freshfindr

Context

This app was developed in March 2019 during a 24-hour hackathon taking place in Leuven, Belgium link

Inspiration

World-conscious meets pragmatic meets entrepreneurship. We drew inspiration from Challenge #19, expanded upon it and enriched its scope.

What it does

Answers the needs of two types of users. The consumers open the free app to find a Google maps with an array of food distributors/sellers around them, tagged with their ratings and peer-reviews. They benefit from the full power of Maps, including its itinerary tools (foot, car, public transport). They can search locations by specific products, ratings, their ethical preference, geographic areas,... The food businesses increase their visibility to consumers. More importantly, paid subscribers receive customized analytics and marketing reports crafted by freshfindr using all the behavioral consumer data the app users generate.

How we built it

We used a number of brainstorming techniques, changed course a few times, before settling on this particular idea. We decided about 80% of the project in the early phase, and added the remaining ideas on the go. While brainstorming, we kept in mind the technical challenges we would be facing during the hackathon. We started coding around midnight. On the technical side, we quickly decided to stick with a combo of web-development technologies which every team member was comfortable working with: node.js and react.

Challenges we ran into

Project. Reconciling the needs of both the consumers and that of the businesses. More generally, staying true to our ethics and desire to have a positive impact, while keeping a down-to-earth, business-oriented outlook. We want our application to find its place in the 21st century market-economy. Hackathon. As a 100% hackathon-newbie team, everything was new to us. Time and energy management was our main challenge during the event.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We’re unanimously proud of what we managed to pull off in such a short period of time! We are new in the industry, still in the early phases of learning both the soft and hard skills. We would never have thought 6 months ago that we would find ourselves frantically coding and debating business ideas all night long!

What we learned

This was the first hackathon for everyone in our team. We learned a great deal about prototyping, and what matters most when making our case to potential investors. It is less about the technical feasts than it is about what the audience sees and feels during the pitch. Does the audience get our vision? Had we known the importance of this beforehand, we would have probably allocated our time and resources differently. We also learned that we should have slept a tiny bit more ;)

What's next for freshfindr

The whole team is absolutely convinced that freshfindr is relevant and unique. Western consumers are showing a rapid evolution of their priorities and preferences. It seems that the big industry players have not yet found how to strike that cord just yet. The answer may be to establish a powerful, market-wide platform, instead of in-house solutions that fail to capture the greater public.