Inspiration
OnBoardMe was founded as a result of the team experience in several pain points whilst booking group travel with friends.
What it does
OnBoardMe offers a simple way for groups of friends to organize and pay for travel. OnBoardMe aggregates data from all major travel websites (in flight, accommodation, and events categories) into one platform and allows users to create holiday boards, share them with friends, discuss and vote on ideas, and split the booking costs. OnBoardMe is an app that offers a simple way to bring friends together to create, share and pay for group travel (events/flights/accommodation).
How we built it
The prototype was built using Azure interactive prototyping and the journey was published using Invision design. We built the background using Node.js and SQL (via sequelize) to store our data as our data was very relational (board is related to users and events, etc). The front-end was done using JS and jQuery, as well as HTML5 and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
We wanted this hackathon to be an amazing learning experience as well as a chance to build something useful. Thus, we decided not to use a service to build our backend but built it from scratch ourselves. We had to deal with some async problems like requests not finishing on time/properly/in order. We also had to think about how to use cookies and create persistent sessions so users are not logged out. This was our first time using Sequelize so it took a while for us to figure the logistics out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite trying out new languages and building the application from scratch, we believe that we were able to create a well-made prototype that followed our envision for this travel app. We also think that despite never having met each other before this Hackathon, our team came together very well, as each of us had a defining role that was essential to the completion of our application prototype.
What we learned
We learned a variety of different things from many sides of this project. From the business side, we learned the importance of customer validation for a new product. From the development side, we learned that we should work in short iteration cycles and not focus too much on the initial design; at the end of the day, we need to produce a working software (especially for these types of events where time is limited).
What's next for OnBoardMe
We hope to continue working on this to add the rest of the features that we had designed for, such as the payment feature using Stripe, a chat/forum feature, pulling data from third party APIs, get an initial customer basis and validate our type of customers, create the product that the customers want, and take over the travel market.
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