Inspiration
Successful startups all begin with great ideas, but great ideas can be hard to come by, especially ones that make immediate sense to others. What if there were some way to help connect budding entrepreneurs to ideas for their next venture that potential customers and investors could relate to? It was in this spirit that I built It'sLike.
What it does
It'sLike is a random business idea generator. Its unique features is that it frames ideas in terms of familiar concepts. For example, instead of suggesting that you build a company that "lets you rent your parking spot out to other drivers", It'sLike proposes a company that is "like Airbnb for parking spots".
How we built it
It'sLike is a single-page web app, with a React front end and a basic Flask API. The UI contains a text field to hold generated ideas and a button that sends a request to the API for new ideas. Potential descriptors are stored in an SQL database, from which Python code randomly selects two and sends them to the UI in API call responses.
Challenges we ran into
Two of my team members dropped the hackathon, and I lost touch with the one remaining member yesterday, so this turned into a solo hack pretty quickly after it started.
What we learned
I learned a lot about managing Python virtual environments, building a web page with React components, and sending API requests between code running on different internet ports.
What's next for It'sLike
Built with extensibility in mind, future versions of It'sLike may support:
- users adding their own ideas to the random generator database,
- a separate "Help / Instructions " page, and
- an upgraded idea generator that uses a machine learning algorithm to pull descriptors from sets of real company names instead of a pre-filled database.
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