Grant Routes

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Inspiration

Our whole group is interested in understanding how does a business mindset works. This mindset informed a myriad of factors in which we incorporated into Granite, our ChatBot. Along with that, we wanted to expand our idea by empowering women to be futuristic, strong, and powerful entrepreneurs and small business owners.

What it does

Grant Routes is a one-stop platform for answering and getting-answered all of the questions a first-time business owner might have! Grant Routes features a ChatBot, Granite, that is an expert on all things business. Asking Granite a business question is as natural and seamless as talking to a friend. Ask Granite about the following things:

• How to start up your first business
• Promoting your Business
• Connecting with an Investor
• Useful Tips and Resources for entrepreneurship and business
• Mentorship in Management
• Networking with venture capitalists
• Recommended Banking

Granite will also connect you with human investors and mentors in real-time!

How I built it

Grant Routes is a Next.JS project hosted on Vercel. Granite is built with DialogFlow and connected to the web application using Kommunicate. Form responses are saved in a Firestore database.

Challenges I ran into

While coding Granite, we realized that many responses included concrete options as a follow-up, so we realized that this hurt the user experience because a typo could throw off the whole operation. That's why we did research on how to add buttons, and this greatly improved the user experience. Getting data out of Firestore was a huge challenge for us because of the authentication aspect, so this took a lot of reading and trial-and-error to figure out.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This was all of our first time creating a ChatBot, and we are all really happy with the user experience.

What I learned

We learned a lot about starting a business! All the resources we found were really helpful and interesting.

What's next for Grant Routes

If we had more time, we want to give some additional features such as providing extra resources in Strategic Focus in Leadership, Planning, and Management. Next, we will connect users who are seeking and willing to network with experienced and professional venture capitalists. After that, we will implement guided specialized workshops, so that future entrepreneurs and business owners can gain knowledge on the useful experience. Finally, we will add useful testimonials, and creating a self team from candidates who are interested in the same goals as the future business owners. We want to add more admin/moderator functionality such as approving submitted resources and accepting new mentors. We also want to add functionality for recruiting team members for your business through the ChatBot.

Built With

• dialogflow
• firebase
• firestore
• google-cloud
• nextjs
• react
• vercel