Finvest

Inspiration

Each year, university students in Africa ideate, work and build projects, projects that solve some of the biggest challenges in Africa. Most of these projects die and rot after been used for grading purposes in their respective institution. These projects and ideas could have come to life if only these students startups could secure funding, if only they were able to have a community and product that connects them with potential investors who are really passionate about funding the projects. This is why we created Finvest

What it does

FINVEST is an innovative application that facilitates seamless connections among students, projects, and investors through features like a community page, Projects page for efficient matching with investor interests.

We have three types of profile because we are building both a community and a funding source, we have a Student Profile for Students, an Investor profile for Investors, and a Member Profile for individuals who are neither but would like to be a part of the community.

Every student gets to publish a post (Idea or Project) of what they think and other students can give these a ratings and a comment, highly rated projects will be shown to investors. The students can decide to auction their projects and accept the investor with the best offer, we are mainly connecting the students with these great ideas with a source of life; funding.

Passion fuels ideas, motivation fuels ideas, but what bring ideas to life is FUNDING.

How we built it

Our team has people for various skills, we started this project by ideating and checking the existing data to build a product that has a seamless user experience.

After that we moved into the design stage, by creating wireframes and layouts for how the design will look like and what really appeals to out target audience who are mainly Students.

After the design stage, the development team brought it to life. Through out the project we used Javascript's framework (React+Vite) and Tailwind CSS for styling and designs. We worked on a big part of Frontend (Backend & APIs in progress) so that we can showcase the main functionality of our platform.

Challenges we ran into

Time was a major challenge but within the three days we were able to build an MVP. The project and design team faced a challenge of sourcing for data in verifying the details in our presentation but this was solved as we were able to crawl the web properly.

The development team faced a challenge of implementing a custom font, on the website without using Google Fonts, this was solved by researching online and making use of information found on Stack Overflow.

This was really inspiring as we were able to learn something new and take a new approach towards problem solving

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working together as a group. Learned new skills from each other. Created a real world product and solution.

What we learned

We came to realize that there is a problem in the society that we can contribute and came up with a real tech based solution. We were able to create a product demonstrates the whole idea of our project and get ideas and plans about our future projection for Finvest.

What's next for Finvest

Finvest is gradually becoming the next idea marketplace in Africa, on Finvest we are not online sharing ideas but we are also bringing ideas to life by providing potential funding sources. We are planning to expand our products and become a middleman in bringing the ideas to life by providing legal services that helps the students and investors document their agreements