SmartSwap

Inspiration

I lived in the 8th floor in my college hostel and I was the only one having a proper knocked and furnished cricket bat (an english willow). So most of my friends and even random people used to come and borrow the bat from me. Seeing this my roommate had an idea of starting a rental business and to ask money from anyone who wants to borrow my bat the next time. I said no to asking money but the rental idea seemed really catchy and profitable. He was the mastermind for all this to begin. We then planned on implementing this idea from the next semester as this was something that could definitely turn big.

What it does

SmartSwap is a peer-to-peer rental platform that makes borrowing and lending everyday items simple, affordable, and sustainable. It allows college students to access what they need without having to buy everything.

How we built it

We used Bolt.new to create this no code web app interface for item listings, user profiles, and rental requests. Our conversational AI, integrated using ElevenLabs, answers user queries using a smart knowledge base. Although, we weren't able to integrate the AI agent as we ran out of tokens, we plan on doing it in the future once our webapp is fully functional. For the backend, we used Firebase to handle authentication and real-time database operations, and Supabase for notifications and image storage and other things like security logs, user reviews, rental requests etc.

Challenges we ran into

-Giving bolt the proper prompts and reducing token usage. This costed me a fortune of tokens before actually reading the guide and duplicating the project. -Payment integration: Installing secure transactions using no-code tools was challenging. Platforms like Stripe aren't available in India and so we had to setup the payment gateway through razorpay's test mode which didn't function properly. When our webapp is deployed we plan to implement a fully functional payment gateway through razorpay by using the help of bolt.new -Chatbot tuning: Getting our AI assistant chatbot to correctly comprehend rental-related questions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-Built a fully functional MVP in just a few days using Bolt. -Created a platform that has the potential to reduce consumer waste and improve affordability on campus. -Started our journey greatly by the help of this hackathon and bolt.new to design a student friendly web app as our idea was to start-off by using google sheets and forms and manually handle everything from storing the users items to lending them to the borrower.

What we learned

-Leveraging no-code tools can dramatically speed up development without sacrificing functionality. -A proper interface and trust building features for a peer-to-peer marketplace.

What's next for SmartSwap

-Expanding it just from our college to various other colleges and then the whole nation. -Adding in-app payments, ratings & reviews, and damage protection features. -Launching a mobile app to improve accessibility.