GiftClub

Inspiration

Originally all of us had a separate idea each but we decided to come down to this app inspired by the site EatClub, seeing as all of us are broke university students and wanted a nice feed without paying the premium.

What it does

Welcome to GiftClub, where restaurants are essentially "gifting" a discount for free. During restaurant down times, business flows really slow, which gets really really frustrating. The selling point is that for these downtimes restaurants are able to set a number of heavy discounts/vouchers which will encourage customers to claim and show up in the specified time. Who doesnt want a nice meal on the cheap with no downsides?

How we built it

We began by discussing the technologies we could use. A few of us wanted to go with building a mobile app using swift whereas the rest thought building a web app would be more suitable given the chances to learn, as some of us had never used the frameworks below before.

Technologies we used:

next js and typescript for the frontend
firebase for the backend and user authenticity

Challenges we ran into

Initially there was a lack of direction of where we wanted GiftClub to go. We knew the implementation of the explore page and list of vouchers was the most important, however the name "GiftClub" stems from a user being able to gift a friend a voucher, and the idea would revolve around this idea of gifting. However this differed too much from the original implementation of EatClub, so we decided to scrap this idea pretty late. We still wanted to create a unique selling point of GiftClub away from EatClub so we decided to come up with a scrolling feature, inspired by TikTok, for user submitted videos showcasing the foods of the discounts they had used.

This hackathon was sort of a last minute decision for all of us so we all had limited schedules to work on the project. Seeing as this was also the first hackathon for a majority of us, we were inexperienced with the frameworks that we ultimately decided with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Reaching somewhat of a MVP.

What we learned

We should combine individual skills for more streamlining: Avoid cross pathing too much with teammates.
Passion and time is key: Seeing as this hackathon was pretty last minute, we all already had plans scheduled for the weekend of the hackathon. However the passion was there, and those of us that were able to put in the time did put in the time to see this product come into fruition. Next time we will have more success and win!

What's next for GiftClub

To enhance GiftClub at this stage, we need to add a redeem voucher system and location tracker. Implementing the tiktok scroll feature is definitely a priority as well, as that would be our ideal selling point and the future of scaling this product. Going back to the idea of gifting, we would also love to flesh that idea out, and hopefully add a gifting leaderboard to see who is the most generous friend (and perhaps add gambling money for a potentially bigger discount).

We would also like to implement a personalised feed, whether it be from setting preferences or setting up a machine learning model to investigate what kind of foods the user tends to buy.

Team Filler