Inspiration

I have always been inspired by people who give back to the society. Moreover, while discussing an idea about charities with the employers of loblaws, they came up with the issue that every time they have an excess of their inventories, they have to discard it by throwing it away. That's when I got the idea of making the following project.

What it does

So what it does is that it brings together different retail sellers and buyers on one platform. Large retail companies have the issue of a large excess of inventories remaining behind. What they usually do is they discard it by throwing it away, which basically means they are wasting a lot of good items just because they don't need it anymore. So my platform allows all these retailers to bring this excess to sell it at a much lower price, to a needy target market. The main objective of a firm is to maximize profit. In my model, the needy people are benefitting from a cheaper market, the firm is making additional profit (as compared to throwing it all away) and the environment is benefitting from sustainability and reduced wastage.

How I built it

My project had a lot of back work behind it. Its programming part was quite easy but carrying primary research was a bit of a challenge. It involved a lot of discussion and research about the target audience. I built my website on shopify though.

Challenges I ran into

This is my first hackathon and I did not have as much programming knowledge and experience as my fellow mates. I initially started the hackathon in a group of 4 people. But the main reason for me to come to HTN was to learn and enjoy what I was doing. Hence, being in my previous team did not give me the chance to learn and unleash my full potential, so I decided to build something on my own and my team members were very understanding of it. Building everything on your own and having on yourself to make decisions about what should and should not be done was pretty tedious and challenging.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud of the fact that I did not give up. Despite my project being simple and relatively easy to build, I was able to finish my project all by myself.

What I learned

I learnt how to believe in yourself and just enjoy what youre learning. But most importantly, I learnt basics of hardware through workshops and I learnt how to use firebase and all of its applications. I also learned some html.