UMarket

UMarket Pitch @ Startup Exchange Workshop
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Inspiration

Our project is inspired by a shared experience: we have a mutual friend who gave us his microwave, for free, because he simply did not have space for it in his dorm.

This is not a unique experience at college campuses around the country.

Throughout the college semester, tons of appliances sit unused, old textbooks sit on shelves, and clothes one size too small stay in the wardrobe.

This is not ideal for:

The owner of the item
Someone who needs that item
The environment

Many would benefit from this app:

Exchange students especially struggle to buy and resell essential living and dorm items during the single semester they arrive.
Freshmen typically bring too many things.
Seniors need to get rid of their old things.
Students need to buy textbooks.
Students need to get rid of old textbooks. ... and so on.

What it does

Our app encourages the reuse of second-hand items by creating an online marketplace for verified college students on campus to buy and resell their products in a Craigslist-style format.

Our app is unique because it is:

Safe (unlike existing software, on UMarket only verified students + faculty on a college campus can buy & resell -- and is therefore significantly more scam-free)
Convenient (all buyers and sellers are on the same campus)
Easy to use (hassle and ad-free)
Dedicated solely to the resale and reuse of items by college students

Our app verifies students and faculty by ensuring they have access to a '@gatech.edu' email and then allows users to make accounts, make listings, and match with or query other's listings.

How is it sustainable?

Our app encourages the reuse of old items. This encourages both a reduction of waste as well as reducing the need for the manufacturing of new items. It also helps students save money: by encouraging them to buy used items for cheaper, and to gain pocket money by selling their unused things.

This will keep unwanted things off the street and provide opportunities and resources to those who need them.

Try it yourself!

Our live project is hosted through Vercel @umarket.tech. Our GitHub links (below) contain all of our source code, organized into separate backend and frontend repositories.

How we built it

Our tech stack consists of a database, a backend, and a frontend:

Our database is a Firestore database.
Our backend is a Dockerized FastAPI RESTful CRUD API hosted on Digital Ocean which uses Mailjet for email verification and Firebase Admin to link with Firebase.
Our frontend is a NextJS web app hosted on Vercel that interfaces with the API through networking requests.

We worked together as a team throughout the design process to collaboratively tackle various parts of the project. This took the form of pair programming, dividing work, and coming together to integrate.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many bugs ranging from simple typos to huge deployment issues caused by the incompatible architecture of our laptops. Through some Stack Overflow and working together, we were able to iron out our bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our email verification service, fully networked and deployed tech stack (database, backend, frontend), and teamwork on this project.

What we learned

We learned a lot about our respective coding disciplines, as well as explore each other's interests by helping fix bugs and research solutions. We also learned how to effectively work as a team to tackle a project none of us could have undertaken on our own.

What's next for UMarket

We hope to scale the project to be accessible to other college campuses (a new marketplace for each college) around the nation. We also hope to deploy the app to Georgia Tech as a pilot, in order to prove viability. We hope to train AI models and use fuzzy searching in order to allow students to search for exactly what they want. We also would like to find ways to encourage people to post their old items on the app, through challenges and events. We would also like to grow the sustainable impact of the project by giving more opportunities for users to find ways to reuse or give away (likely through a donation feature) their unused items.