Boosting a Zero Waste Marketplace With a GenAI-Powered Mobile MVP
24h
From discovery to prototype
A little over a day of live coding produced a functional, clickable cross-platform app.
870K
People in the community
The movement the app was built to serve.
35K t
Kept out of landfill each year
Used items the community saves annually.
The client
Uwaga, Śmieciarka Jedzie is a Polish foundation set out to make one person’s rubbish another person’s find. It began in 2013 as a single Facebook post, became a countrywide grassroots movement, and registered as an NGO in 2022.
The community now runs to more than 870,000 people across over 270 local groups, saving roughly 35,000 tonnes of used items from landfill every year.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
With that much traction the foundation needed to scale more cleverly, and to stand on its own platform rather than depend on someone else’s.
Challenge 01Posting has to be effortless
The shorter the journey from wanting to give something away to it reaching the group, the better the service works.
Challenge 02Let people see their own impact
Members engage more when they can track what they have contributed, so a counter of items shared and kept out of landfill was a requirement.
Challenge 03And the group’s impact too
A local group that gives away more stays more motivated and more active, and a fundraising call to action gives the NGO something to build on top of the core features.
What we did
A generative AI app, prototyped inside a hackathon
The foundation reached Tech to the Rescue and joined a hackathon on using generative AI for social and environmental impact. That is where we picked up the task, and the event became an intensive kick-off.
The AI writes the listing
Item descriptions are generated from images and frequently used phrases, which removes most of the effort in posting something.
Saved for next time
Phrases can be stored for future use and post drafts kept, so a member is not starting from a blank field each time.
Straight through to the group
Seamless integration with Facebook means instant posting where the community already is, rather than asking it to move first.
Counted individually and together
Both individual and community impact are tracked, which is the part that keeps members coming back. Phase two adds scheduling, collection notifications, safety measures and richer profiles.
Client testimonial
Our community efforts are all about positive impact. Netguru prototyped a GenAI-powered mobile solution within a little over 24 hours – with the MVP we’re now working on, we’re going to be able to monitor our impact. Peter Drucker says that you can't improve what you don't measure. The MVP is the first step to measure our work, so we can scale while maintaining quality, increasing our efficiency, and accessibility. Generative image description also opens up our community to visually impaired users.
More like thisOther places we scaled product teams for growth.
What’s next