Rooted

How We Meet the Brief: Reconnecting in an Isolated World

Our slides: https://www.figma.com/deck/YAmkTt7EaHvx4JxUg7pBfk/Two-Tone?node-id=1-507&t=1PDr0lqF1QyQGVY3-1

At Rooted, our mission is to address the challenge of staying in touch with former colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, even as life takes people in different directions. We understand that, in today’s fast-paced world, reconnecting can be difficult, and often feels like a lot of effort for something that may not always be fulfilling. The goal of Rooted is to make reconnecting feel effortless, meaningful, engaging, and rewarding. Below, we break down how we meet the brief and reinvent the way people reconnect with those from their past.

Effortless

We’ve designed Rooted to make reconnecting simple and intuitive, eliminating the barriers that typically make socializing feel like a chore. The app is easy to navigate, and users don’t need to spend hours organizing events or reaching out to people. Instead, they can quickly find event suggestions that align with their values and interests. By integrating features like calendar syncing and social media connections, we make the process of finding and meeting people even more seamless. Additionally, the AI-powered recommendation system suggests events based on users’ shared interests within gardens, helping them rediscover connections and create new ones.

We recognize that socializing can feel overwhelming for different users, especially for those who are neurodivergent, including individuals with ADHD. Rooted is designed to cater to a variety of experiences, ensuring that no one feels left behind. For users with ADHD, we've simplified the process to reduce cognitive load. The “Meet Now” feature eliminates decision fatigue by offering tailored event suggestions, making it easier for users to choose and attend activities without sifting through overwhelming options. The app also integrates with calendar syncing, providing helpful reminders to stay on track and ensuring users don’t miss out on important events. Additionally, the AI-powered recommendations guide users toward connections they’ve interacted with before, helping them stay focused on meaningful relationships.

For visual learners, the app uses a flower and plant metaphor to provide a clear, visual representation of relationship growth within gardens. As users interact more or attend events, their gardens bloom, offering a tangible, ongoing reminder of their efforts. This visual approach motivates users by showcasing the progress of their connections, reinforcing positive behaviors, and encouraging continued engagement. By focusing on simplicity, clear decision-making pathways, and visual growth tracking, Rooted ensures that reconnecting is effortless, enjoyable, and rewarding for all types of users, no matter their experience or needs.

Meaningful

Reconnecting isn’t just about surface-level interaction; it’s about making those moments count. Rooted enables users to connect around shared interests, values, and hobbies, making every interaction feel significant. Each garden represents a place where people have met before—whether at a hackathon, university, or work—and within each garden, users can track the growth of their relationships. The plants in the garden symbolize the depth of these connections, and the more users interact, the more the relationships bloom. By giving users a personalized year-in-review scrapbook and stats on who they connected with most, we ensure that every meeting feels like a meaningful milestone in a relationship.

Engaging

We’ve used gamification as a key strategy to keep users actively engaged. The process of growing a garden by nurturing relationships is visually appealing and rewards users for their participation. Users earn points for attending events, taking photos, and leaving reviews, which directly contribute to the growth of their garden. The idea of tracking relationships through flowers that grow and shrink based on engagement turns reconnecting into a fun and motivating experience. Features like spinning wheels for deciding which event to attend, and rewards for participation, keep users motivated to continue interacting with the app. The integration of AI recommendations also ensures that users are always discovering new events to keep them involved.

Rewarding

Rooted doesn’t just help users reconnect—it also rewards them for doing so. Each interaction with friends and colleagues unlocks opportunities for promo codes and exclusive offers from vendors, further incentivizing users to meet up and engage. This system creates a loop where users feel recognized for their effort to reconnect, while vendors benefit from affiliate marketing and targeted exposure. As relationships grow, users can also gain points for taking part in activities and creating memories, which translate into more features or rewards within the app. At the end of each year, users can enjoy a scrapbook of their experiences, filled with photos, videos, and memories from the events they attended, further enhancing the rewarding nature of the app.

Monetization Plan: Vendor Onboarding & Affiliate Marketing

To ensure the sustainability and growth of Rooted, we’ve integrated an affiliate marketing model that works seamlessly with our vendor onboarding strategy.

• Freemium Model for Vendors: We aim to attract vendors (such as bowling alleys, restaurants, event venues, etc.) to join Rooted through a freemium plan. Vendors can join the platform at no cost, offering their events and services to users in exchange for exposure. They can advertise their offerings within relevant gardens, increasing their visibility to users based on shared interests or past experiences.

• Premium Vendor Plan: As Rooted grows, vendors can opt into a premium plan. This plan will allow vendors to have enhanced visibility, additional marketing tools, and the ability to post special deals or events directly to targeted users. Over time, as we scale, vendors will be incentivized to pay a fee to continue posting on the platform as we move from a freemium to a more revenue-generating model.

• Affiliate Marketing & Tracking Cookies: Rooted will integrate affiliate marketing and tracking cookies as a key monetization strategy. When users click on a vendor’s event or activity, a tracking cookie is placed in their browser, capturing the referral. If users proceed with booking an event or purchasing a service, Rooted earns a commission from the vendor. This approach ensures that vendors benefit from increased bookings or activity while Rooted generates passive income from the successful referrals.

This combination of freemium vendor onboarding and affiliate marketing with tracking cookies creates a sustainable revenue stream, ensuring that Rooted remains accessible to users while providing value to our vendor partners. By leveraging Rooted’s growing user base and the powerful recommendation system, vendors can effectively target the right audience while generating more sales, creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem.

Reinventing the Way People Reconnect

Rooted goes beyond traditional social media platforms by offering a dynamic space where real-world relationships are actively nurtured and tracked over time. Rather than relying on digital conversations that often lack substance, Rooted encourages people to meet up in person by offering real-world activities and events that cater to shared interests. The tracking of these events in gardens allows users to see the tangible growth of their relationships, which adds a layer of meaning that traditional social apps often lack. Additionally, features like the scrapbook, yearly stats, and event reviews help users reflect on their journey of reconnecting, making the experience feel more like an evolving story rather than a series of fleeting digital interactions.

Technical Implementation

We focused on creating a responsive and scalable frontend using React, Vite.js, and TypeScript. React enables a dynamic user interface, allowing us to build an interactive and smooth experience for our users. Vite.js provides a fast development environment with rapid hot-reloading, which helped us quickly iterate and build out features, ensuring a seamless user experience. TypeScript was chosen for its strong typing system, which helps prevent errors and improve maintainability, making it easier for us to scale and update the app over time.

The frontend interacts with a backend server that manages user data, event information, and interactions within gardens. For our database, we would likely use NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, as they offer flexibility in storing user data (e.g., preferences, interests, event history) and can scale efficiently with growing user data. MongoDB would be ideal for managing the unstructured data that’s central to users' relationships, events, and activities.

The recommendation system would be powered by machine learning algorithms, such as collaborative filtering or content-based filtering, to suggest events and connections. For this, we could use libraries like TensorFlow.js or integrate with Google Cloud AI or AWS SageMaker to build the recommendation engine. The system would analyze user data, preferences, and past interactions to offer personalized suggestions that align with their values and interests.

To track users' interactions and events, cookies would be used for tracking, allowing us to gather data for affiliated marketing. By using tracking cookies, we can recommend vendors and activities and gain commissions from users who book through the app. We would also implement proper data privacy measures to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR.

In the future, as the app scales, we may consider additional technologies such as GraphQL for querying user data more efficiently, or Firebase for real-time data synchronization, especially when integrating features like messaging and event booking.

Overall, the combination of these technologies ensures Rooted is built for both speed and scalability, enabling us to continuously improve the user experience while expanding the app's capabilities.

Conclusion

By focusing on making reconnections effortless, meaningful, engaging, and rewarding, Rooted provides a platform that reinvents how people stay in touch. It’s not just about catching up with old friends or colleagues—it's about building deeper, lasting connections that contribute to overall well-being. Through our innovative approach, we hope to transform how people reconnect and maintain relationships in an increasingly isolated world.