BarterPlanet

Hello and welcome to Barter Planet! The current economic and health crisis is particularly dangerous for independent workers because they lack traditional protections many workers enjoy, like healthcare and paid sick leave. Small businesses create unique entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly for women, minorities, and immigrants. At the same time, owners of the smallest firms are particularly vulnerable.

This is why created Barter Planet. In times of reduced cash availability, we make sure that individuals and small businesses satisfy some of their needs avoiding the actual cash part.

Claire is a social media manager and a German teacher. She’s a bit low on cash now, but desperately needs someone to fix her kitchen.

Yannick is a construction worker. He wants to ensure that the houses he builds are safe and reliable, but can’t afford the fees of a professional consultant.

Marianne is environment consultant. She just moved to Berlin and clearly needs a German tutor.

Once they all register at the platform and open request, we use the matching algorithm. This way Claire teaches German to Marianne, Marianne consults Yannick on the water purification systems, and Yannick fixes Claire’s kitchen.

And it’s not only about services. You can trade your skills for some products, or trade those products for the services you need.

We’ve built a clickable prototype and are working on the final features. We conducted several surveys and already have more than 50 freelancers and 7 small businesses that expressed their interest in trying out the platform.

To provide accurate solution we’ll use reinforcement learning, beginning with two-sided stable matching with weighted preferences and adding spatial component to it. We will also use NLP to detect illegal content in the user profiles.

You’re welcome to sign up on our landing page, so we’ll keep you updated about our progress.

Thank you!