MeetMidway. Are we Done? What's Next?

It all started with me scrolling through the app store, looking for MeetMidway. Now, before I can continue my story, it's only fair that you know what MeetMidway is.

It all started a little before the end of grade 12. During a hectic season of university admissions, everyone was stressed and so through some Instagram networking, I met a bunch of grade 12s that had the same academic drive as me. We made a group chat, consisting of 100 people and content which ranged from the most random memes to university admissions stress breakdowns. Soon enough, the group chat started dwindling and eventually, we decided to make a new group chat with only the active members from the original one. This was the start of Vanakian, our group of friends passionate about exploring and creating. We would have meetups in downtown Toronto, as all friends do, with some at the Eaton Centre, some at a random burger place near Dundas and others at Union Station. Unfortunately, many of these meetup plans would begin in the group chat but actually never leave the chat, due to bad planning, busyness and most importantly, a lack of things to do. I mean, you can only do so much when you go to Downtown Toronto every week, walking through the same stores in the Eaton Centre. Now keep this information in the back of your head because it'll be revisited eventually!

We realized we should actually do something productive and that's when the idea of hackathon hopping came up. Now, I'll leave you to read on that story on your own time :-). After participating (and also winning) the smaller hackathons we decided that us — yes us, this group of soon-to-be university freshmen should tackle the big fish now. That's how we found the Google Gemini Hackathon, a hackathon which required participants to utilize the newly released Gemini API and only Google's APIs. Cool right? Now the only problem was we had exactly three weeks to complete this three month long hackathon because of our unfortunate timing. Nevertheless, Vanakian didn't back down from this and so, we began brainstorming.

Remember how I told you to keep something in the back of your head earlier? Well, that whole dilemma of never being able to figure out what to do other than the same-old walk around Eaton Centre for 2 hours, get Osmow's from the food court and cluelessly walk around downtown for hours was now our source of inspiration. MeetMidway, as the name suggests was our idea to make meetups easier and generate personalized itineraries for users based on their preferences. The solution to this forsaken problem that so many other friend groups experience was now waiting to be created. We developed and deployed MeetMidway in less than a week onto the web. Honestly, we were genuinely proud of ourselves. Within the next couple weeks, we received 600 clicks on our app. Feel free to check out the actual project and demo video on our project page on the Google AI for Developers Website (yes we got featured there)!

Unfortunately, we weren't the winners, meaning we didn't get the most votes. But when we reflected back on the experience, we asked ourselves: "Did we build this app to simply win the hackathon? Is winning this hackathon what drove us to come so far in such little time?" And surprisingly enough, we all knew the answer. Whether we realized it or not, along the process of building MeetMidway, we became detached with the idea of just winning this hackathon and in fact, aimed towards something even greater: solving a problem that countless other children, teenagers and adults face on a day-to-day basis, by encouraging real-life connections so that the only hard part is stepping outside. Only 17.9% of the U.S. population went outside at least once a week in 2018, according to Outside Magazine. Our hope is that through MeetMidway, this number goes up, in order to help reduce rates of obesity, depression and loneliness. What better excuse than a hangout with friends, am I right?

Fast forward to December 27, 2024. After a bit of doomscrolling on the App Store (yes, the App Store), I find one app called MeetMidway. But, this wasn't our MeetMidway. Whoever made this did a pretty crappy job of copying us because unfortunately, you can't exactly replicate user interface. This made us feel multiple ways at the same time. On one hand, we were pretty irritated by the fact that our exact slogan, idea and features were copied on an app that was launched a couple months ago, just after we launched MeetMidway. However, this discovery also reopened a chapter that we had closed for the most part because we thought we were 'done'. Of course, if we got copied, there has to be something that was worth copying. It's time to grind and there's no time better than now because honestly, for our own self respect, we couldn't just sit back and leave our idea to catch dust when we know we've only just begun, especially when it's good enough to be copied.

And so as I write this, we're working on making even better Figma designs, ways to make the geometric median calculation as efficient and accurate as possible and marketing strategies to put ourselves out there because if we don't, someone else will.