Agripool

How can you make sure a transporter's truck doesn't leave a village half empty?

That was the problem behind Agripool, a mobile application we built during VCET Hackathon 2021.

The idea was simple: connect farmers who need to transport their produce with transporters who have available space in their trucks.

Our project won Third Prize at the hackathon.

The Problem

Transporting agricultural produce from villages to wholesale markets can be expensive, particularly when trucks are not filled to capacity.

A transporter might already be making the trip to a wholesale market with unused space, while farmers in the same area are looking for transportation.

This creates a simple coordination problem:

Farmers need transport. Transporters have available capacity. They need a way to find each other.

Agripool was our attempt at solving that problem.

The Idea

Agripool connects the two sides of the transportation network.

Farmers can use the app to find available transportation for their produce, while transporters can discover demand and fill otherwise unused capacity.

The goal was to create a system where:

• Transporters can fill more of their available truck capacity.
• Farmers can share transportation costs.
• Fewer trucks make partially empty trips.
• Both sides can coordinate through a single platform.

The App

The app starts with a simple landing screen and guides users through account creation and authentication before they can access the ride marketplace.

Finding & Booking a Ride

Once inside the app, farmers can browse available rides and book transportation for their produce.

The flow goes from discovering a suitable ride to booking it and contacting the transporter after the booking.

Creating a Ride

The other side of the marketplace is the transporter.

Transporters can create a ride and make their available route and capacity visible to farmers looking for transportation.

30 Hours

The entire project was developed during a 30-hour code sprint.

It was my first hackathon, so there was a lot to figure out at the same time:

• A completely new technology stack
• Product design
• Mobile development
• Backend integration
• User workflows
• Preparing the final demo
• Presenting the idea to the jury

We deliberately chose an unfamiliar technology stack — Flutter — and had to learn and build with it under the same deadline.

That experience taught me how quickly an idea needs to become something tangible when there is a fixed deadline.

Recognition

Our idea and execution won Third Prize at VCET Hackathon 2021, along with a ₹10,000 prize.

What I Learned

This was my first hackathon and one of my first experiences building something for a problem outside the usual software-development context.

The biggest lesson was that product constraints can be just as interesting as technical ones.

We started with a broad problem — inefficient agricultural transportation — and had to reduce it to a concrete interaction between two groups of users.

I also learned what it's like to pick up an unfamiliar technology and build something usable under a very tight deadline.

Team

I built Agripool with:

• Keshav Mishra
• Jaideep More
• Mohil Khare

The project was built during VCET Hackathon 2021.

Tech

Flutter · Mobile Development · Product Design · Hackathon