Inspiration
“Vivek Shah, 30, has fewer options following his drop in Uber rides in Los Angeles. Shah relies on gig work for his entire income and has seen a roughly 60% drop in his earnings”. CNBC
“A 2019 report by the JPMorgan Chase Institute looked at 1.4 million small businesses with a business banking deposit account at the bank and found 29% of businesses in a typical community were unprofitable, and 47% had less than two weeks of cash liquidity.” Wall Street Journal
What it does
Small business owner: "Alexa, get a disaster loan with S.B.A. Loan"
Alexa: "Ok. Welcome to S.B.A. economic injury disaster loans."
What you see above is the easiest way to get a loan in the history of the world. Not because of us. But because of the CARES Act, the COVID-19 crisis, Alexa and millions of developer hours over many decades perfecting natural language processing technology. All we did was take some of the stuff we used to help young children learn how to read way ahead of their peers and apply it to this problem so small business owners can get up to speed way ahead of their peers.
How I built it
Alexa skills (apps for Alexa) are incredibly easy to build with AWS Lambda and node.js so that's honestly the easiest part of the process these days. I've literally created over 200 so have an idea of how to manage the workflow. The value add part is will this conversation you are making between a machine and a person with real needs help them get further in life faster than if they just Google's something our watched a video? If this answer is no, then it doesn't matter how you built it (in my opinion).
Challenges I ran into
Over the years I've put a fair amount of time into understanding how to build on Facebook's messenger platform. Years ago it was very developer friendly, but today a lot of time is consumed by independent developers paying the price for well funded state actors. In the end, I simply didn't have the time deal with the heightened security/scrutiny to access tools.
However, I was able to simply use some of the GUI based settings and create FB pages that did 80% of what my bots were going to do, so in the end, this was a blessing in disguise. It aloud me to focus on a real MVP.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm glad I was able to get this done in time, but I will only be proud of it if it helps someone avoid closing their business or letting go of their team due to COVID-19 economic damages.
What I learned
The biggest thing I learned had little to do with building the product and more to do with the quality of information available and how parties twist that information to get their industry, political, or local view across. It's sad, but true that less and less of what you read online is accurate, regardless of the source. For every minute I spent coding and testing I spent 10 minutes verifying or invalidating something I read in a "reputable" news source, versus something that was buried in a government document. I'm not sure there's an incentive to fix that problem (information reliability), because the goals of the parties that can fix it are not aligned with the people that would benefit most by having confidence that what they read is accurate.
What's next for Brainspray COVID-19 Loan Alexa Lessons
A business professor from an elite US University has joined our team to focus on business solutions. I'll continue building out our successful early childhood reading and math tools. I'll also verify that the test users I spoke with this weekend were (or were not) able to secure COVID-19 relief capital for their businesses as a result of our Alexa lesson.
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