Waypoint

Framing the Problem

Modern conferences are filled with valuable opportunities, but attendees only discover a small fraction of them.

A conference may have thousands of attendees, hundreds of sessions, dozens of sponsors, and countless networking opportunities. However, participants often struggle to identify the people they should meet, the sessions most relevant to their goals, and the opportunities that would create the most value for them.

This affects:

• Attendees trying to meet the right people

• Speakers looking to engage the right audience

• Recruiters seeking qualified candidates

• Sponsors searching for relevant prospects

• Organizers trying to maximize attendee engagement and conference impact

Today, conferences primarily measure attendance and participation. They rarely help attendees achieve specific outcomes such as finding a job, meeting founders, discovering customers, or building meaningful professional relationships.

Idea Explanation

Our solution is Waypoint, a tool designed to make conferences outcome-driven rather than attendance-driven.

The platform allows organizers to create and customize conferences through a dedicated onboarding and administration experience. Organizers define venue zones, participant roles, networking capabilities, conference features, permissions, and engagement settings before publishing the event.

Once attendees join a conference, they complete a personalized onboarding flow where they define their professional background, skills, interests, goals, networking preferences, and social profiles such as LinkedIn and GitHub.

Using this information, the platform creates an AI-powered attendee profile and recommends:

• Relevant people to connect with

• Sessions to attend

• Sponsors to engage with

• Networking opportunities throughout the venue

The platform explains why each recommendation is valuable and helps attendees progress toward their conference goals.

At the end of the event, participants receive a personalized conference journey report summarizing connections made, goals achieved, sessions attended, and recommended follow-ups.

Implementation

The platform consists of two primary experiences:

Organizer Experience

Organizers create and configure conferences through a multi-step onboarding flow.

They can:

• Create conference profiles

• Configure venue zones

• Define participant roles

• Enable or disable platform features

• Configure networking permissions

• Manage attendees and content

These configurations dynamically influence the attendee experience.

Participant Experience

Participants browse available conferences and join an event.

During onboarding, they provide:

• Professional information

• Skills and interests

• Conference goals

• Networking preferences

• Social links

This data is used to generate recommendations throughout the conference.

Technical Architecture

Frontend:

• React

• TypeScript

• Kendo UI

• Zustand

• TanStack Query

Backend:

• Node.js / NestJS

Database:

• PostgreSQL

AI Layer:

• Profile analysis

• Recommendation generation

• Conversation starter generation

The frontend communicates with backend APIs to manage users, conferences, recommendations, networking activity, and analytics.

For the hackathon version, certain recommendation and AI components are simulated to focus on demonstrating the user experience and overall product vision.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges was balancing scope with available development time.

The original concept included:

• AI-powered attendee matching

• Sponsor discovery

• Session recommendations

• Real-time networking

• Conference analytics

• Organizer management

• Venue intelligence

Building all of these systems at production scale within a hackathon timeframe was unrealistic.

To overcome this, we focused on delivering the most important user journeys while designing the platform architecture to support future expansion.

Another challenge was designing a system that works for both organizers and attendees while remaining intuitive and easy to use.

We addressed this by creating dedicated onboarding experiences and role-based interfaces for each user type.

Accomplishments

We successfully designed and implemented a complete conference operating system experience rather than a single-feature application.

Key accomplishments include:

• Organizer conference creation workflow

• Dynamic conference configuration system

• Role-based participant onboarding

• AI-powered networking and discovery experience

• Personalized mission-driven attendee dashboard

• Conference analytics and management experience

• Professional networking integration through LinkedIn and GitHub profiles

• End-of-conference reporting experience

We also learned how to design a product that balances user experience, AI capabilities, customization, and scalability within the constraints of a hackathon.

Next Steps

Our long-term vision is to evolve Conference Mission Control into an open-source platform that can be adopted by conferences of any size.

Future improvements include:

• Production-grade recommendation engine using vector embeddings

• Real-time attendee matching

• Calendar integration

• LinkedIn and GitHub synchronization

• Advanced organizer analytics

• Sponsor intelligence platform

• Session personalization

• Multi-conference user profiles

• Mobile applications

• White-label conference deployments

• Community features that persist beyond the conference itself

• Opensourcing the tool that any conference can plug and play.

Ultimately, we want to transform conferences from passive events into active platforms that help attendees achieve meaningful outcomes and create lasting professional relationships.