STELLAR

Logo
Low fidelity prototype

Inspiration

The investment market has undoubtetly been negatively affected by COVID-19. The pandemic has made tremendous impact on companies of all kinds- but startups have been hit the hardest. Start-ups have been especially vulnerable, and are facing plenty of formidable challenges from both a company and an operations standpoint, and unfortunately flaws in the supply chain network have raised problems for all start-ups. Given the global scale pandemic and the resulting uncertain economic conditions, there is a strong possibility that funding for start-ups will become a major challenge in the future, as numerous investors will want to concentrate their future fund deployments solely on established portfolio companies in order to ensure that they can weather the current global crisis.

What it does

STELLAR is a mobile app where investors can invest in start ups based on their passions and interests. A menu of coming, new start up's and projects are displayed, and through our network, investors are able to gain insights on the startup, what it does, and how to invest in it.

How we built it

Our app was built specifically for mobile, and it was built particularly through android studio. Kotlin was the primary language used, along with some java. We used google analytics to obtain crowdfunding data, and log the startups stock and financial data into our backend powered by Firebase. To access data, we used a restAPI.

Challenges we ran into

We initially had an idea to build a decentralized social media platform using steganography and blockchain, however this proved to be difficult as we had little to no experience with cyber security applications. As we felt finance was an important theme to consider when building our project, we had to work backwards in the middle of the hackathon to construct user research and testing. In addition, this was our first time using Kotlin, so the learning curve provided some challenges. In addition, getting dependancies to work proved to be difficult, as our builds kept crashing. Time constraints is a cliche, but critical challenge we ran into, as we had to pick and choose critical app features which we could implement in the given time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of the fact that we were able to create a functional product in the given time frame! We are really happy with our project, and feel it is a unique idea which can be implemented effectively to help start ups moving forward.

What we learned

We learned that user research and considering design is just as important as the development! Being able to get a clear idea of our users enabled us to explore ideas in a more coherent way, and we feel this definitely helped our final product. When developing mobile apps, we usually use flutter so using kotlin was a new skill we picked up! We also learned about implementing google cloud backends, and using google analytics to collect data, and store them in firebase.

What's next for STELLAR

In the future, we hope to include current stock, and predicted stock visualization data on the app so users can gain a better understanding of the value of the startup before investing. In addition, we hope to scale this across a larger variety of platforms, such as iOS. We are hopeful for the future of this application, and hope it will empower start-ups!