CoRide | Devpost

Example text confirmation
Rider sign up
Driver sign up

Inspiration

Bryan has to spend $200 just to take the Amtrak every time he wants to head home to Pennsylvania. We realized that Bryan is not the only student who goes home to that area. In fact, Bryan's mom even asked, "Don't you guys have a bulletin board where you share stuff like this?"

We realized the need for a platform to connect students headed home, enabling them to share rides and save time and money while reducing their carbon footprint, we set out to create an innovative solution that brings people together for a greener, more social commute.

How We Built It

When users put down their info into our signup page, trycoride.com, that triggers our Zapier Zap, which binds our whole process together. The Zap enters that user's data into our Google Sheets database. Then, using Twilio, we text the user that just signed up to confirm their account creation. At the same time, we kickoff our first AWS Lambda, which searches through our Google Sheets database to find the best matching user who is also going to that destination. After that match has been computed, we use Twilio again to text the rider of that pairing and ask them to confirm. If they confirm, we use Twilio to send a text to the driver of that match. While these texts are being sent, we use our second AWS Lambda to monitor that the driver has confirmed. After both parties have confirmed, we reveal their names and phone numbers and send both parties a text over Twilio so that they can connect.

What it does

CoRide let's students sign up as riders or drivers. Riders are looking for a more economic, green, and social way to get home, and drivers are already headed home and are looking to help others get home just for the price of gas. When a user signs up, they are automatically notified whenever a user of the opposite type (rider/driver) is also headed near them, and they are continually notified as better matches come along. If both the rider and the driver agree to the match, we connect them and help them set up a CoRide. The beauty of CoRide is that once you submit where you're going, the app works in the background and you only interact with others over text, seamlessly integrating CoRide into your daily life.

Challenges we ran into

Last year, we overcomplicated our hack and spent too much time on aspects we couldn't even demo. This year, we went for simplicity and used no-code solutions like Zapier as much as we could. Our biggest challenges came from integrating all of our moving pieces together, and this required us to rethink our approach and switch from the Twilio SDK to the REST API, but we still glued our whole app together using just Zapier, Google Sheets, and AWS Lambdas.

What's next for CoRide

From discovery, we have learned that many potential users have safety concerns with regards to riding with people they haven't met before, so we plan on continuing our research in this area as well as adding accountability measures such as reviews.