Lemonade

Ready to invest your lemons?

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Inspiration

As a college student with a limited amount of spending money, and as someone who wants to get into the startup world through investing, it can be difficult to find the startups that fit right with me. The popular startups that I hear about are already shooting for the moon and not looking for my spare change, and the ones that are just getting off the ground don't have the marketing budget to reach my ears. This is why I created Lemonade. A way for new investors to quickly learn about an up-and-coming startup, invest (a low-stakes amount!), and continue to keep tabs on how the company is doing.

What it does

For Investors: Browse through companies that have joined Lemonade. View their profile to get insight into their product, culture, and mission statement.

For Companies: Advertise your new startup and get funding from people around the world.

How I built it

A MERN Stack: Frontend: Reactjs Backend: Nodejs + Expressjs server connecting to MongoDB database

  • Mongo primarily used to store user and company data for website to populate pages with

Challenges I ran into

I haven't done a solo hackathon nor have I implemented MongoDB. It took quite a while for me to get the website in a modifiable state. I also had some trouble making a few design choices, especially when it come to how different I wanted the website to look for investors and for companies.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Built a working login/register system for the first time, hooked into MongoDB
  • Built a web app using a MERN stack for the first time
  • Made lemons appear and disappear on the profile page (maybe my proudest accomplishment)
  • Separated the website out into an investor version and a company version

What I learned

  • How to integrate MongoDB with Reactjs
  • How to manage time at a solo hackathon
  • How to use WebStorm from Jetbrains (an IDE I wanted to try out by doing this hackathon)

What's next for Lemonade

My first next step is to integrate Paypal's API and a card system to allow more payment options from investors. For companies, having an update system to investors, a monthly subscription option, and a rewards program (swag for investing, similar to Kickstarter) would give startups new and innovative ways to market themselves. The Kickstarter method of rewards and updates could be very beneficial because it allows investor to keep up to date with up and coming companies and their exciting new innovative technologies.

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