Help Space

Easily find people, businesses, or groups in your community in need
Search within your community
Uses Facebook's native personal/group fundraiser tools to improve trust and handle payments

Inspiration

Most people in the US will be getting a check for about $1000 for Covid19 relief. For some, it's a nice bonus but for others, it's a critical lifeline and not nearly enough. Many people I know have lost their jobs or had to furlough employees for their small business due to social distancing and shelter-in-place orders. If people in their community had an easy way to discover their need and pitch in by sending part of their own stimulus check to someone who needed it more, everyone in the community would benefit and the US stimulus would be much, much more effective.

What it does

Think of help.space as a simpler GoFundMe with built-in community search, social connections, and marketing (via Facebook) along with a scalable payment system that resists bots, fraud, and illegal usage (e.g. anti-money laundering) It provides an easy way for someone to post their need and for others to discover it via search by keywords, hashtags, or community map.

How I built it

The MVP uses existing platforms to help ensure availability, trust, and scale. The front-end uses an off-the-shelf marketplace platform (sharetribe.com). The core plumbing of the app uses Facebook's APIs to create fundraisers and uses Facebook's Fundraiser app to accept payments and broadcast the need to friends and the community. Authentication requires a Facebook account to help reduce bots and fraud and to provide social proof of those in need.

Challenges I ran into

Asking for people to send money requires more than a way to accept payments. Users need to have trust that their funds get to the right people - real people in need and not scammers or bots. Also, participants need to be comfortable that their information won't be misused or their privacy violated. It was also a challenge finding an effective and simple way for people to easily link to their personal fundraiser across social media platforms to 'market' their need. The solution also needed to prevent scammers or money launderers from misusing it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to get the basic plumbing of the system up and running within a day - although it is not yet production-ready, we are moving fast.

What I learned

Using existing platforms to build solutions are more effective than building everything from scratch. We also learned a lot about using Facebook's APIs to other systems as well as other tech components - like creating and managing deeplinks that are easy to remember url links to personal fundraisers. Mostly, we learned about the practical limitations of building a system that accepts payments and requires trust from both sides of the marketplace (givers and receivers)

What's next for Help Space

Our goal is to have a tested production solution before stimulus checks hit bank accounts in a few weeks. We'll look for ways to get national media attention. In true times of need, people come together to help their community, we want to be an important part of our global recovery from Covid19