Only Paws

Providing a little comfort for your comfort <3

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Inspiration

Sad but true, as babycare and healthcare keeps on getting more and more expensive, gen Z and gen X would rather have pets than babies. Convenience , or consequence of capitalism - call it what you want but it’s true and what is also true is that this is a growing industry with a lot of potential. On a more personal level, each of us either has a very strong bond with their pets or is very eager to get one when they can afford it and care for it.

What it does

Only Paws is a platform for the little creatures (or sometimes even large. We don’t judge) that we value more than ourselves. Currently, we can use the web application to find pet caretakers as easily as swiping right on tinder. The whole idea is to create a trustworthy and kind community of pet owners and caretakers. The matching of the owners and caretakers is done based on shared interests and the time of availability is visible for a truly transparent and hassle-free experience.

How we built it

The process of our creation began with an idea - to create a digital product/service for something meaningful to us and after a whole series of discussions, we agreed upon only-paws. The next step was to decide on a framework and the libraries from HTN that we were going to use. NEXT JS was clearly the winner because of the convenience with routing. We agreed upon using CockroachDB as the star of our application as it is very efficient and relevant for only-paws to keep the data about our users.We had more discussions about how much we wanted to do for the app and how much we were willing to settle for considering the relatively small timeframe of the hackathon. We still decided to proceed with the idea and delegated the work in between members based on their experience level and skills. Front-end, back-end, design, libraries and assistance work was divided. Everyone started working on their designated portion but we often kept on checking on and helping each other. There were many times the documentation was discussed as a group or someone who had some experience with a particular technology, shared it with the rest of the group. The project really started coming together on the third day or should I say 9 hours before submission when a lot of our frontend and backend was done. The rest of our time was devoted to integrating the back-end to the front-end as well as polishing the UI and enhancing the user experience. Then it was time for testing, deployment and finding urls

Challenges we ran into

I think the first challenge we faced as a team was delegation. We had to consider what it means to have a fair distribution of work. Fair does not mean equal and some members were obviously more well versed with the frameworks than the rest. However, there was a lot of good initiative in the sense that the people with experience went to the front gates but we delegated smaller and more doable tasks for the people who could not work on the project as a whole. I think that kind of decreased the pressure from the experience and also promoted a sense of belonging even if it was a little bit. The next major problem we ran into was using CockroachDB but we consulted the mentors present on the venue who were very kind to provide us with their help. There were some minor problems with the UI which we constantly kept on updating. Another challenge we ran into was the loss of a teammate who left without any reason.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of coming up with a practical, scalable and profitable business model in this fast-paced environment. The fact that we were able to balance our commitment to our project as well as spend time on recreational activities is something we are very happy about. Some of us are also excited about continuing to work on this project even after the hackathon. The fact that we were able to create something so amazing in such a short span of time with complete strangers feels almost unreal. We are in general just very grateful for this amazing and unique experience that HTN provides.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of teamwork and the wonders that we can do by just collaborating with people sharing the same interests and enthusiasm. We also gained knowledge about the functioning of technologies like CockroachDB, co:here’s NLP, etc to optimize our application.

What's next for Only Paws

Only-paws has a huge potential for growth. We plan on adding a chatbot that uses co:here’s NLP to auto-generate questions and responses while the pet owners and caretakers are chatting. Their API can also be used to assess caretakers by processing information from reviews to weed out inauthentic accounts.We also see a lot of potential for monetising as we plan to add a separate section called ‘The noob’s guide to petting’ to broadcast tips and tutorials from recognised individuals. We are also thinking along the lines of adding a page for buying pet care products.

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