Bondar For Businesses

Granting Authentic User Interaction Insights to Small Retail and Event Based Businesses

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Inspiration

Advertising cost for small retail businesses are becoming increasingly too costly for local businesses. Coupled with an ongoing loneliness epidemic as well, how nice would it be if we could match customers to physical events and retail outlets? That is when Bondar for Business was birthed.

What it does

We connect customers who share interests and suggest they meet up at local businesses. These businesses gain access to the Bondar Business app, allowing them to monitor the traffic we bring to their stores and receive valuable insights and recommendations to improve their operations. We offer various subscription packages tailored to businesses' needs, facilitated by Square APIs for seamless transactions.

How we built it

We use a simple mobile friendly web app to serve consumers and businesses alike. This consists of a nextjs frontend and a express backend.

This reduces the friction of adoption as small businesses will not need to buy new POS devices and can access metrics to make business decisions in an agile manner through their mobile devices.

By building a ubiquitous application empowered by the Internet and easy to maintain packages, we can then host it on commercial cloud but for this instance we only used vercel and heroku for frontend and backend servers respectively.

Challenges we ran into

Using squares api without embedded components isn't easy. Unlike stripe, square has enterprise ready documentation but required us to build our own components to interact with it. We felt that that was better actually despite the additional complexity as we can skin the looks and reduce the amount of information we are exposing.

We also had challenges developing a comprehensive suite of marketing metrics and recommendations and had to use placeholder recommendations for some but we do intend to use LLMs in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to present a completed prototype of the core functionality of our envisioned idea. Even though we did not do up a production ready level of authentication or features. The base functionality of this MVP is sufficient to showcase to businesses what they can potentially expect.

Automatic Loyalty Programme

Businesses can easily create their own automated loyalty program in a few clicks. We currently cannot use real insights to generate coupons, discounts, and subscription packages but those are in the works for the future.

Streamlined Payments and Stratified Tiering Packages

We have broken down marketing outcomes into simple and easy-to-understand tier packages with square catalog objects. We use this simplified pricing to ensure business users will understand business outcomes with no fluff.

Curated Business Profile and Reviews

To show the consumer the best of their businesses, we created a simple interface for businesses to inject their media to showcase their stores while at the same time embedding reviews so that they can easily read and interpret qualitative data.

Automated Insights and Analytics

Business user get best-in-class simplified insights to track their growth with us. As the app is in the prototype phase we mocked consumer data but in the future, such automated insights can be used for easy analysis and recommendations can give businesses quick actionable steps to their marketing strategy.

What we learned

We learnt that Square APIs, despite their complexity, is very rigorous for enterprise-ready solution. We also discovered that hiring marketers can really be automated because we can always use LLM and other ML solutions to provide best cases.

What's next for Bondar For Businesses

We want to scale the app an have greater business adoption by having the product to be readily available for download by any small business so we can drive users to their stores. We wish to empower more small businesses and that is hopefully something we can do with both the business and consumer application.

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