HackTinder – Project Story

Inspiration

Hackathons are exciting and fast-paced, but one challenge always stood out to us: finding the right teammates. Often, participants end up in teams where skills, goals, or work styles don’t align, which can make collaboration stressful and slow down progress. We wanted to create a tool that helps people form balanced, compatible teams quickly so that they can focus on building ideas instead of worrying about team dynamics.

What it does

HackTinder is an AI-powered platform that makes team formation easy and efficient. Users create a profile with their skills, interests, and preferred project tracks. The system then uses AI to suggest teammates who are the best match. Once a team is confirmed, HackTinder automatically generates a project board with tasks assigned to each member based on their strengths. Teams can track progress in real time, making collaboration smoother and helping everyone stay organized.

How we built it

We approached the project in layers. First, we created a simple, intuitive dashboard for users to create profiles and view suggested matches. For the matchmaking logic, each participant is represented as a set of skills, and AI calculates compatibility between users to ensure teams are balanced. Once teams are formed, tasks are automatically generated and assigned to members based on their expertise. The backend handles all data and API logic, while a real-time dashboard keeps everyone up to date on progress.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing teams so that each group had a mix of complementary skills was harder than we expected. Ensuring that the task boards and dashboards updated in real time for all users required careful backend design. Working under tight time constraints meant we had to plan and coordinate every step very carefully to build the core features within the hackathon timeframe.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully created an AI-based matchmaking system that forms balanced teams. We automated task generation so teams can start working immediately without manual setup. We built a dashboard that tracks progress in real time and keeps teams organized. Overall, we created a platform that is both easy to use and scalable for any hackathon setting.

What we learned

We learned that AI can significantly reduce friction in team formation and enhance collaboration. Integrating multiple systems like AI, databases, and task automation requires careful planning and clear communication. We also realized the power of real-time data sync for keeping teams productive and on track.

What's next for HackTinder

We plan to add features like voice or video integration for team introductions and improve the AI to provide recommendations based on past hackathon experiences. The platform could also be expanded to work beyond hackathons, helping students and professionals form teams efficiently in any collaborative setting. Finally, we aim to add analytics to help teams understand their performance and improve over time.