Welcome to the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon spotlight, curated by HackerNoon’s editors to showcase noteworthy tech solutions to real-world problems. Whether you’re a solopreneur, part of an early-stage startup, or a developer building something that truly matters, the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon is your chance to test your product’s utility, get featured on HackerNoon, and compete for $150k+ in prizes. Submit your project to get started!

In this interview, we speak with Rumaisa Tafhim about INVARYS, a city-based social platform designed to transform online interactions into real-world experiences. By connecting local communities through events, challenges, and cultural celebrations, INVARYS aims to foster genuine human connections beyond the screen.

What does INVARYS do?

Invarys is a city-based social platform that transforms online interactions into real-world experiences. It helps people discover events, create plans, join challenges, celebrate cultures, and connect with their local communities, while enabling businesses to reach nearby customers through experiences instead of traditional advertising. Now’s a good time for INVARYS to exist because technology has hyper-connected our devices, yet people are increasingly craving authentic, in-person community engagement to combat isolation and division.

What is your traction to date?

Invarys is currently in its early launch stage and has not yet established monthly active users. Our initial focus is validating engagement through United World by Football (UWF), beginning with multicultural cities such as Dubai and expanding globally. We expect our first users to come through creator partnerships, local businesses, community organizers, and football fans participating in city-wide cultural celebrations.

Who does INVARYS serve?

Invarys is built for every citizen of Planet Earth. We believe our planet is borderless, and technology should help people experience the richness of cultures beyond their own. From students and families to creators, travelers, professionals, and local communities, Invarys helps people build genuine human connections through real-world experiences instead of endless scrolling.

For local businesses, Invarys transforms marketing into participation. Restaurants, cafés, hotels, cinemas, clubs, salons, activity centers, retailers, and community organizations become part of city-wide experiences through events, fan deals, collaborations, and cultural celebrations—creating meaningful engagement and foot traffic rather than relying solely on traditional advertising.

What technologies were used in the making of INVARYS? And why did you choose the ones most essential to your tech stack?

INVARYS relies on a modern, robust tech stack featuring Next.js, React, and TypeScript for a highly responsive frontend, styled with Tailwind CSS and deployed via Vercel and Cloudflare. On the backend, we leverage Supabase for authentication and storage alongside PostgreSQL and Neo4j, allowing us to efficiently map and process complex social networking connections and city-based data.

What excites you about INVARYS's potential usefulness?

Our vision is simple but ambitious: a more united world.

Despite living in one of the most connected periods in history, humanity continues to face division, prejudice, and racism. Technology has connected our devices, but it hasn't always connected our hearts.

Through our first global initiative, United World by Football (UWF), we're inviting people everywhere to celebrate one country's culture together each day. By experiencing different traditions, foods, music, languages, clothing, and lifestyles together, people don't just learn about another culture—they experience it alongside others in their own city.

We believe understanding creates respect. Curiosity replaces prejudice. Shared experiences replace division. Our hope is to help build a world where people are proud of their own heritage while celebrating everyone else's.

Ultimately, we're not just building a platform for events—we're building a platform for human connection. If Invarys succeeds, it will help create more vibrant cities, stronger communities, and a future where we replace division with discovery, prejudice with curiosity, and racism with mutual respect.

Our ambition is to play a meaningful role in bringing humanity closer together by making genuine, real-world connection part of everyday life.

Walk us through your most concrete evidence of usefulness.

Since launching our early version, we've started onboarding our first users and gathering direct feedback from the community.

The most consistent feedback has centered around three things: the uniqueness of our social features, our mission to bring people together through real-world experiences, and the overall user experience and design of the platform.

Beyond feedback, the strongest validation we're looking for is behavioral rather than vanity metrics. When creators, businesses, community leaders, and residents voluntarily use Invarys to organize and participate in real-world cultural experiences through United World by Football, it demonstrates that we're solving a genuine coordination problem that existing social and event platforms don't address.

For us, success isn't measured by downloads alone—it's measured by people choosing to spend their time bringing communities together.

How do you measure genuine user adoption versus "tourists" who sign up but never return?

We don't define success by registrations or daily active users alone.

Our primary retention metrics focus on real-world participation:

• Users creating or joining multiple plans and events.
• Businesses returning to launch new experiences and campaigns.
• Organizers hosting celebrations across multiple featured countries.
• Communities growing through repeated participation.
• Users inviting friends and local businesses into the platform.

Our goal is to become part of a city's routine. If someone returns because there's always another event, another culture to celebrate, another gathering to join, or another community to discover, we've achieved genuine retention.

If we re-score your project in 12 months, which criterion will show the biggest improvement, and what are you doing right now to make that happen?

The biggest improvement will be community adoption and ecosystem participation.

Today we're laying the foundation by onboarding creators, DJs, restaurants, cafés, hotels, cinemas, activity providers, cultural communities, and local organizers before scaling users.

Rather than launching an empty platform, we're building supply and demand together. Every partnership creates more reasons for people to participate, while every participant creates more value for businesses.

Within twelve months, we expect Invarys to evolve from a promising concept into a living ecosystem where cities actively coordinate experiences through the platform.

How Did You Hear About HackerNoon?

I've followed HackerNoon as a platform that highlights builders solving meaningful problems through technology. I appreciate its focus on startups, engineering, and founder stories rather than just headlines. It has become one of the places I look to understand how ambitious products are being built and scaled, which made it a natural community to share Invarys with.

Since INVARYS is currently in its pre-launch stage with a focus on the United World by Football (UWF) initiative, what specific milestones or adoption numbers are you aiming to hit in your initial test city of Dubai before expanding globally?

Our objective isn't simply to acquire users—it's to validate a complete city ecosystem.

Before expanding, we want to demonstrate that one city can successfully coordinate recurring real-world experiences through Invarys.

Our initial milestones include:

• Hundreds of active participants joining UWF celebrations.
• Dozens of participating local businesses across restaurants, cafés, hotels, cinemas, activity centers, clubs, and retailers.
• A network of creators, DJs, photographers, organizers, and community leaders representing multiple cultures.
• Multiple successful country celebrations where businesses, organizers, and citizens collaborate through the platform.

Once we prove that this ecosystem can sustain itself in one multicultural city, we'll replicate the model globally. Building a platform that relies on local participation requires a delicate balance of supply and demand; how do you plan to scale the onboarding of businesses like restaurants and activity centers to keep up with user growth?

We believe communities should drive business participation—not the other way around.

Our strategy begins with recruiting local organizers and community leaders who naturally connect businesses into each celebration. Instead of approaching every restaurant or activity center ourselves, organizers introduce opportunities to businesses that align with each country's cultural experience.

At the same time, Invarys gives businesses immediate value through themed campaigns, fan deals, event listings, and community exposure.

As each city grows, the ecosystem becomes self-reinforcing: more organizers attract more businesses, more businesses create better experiences, and better experiences attract more participants.

Given your goal to replace endless scrolling with real-world human connection, what core feature within the INVARYS platform do you believe will be most effective in actually converting online interactions into in-person attendance?

The core feature is Community Planning.

Instead of passively consuming content, anyone can create plans, gatherings, challenges, cultural experiences, or local events that others immediately discover through their city feed and city calendar.

These aren't isolated posts—they're coordinated experiences where businesses, creators, organizers, and communities all participate together.

By making participation visible and collaborative rather than algorithmic, Invarys transforms online interest into real-world attendance.

Our belief is simple: people don't build meaningful relationships by scrolling—they build them by showing up.

Meet our sponsors

Bright Data: Bright Data is the leading web data infrastructure company, empowering over 20,000 organizations with ethical, scalable access to real-time public web information. From startups to industry leaders, we deliver the datasets that fuel AI innovation and real-world impact. Ready to unlock the web? Learn more at brightdata.com.

Neo4j: GraphRAG combines retrieval-augmented generation with graph-native context, allowing LLMs to reason over structured relationships instead of just documents. With Neo4j, you can build GraphRAG pipelines that connect your data and surface clearer insights. Learn more.

Storyblok: Storyblok is a headless CMS built for developers who want clean architecture and full control. Structure your content once, connect it anywhere, and keep your front end truly independent. API-first. AI-ready. Framework-agnostic. Future-proof. Start for free.

Algolia: Algolia provides a managed retrieval layer that lets developers quickly build web search and intelligent AI agents. Learn more.