GoLoco

Inspiration

In our highly digitized society, small businesses struggle to garner attention, which results in less sales and less opportunities to share their innovations with the world. Our product, GoLoco, seeks to revolutionize how small businesses raise attention by providing a dedicated platform for them to do so. Our hope is that tourists visiting any city, town, or location will use GoLoco to explore the ecosystem of small businesses around them.

What it does

GoLoco is a short-form social media platform specifically for browsing local small businesses. Users are required to make an account and then can see videos uploaded by small business owners in their vicinity showcasing their services and products. Users can sort their feed based off of videos with the highest like/dislike ratio or by closest distance.

How we built it

We used Django as a framework and its REST Framework to handle all the backend functionality, and React.js and Tailwind.css to handle the frontend and all user interactions. We also used Map Embed API and Geolocate API from Google Maps API to fetch information about distances between users and businesses. We also forced users to be logged in before accessing the platform through ProtectedRoutes.

Challenges we ran into

We initially ran into issues related to sending data between the frontend and backend, but they were resolved after much trial and error. Our biggest unresolved challenges was configuring a form on the frontend that allowed business owners to upload their own videos into our Django models. We were unable to send and store a whole video from the frontend to the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the functionality and features that GoLoco displays. For example, we built our own API using Django, queried map and geolocation data from third-party APIs, and successfully integrated our frontend with the backend through Django REST Framework.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate a frontend framework, React.js with another framework, Django, without sacrificing the ability to communicate information between those two frameworks. Throughout the hackathon, we also strengthened our planning and communication skills, as we developed a clear plan before coding and then had to quickly adjust the plan due to various constraints we told each other about.

What's next for GoLoco

We want to resolve the issue of business owners uploading their own videos of their businesses. Ideally, they are able to upload videos by themselves like other social media companies. We would also like to make the map more user-friendly by adding allowing users to pick points on the map instead of manually entering a location.