Beeyond

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Inspiration

COVID has made it difficult for small businesses and self-employed people to thrive and expand their audiences, and our teammates have practically seen this, seeing local businesses shut down and self-employed people become troubled on how secure their source of income is. We decided to target such businesspeople and create a platform specific to them. Small businesses or self-employed people often struggle with effective advertising in the face of larger competitors with more money, time, and resources. Our platform provides free marketing by focusing on connecting local businesses and self-employed people to consumers all with a simple search, even in the midst of COVID.

What it does

With this in mind, we created Beeyond, a website that connects small businesses and self-employed people to consumers through search. Unlike other social medias and similar sites, we really focus on the “small”, providing free advertising for sellers who may not have the time or budget to effectively do it themselves in a competitive way. Beeyond also helps consumers more easily find and support local businesspeople. Beeyond provides free marketing to businesses and helps consumers find local people who can help with their needs, even in the midst of COVID.

How I built it

We used React.js for the UI, Node.js for the server, IBM Countant database and IBM Watson Assistant for the chat bot.

Challenges I ran into

We used technologies that some of us never used, so we had to navigate and learn them

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We built a really nice looking site searching a really great and critical purpose all from scratch!

What I learned

We learned about frontend development

What's next for Beeyond

We plan on fixing bugs and getting the platform up to the public. Also we have the ability for businesses to contact other businesses through email but we would like to further this interaction by creating a separate page just for business owners where they can chat and find projects to do with other creators. For that we may want to design a login page where users and businesses can create accounts. We also wish to create a way to filter out businesses that are large that may have signed up, or businesses that became large and give less priority to them while maintaining credibility based on customer reviews.