to be it was something that would cost a lot on a daily basis. In the end, I stayed for 6 months enjoying Thailand.

Currently, there are two large markets, the remote development jobs market and the digital nomad market, both are booming right now. The first market focuses on working from anywhere and mainly consist of developers or people who work off their laptop. The second market consists of people who love traveling at super low cost by hustling and learning as they go. There is a large market of people who would love to combine both, less hustling, more benefits, and more travel and this is what the app aims to achieve.

What it does

The primary focus of the app is similar to the story above and more. To create a network of people who want to travel and use the skills they have to attain benefits from job hosters allowing them to travel the world at a very low cost by exchanging it for their skills.

How I built it

Since this hackathon would be my first prototype I sued react-native with expo to get it up and running as quickly as possible. Then I scraped current remote development sites such as https://remoteok.io/ and https://nomadlist.com/, after which I added some fake data to the current data I scraped to make it more relevant to the app. Hosted the backend on firebase for a quick and easy solution

Challenges I ran into

Since react-native is not the most stable framework when coming to actually build native android, there are loads of external libraries that might not be compatible or give errors after the build. Two things I learned, don't use new libraries at a hackathon, use what you know and build your application a few times throughout to check for any crashing errors.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm not strong in backends and I like taking my time to learn something new. It's great that I managed to learn firebase APIs and workaround in such a short time. Also many times we build apps for companies just for the sake of building. I like this feeling of getting the chance to build something I strongly believe in

What I learned

I learned so many things, new apis, new libs. More than learning I met tons of amazing people as motivated as me, and some people who are even interested in building the app with me. this project is more than a short term thing so meeting people with a similar mindset is great.

What's next for Work Packers

Get it out of the prototype stage, release a simple version and market it on Reddit and other remote or nomad sites to see the traction. Then continue to build on top of it by adding more features such as booking systems directly into the app for people traveling.

Share this project:

Updates