SkillTap by BWIT

SkillTap connects businesses with skilled technical professionals for websites, apps, databases, and more—fast, reliable help when you need it, from experts skilled and ready to deliver.

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🚀 SkillTap: Keeping Talent Working, Keeping Innovation Moving

Inspiration

We saw a clear need. With waves of tech layoffs and major shifts in the federal space, too many brilliant tech minds— Black women—were being sidelined. SkillTap was born to flip that script: we wanted a fast, intelligent way to keep talent working and innovation moving.

What it does

SkillTap connects experienced tech professionals—particularly Black women—with businesses that need support across the tech stack. From websites to DevOps, SkillTap lets companies submit project needs quickly and get matched with proven pros ready to deliver.

Businesses can:

  • Submit project requests using AI assistance
  • Quickly find vetted tech talent
  • Manage project requests through a simple, streamlined process

How we built it

We built SkillTap with:

  • Bolt for rapid UI/UX and low-code development
  • Supabase as our flexible backend database
  • ElevenLabs AI to help businesses draft and clarify project needs

We knocked this out during a two-week sprint while juggling full-time jobs, using smart tools and even smarter collaboration to stay on track.

Challenges we ran into

  • ⚠️ Platform costs — Some tools surprised us with hidden fees for team collaboration
  • ⏳ Time management — Nights and weekends only meant energy was limited
  • 🧠 Learning curves — Bolt and Supabase were new for some of us
  • 🎯 Real life happened — Because of course it did

Even with all that, we kept it pushing and shipped a clean, functional product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Designed, developed, and deployed a working MVP in just two weeks
  • Used new tools and learned on the fly—no one dropped the ball
  • Worked as a team, aligned around a mission bigger than just us
  • Centered Black women in tech—both as builders and beneficiaries

What we learned

  • How to leverage low-code tools like Bolt for rapid deployment
  • Better practices in collaborative design and testing
  • How to organize and execute in a sprint format (not just waterfall vibes)
  • That trust and team dynamics matter just as much as tech stacks
  • AI is amazing but your expertise is still needed to support the troubles and logic loops

What's next for SkillTap

We’re just getting started. Coming up:

  • 🔁 Iterating on SkillTap with real user feedback
  • 🔍 Exploring more AI integrations for project matching
  • 🤝 Creating paid partnership opportunities with orgs who believe in equity in tech
  • 🧪 Expanding the platform to include training pathways, so emerging Black women tech talent can level up while they earn

We're going to flush this out more, work out the kinks, switch database providers to and amp our features and work on the roadmap and vetting our monetization framework.

Built With

  • autoprefixer
  • chat-gpt
  • eleven-labs
  • eslint
  • eslint-plugin-react-hooks
  • eslint-plugin-react-refresh
  • eslint/js
  • globals
  • lucide-react
  • postcss
  • react
  • react-dom
  • supabase/supabase-js
  • tailwindcss
  • types/react
  • types/react-dom
  • typescript
  • vite
  • vitejs/plugin-react
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