MeeTUM

We believe that what current social meetup apps are lacking is spontaneity. Our app solves this by offering a platform to meet up with others instantly or within the next 12 hours.

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Inspiration

We started this challenge with a very clear problem statement (Make Munich a City where no one feels alone). Since loneliness is such a common and well-understood problem, there have been plenty of apps before us trying to solve this issue. We wanted to understand, where these apps fall short and we believe we have nailed it down to one core thing:

The biggest friction in existing meetup apps is the time that passes between the user opening the app, when they crave social connection and the time when it actually comes to meeting the people. There are so many points at which any one of the involved users could get cold feet or just not be bothered anymore.

What it does

We therefore designed the entire app around getting people together as quickly as possible. We make this happen through the following: - Limit any meetups to the next 24 hrs → focus on spontaneity - Simple UX that focusses on the most important features - Smart recommendation algorithm which means that users don’t have to endlessly swipe through options We built a System that revolves around what we call “Activities”. For example if I wanted to play a game of Billiards, I could create an activity, and then others can join me. You can think of them like a lobby in a multiplayer videogame.

How we built it

We built the UI in Flutter and hosted it as a Web-App, since this would allow us to do a live demo that people can interact with. Our backend consists of a REST-API in Python that manages a MongoDB and also contains our algorithm for matching activities. The matching algorithm we built for the new suggestions is based on the similarity between the past activities that the user joined and the overlap between the requested activity and existing open ones. When the user adds their activity, it matches the top 3 activities from other users, that are similar to their activity in some aspect.

Challenges we ran into

We set ourselves an ambitious goal of having a live-demo for our pitch, that users could use and go through the app flow to schedule activities with each-other. We ran in to quite a lot of issues with authentication when communicating between our Web-App and our API which took up a lot of our time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Implementing an idea that we would actually want to use ourselves
  • Having found a scope that works for the timeframe of a Hackathon
  • Designing a very streamlined user-flow that optimizes for the challenge we set ourselves
  • Building a recommendation algorithm that matches based on multiple types of data

What we learned

  • Asynchronous collaboration is a lot less effective
  • There is quite a bit of strategy in deciding when to sleep

What's next for MeeTUM

  • Change the name
  • Fix our Web-App
  • Implement M-Login
  • Include filter options for users

(you can find our pitch-deck here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Xk_KJhnkbIwpjdtwinr3W6wkyligICa_sHiIfQrRl4A/edit?usp=sharing)

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