Borrowhood

Borrowhood: Share More, Spend Less, Connect Always
Share and/or borrow anything!
Browse recommended items and communities

Inspiration

We were inspired by the growing concerns around overconsumption and social isolation in today's digital age. Many people purchase items they only use a few times, leading to waste and unnecessary spending. Additionally, people often struggle to connect with others who share their interests in their local communities. Borrowhood was born out of the desire to address these issues by creating a sustainable and community-driven platform that encourages sharing, connection, and accessibility.

What it does

Borrowhood is a communal rental platform that allows users to list items for borrowing, exchange, or lending. Users can borrow and share items by offering/ charging small fees (in social currency) or engaging in social activities such as coffee chats. The platform also enables users to join hobby-based communities, furthering those meaningful connections.

How we built it

We developed Borrowhood using a modern tech stack to ensure a seamless and engaging user experience. Our frontend is built using React.js, with a responsive UI designed with Mantine components. The backend leverages FAST Api, while Firebase provides a scalable and real-time database solution. The platform's cataloging feature is implemented using Gen AI capabilities of Llama and Google Vision API.

Challenges we ran into

Text extraction from images in any meaningful way is very tricky. We tried a few solutions and then ended up using the feedback from vision api as tags and storing them into firebase for our recommendation flow. Additionally, since we expect users to primarily use an application like this on phone, it was hard to consistently think of flows that made sense device agnostically.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Reducing our scope to something more tangible and manageable. Our initial idea was severely bloated which led to a lot of confusion in the first half of the hackathon.
Creating a clean and accessible UI that aligns with our goal of fostering community engagement - we did not have a designer on the team so all the developers wore their designer hats and we are going to say we did a GREAT job.
First time working with image to text extraction - steep and fun learning curve ahead of us!

What we learned

The importance of scope management in fast-paced environments like hackathons.
How crucial UI/UX is in building community-driven platforms.
Working with AI models like Llama and Google Vision API provided us insights into the challenges of text/image extraction and recommendation flows.
Developing a platform with mobile-first design principles requires constant iteration and testing.

What's next for Borrowhood : SO MUCH!

Flesh out the borrower and sharer flow. Because of all the issues we encountered with the image piece, we weren't able to add much vertical detail to that flow
Build a better recommendation algorithm using techniques like collaborative filtering to make those recommendations really pop off!