COP (YC Hackathon Finalist)

Young, Omar, Kevin, and I were selected to attend the Y Combinator November 2019 hackathon in Mountain View, CA. We originally planned to continue to develop IDK App but once we got there, we were inspired to work on a new idea from scratch.

Problem: With the popularity of subreddits like r/frugalmalefashion, price-conscious consumers like college students are always looking to buy items on sale. However, constantly checking prices is tedious. I once wanted to cop (buy) Common Projects on sale and I would check r/frugalmalefashion everyday. Before deciding to build, we searched for solutions but Honey and camelcamelcamel only partnered with specific retailers.

Introducing COP, a lightweight way of tracking prices for any item on the Internet. Watch the demo video (sorry no voiceover) ↓

In 24 hours, after many redbulls, free food, and basketball games in the YC parking lot, we built an iOS app that sends a text message when the price decreases. The user pastes a link, inputs the current price (to verify our scraping algorithm), and selects the price threshold for the notification.

YC Hackathon Finalist: After pitching to Trevor Blackwell (co-founder of Y Combinator) and almost having the demo flop, we were selected as finalists to present to all the judges (list). Although we didn't win, it was a really exciting time!

I guess they didn't take the best photos of us 😬