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Yippee Air Website
Inspiration
We're a group of travel hackers, and we know lots people love to travel. We were thinking about ways that others could help sponsor travel, and we know that the pet shipping industry is a mess. Unless you can personally travel with your pet, there aren't a lot of ways to get your furry friend from A to B safely: http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/traveling-pets-airlines-dog-deaths/story?id=11198807
What it does
We figured we could match travellers ( like us! ) with people who need to get a dog from A to B. The pet owner will pay for the ticket, and a small fee, and we'll hand-carry the pet to the destination. We'll provide updates via modern methods -- like Slack, email and SMS -- all along the way, so you can stay in constant contact with the person taking care of your pet.
How we built it
The most interested part from a technical standpoint is that we're basically using Slack as our backend. All trip requests come into Slack, and all communication with the pet owners is done via Slack, posting to a private website for the duration of the trip.
As for our backend, we used Mongo, Express and Node.js.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of the most exciting things about this is that we actually got something launch ready during the course of the weekend! Our team was formed just for this hackathon, and some of us were new to the Mongo/Express/Node stack, so there was a bit of a learning curve. The code isn't perfect -- there are a few rough edges here and there -- but we've got most the stuff you should have in a development project -- a production server (gcloud), error handling, SEO, and so on.
What's next for Yippee Air
We're planning to launch this. There are lots of places to market -- like the 'United Airlines Nearly Killed My Greyhound' Facebook Group ( https://www.facebook.com/UnitedAirlinesAlmostKilledMyGreyhound ) with 14K likes, and we're hopeful we might be able to validate whether there's a business here.
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