OwnUp

Inspiration

We were inspired by the difficulty of sticking to personal goals. We realized that while self-motivation is great, it's often not enough. The most powerful commitments are those we make to others, especially when there are real stakes involved. We wanted to combine the motivational power of social accountability with the tangible commitment of a financial stake, creating a system where you win by staying true to your word.

What it does

OwnUp is a personal accountability market where users bet on themselves to achieve their goals. A user sets a goal (e.g., "Go to the gym 4x this week"), sets a monetary wager, and commits. If they succeed, they get their money back plus a share of a prize pool funded by users who didn't meet their goals. It turns personal development into a collective game where everyone is motivated to succeed.

How we built it

We built OwnUp as a full-stack web application using a modern tech stack designed for rapid development. The frontend is built with Next.js and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS. For the backend and database, we used Supabase, which handled user authentication, data storage for bets in a PostgreSQL database, and serverless functions for our core logic.

Challenges we ran into

A key challenge we ran into was merging 2 branches in GitHub and integrating Supabase.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of building a fully functional, end-to-end application in a short amount of time. The core economic loop isn't hardcoded; the prize pool and payout calculations on our settlement page are dynamically generated from real user data in the database. Implementing a secure authentication flow and a dynamic, cohort-based settlement system were major accomplishments that prove the concept is viable.

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned the importance of a well-defined data structure and how critical it is for the core logic of an application. We gained hands-on experience with the entire Supabase ecosystem, from database schema design and authentication to real-time data fetching. We also learned how to structure a Next.js application using the App Router and how to protect routes with server-side middleware.

What's next for OwnUp

The next step is to move beyond self-reporting and build trust through verification. We plan to introduce social verification, where a friend or peer must "vouch" for a goal's completion. The long-term vision is to integrate with third-party APIs for automated verification (e.g., Strava for fitness goals, GitHub for coding goals). We also plan to introduce group bets, leaderboards, and a real payment system using Stripe to turn this prototype into a full-fledged platform.

Built With

• next.js
• supabase
• tailwind
• typescript