Inspiration
We all accumulate stuff for one reason or another, whether we piled up on board games right before the world shut down or you were an avid badminton player in high school and have all your equipment lying around. The moment you buy it, its value starts to depreciate. But what happens when you still want to play once in a while so it's not worth selling, but it’s just sitting there in the dust 90% of the time? You can share by renting it out! This way we can eliminate waste and unnecessary purchases. Equire allows you to list your items on our local community platform for rent so that others can also make use of your clutter. For example, not everyone needs to own Settlers of Catan, and not everyone can dish out $50 to buy the board game, but it would be great to borrow/rent for a cheap price on occasions: this platform allows us to do just that.
What it does
Equire is an online platform that allows people from a local community (such as a university campus, apartment complex, or shared housing) to list their power tools, board games, specialized cooking supplies among others, up for use. Then a member that is verified by that community can select a listing and send an email through our platform using Google Cloud and set up a meeting time and place. Members can also place a request for an item on our site, and anyone else in the community can fulfill the request by providing their own item. We’re fostering social connectivity by allowing people to interact with other members of their community and exchange items and ideas, allowing them access to entertainment that would otherwise be too costly to acquire themselves.
How we built it
We created a lofi design on Figma. Next, we started implementing the components and pages of our platform using Next and React. We integrated university logins using the Google providers for each of the given universities and performed authentication through Firebase. All emails are sent using the Twilio SendGrid Email API. Code was maintained using GitHub with continuous integration and continuous deployment setup. The application is hosted on Vercel.
Challenges we ran into
- An unfortunately timed power outage resulting in using a internship-given phone’s data plan to hotspot a laptop to finish the writing of this
- Integrating with university login systems in a seamless manner: this took many, many hours to figure out
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- It works! Any student with a UW NetID can start using our site today, integrated with UW IT's own login system: the same one you use for Canvas, Gmail, and more. It also works out of the box for WSU and Berkeley students using their own login systems.
- Using CI/CD, any company in the real world would implement such a thing to have constant maintenance of their website
- Creating a production-quality app. Rather than use create-react-app, which is all client-side rendered, we used NextJS for hybrid-SSR rendering to protect pages via an authentication layer. Our product was built and designed with security and scalability in mind as we hope to continue this beyond Dubhacks.
What we learned
There aren’t many protections for people who rent their items out if the value of the item is more than what it is up for rent. To mitigate this temporarily, we’ve locked use of our site based on university logins so that as long as you are a student, you are trackable and can be reported for misuse of our site
- A future implementation would require you to register a credit card which would allow us to charge our determined value of the item if you didn’t return it in a timely fashion.
How are we commercially viable?
In our current state, we are simply the hosting site. All integrations that we have implemented are free to use for us. In the future we can implement a low membership fee, which promotes users are “verified” meaning that there is protection for both the renter and the rentee. That membership fee as well as a small portion of the renting fee would go to us. Our current market is university campuses. These are the easiest to maintain as everyone is physically located together and there is an easy way to verify users: through school logins. In our beginning stage when we don’t have the ability to enforce fees, this allows some maintenance of the honor system, but allows students to report their items as stolen if needed. We want to let people make connections with others that have similar interests and so you can view others’ profiles and see if you share any equipment or hobbies.
What's next for Equire
- NLP with Google Cloud for generating suggested tags from title/description
- Cybersource VISA API to integrate payments directly into the website
- More university and community integrations
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.