FindMoto

A project to prevent doom scrolling on facebook marketplace when you're in the market for a motorcycle.

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Inspiration

We are both in the market for a motorcycle, but we found ourselves spending too much time scrolling on facebook marketplace. We came up with this idea yesterday when we were talking about how you have to be quick to get the best deals on FB marketplace because they disappear fast. Since we are both heavy notion users, we thought it would be a good idea to send the listings to our notion workspaces at scheduled interval throughout the day in order to catch the freshest listings. We have this integration running in the background as a cronjob that refreshes the listings in our Notion Workspaces every 4 hours.

What it does

FindMoto is a Notion Integration with Facebook Marketplace listings, in this case we wanted to automate finding the bestest, freshest deals for motorcycles.

How we built it

  • We built a python web-scraping script using Selenium, then the script grabs the first 10 freshest listings in or nearest to the specified city.
  • We parse through and send this data to Notion via the notion API to build a dashboard of the freshest and best deals for motorcycles in our desired locations.

Challenges we ran into

  • Web scraping the data was a challenge as it was my (Lloyd) first time doing a webscraping project, and I ended up doing the most of it and formatted the data. For Ayad, he found using the Notion API to be a challenge as he was new to it.
  • Setting up the cronjob was also quite tedious but successfully ended up getting it to run.
  • Facebook MarketPlace API is deprecated, so we had to find another way to extract the data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Something we are really proud of in this project is the fact that we solved a problem that affected the both of us in such a short time. We had a good time working together and building something that we will be using in the future.
  • We are also proud that this app can live locally on our computers, as it is perfect to have running in the background for us. If this was deployed on the cloud, we believe that would be overkill.
  • We also like the fact that while this app specifically searches for the best motorcycle deals, this project can be easily run for other items that people want good deals on.
  • We worked around the fact that the Facebook Marketplace API is deprecated, and we successfully extracted the data we wanted from the Marketplace page manually. This was a huge pain, and probably took up most of our hacking time, it was rewarding to pull it off.

What we learned

  • Meta removed the facebook marketplace API, so we had to get deep into the HTML of the marketplace webpage to extract the necessary data.
  • We learned more about Notion Integrations and how flexible and powerful Notion can be.
  • We also enjoyed have a workflow automation project for the first time.

What's next for FindMoto

  • A feature that we believe that will make FindMoto 10x its user experience is using GPS data. We have to manually put the cities that we want to do fresh searches on, and we feel that utilizing location data would make it easier for users. We were thinking of using apples CLLocation API and requesting for that data via our python script. Security however will be another challenge for this addition.

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