MentorMe

MentorMe Logo!
home page
about page
sign up page
login page
exisiting offers page
post new request
New Postman workspaces stuff we learnt!

💡 Inspiration

Despite the growing popularity of small business ownership, especially with many of our friends starting their own small business selling art and crafts, many people are still intimidated by the prospect of getting started from scratch. We want to make getting started more accessible, and provide structured resources for more advanced small business owners who want to take their projects to the next level.

Our project is a platform to help budding entrepreneurs get started with their very own small business. These budding entrepreneurs can request help from veteran business owners to show them the ropes of running a startup and even find paid mentors for long term business guidance. We also understand that the mentor's time is valuable, so we have the "payment" option in the request to allow mentors to be compensated for their time.

We took inspiration from a telegram group at our school where students can find tutors to teach them difficult concepts for various coursework. We wanted a similar service to be available to small business owners.

🔍 What it does

One stop website for budding entrepreneurs to get know-hows from experts. Main function to connect mentees and mentors based on small business skills needed. In our examples, we showed how small art businesses can request for advice and help with their setup, manufacturing of products, marketing, social media outreach and so on. This is from what we heard from our friends who run their own small art businesses on Instagram.

Secure login
- Require both email and password to be able to login.
Request
- Users can publish a request to ask for help on particular topics. Users can also view all requests that they post.
Respond
- Users can respond to requests to advertise themselves as available to help with requests. Users can also view all responses that they posted.
Update profile
- Users can update their profile information, such as their username, description, and experiences

🔧 How we built it

We first designed the database schema for MongoDB Atlas, figuring out how we wanted to store our data and organize them into collections for our use case.

The backend was then coded with python Flask, using pymongo and bcrypt for password encryption. MongoDB Atlas documentation was helpful with this step, and we managed to write our backend API. We learnt about Postman workspaces, where we could test out all our endpoints and share the requests formats with each other, which greatly improved our workflow.

We initially wanted to host the backend on python anywhere, but was blocked by the paywall. We then faced other issues trying to run both backend and frontend on localhost for testing (cough cors cough)

We then considered what frontend framework we wanted to use, and discovered Svelte. We built the requests and offers pages to display information from MongoDB, where we had to learn Axios to communicate with our Flask backend.

Svelte, Axios, Flask, Postman, MongoDB Atlas

🏃‍♂️ Challenges we ran into

Brainstorming ideas took a while due to a prior lack of sufficient knowledge about small businesses and local groups. We had to consult websites for ideas on possible challenges.
It was our first time being exposed to Svelte and Axios. For Siew Wen, it was also her first time using Flask, Postman, and MongoDB Atlas.
- This project was a more complex use case for Flask, Postman and MongoDB Atlas than we had experience with, as such there was a lot of searching for the desired functions.
Implementation of all desired features. Due to time constraints and an insufficient understanding of the applications, we had to simplify some features and UI designs.
Due to the applications being new to us, especially Svelte, we were stuck for hours at points in the code due to errors and difficulty in debugging.
[Siew Wen] Return after not hacking for 10 months. It was hard to allocate sufficient time to hack-finish, and had to get a lot of help from my hacking teammate.

🏅 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Made a website that works.
It was our first time trying Svelte, Axios, Postman, and MongoDB Atlas, but we managed to make something that works and looks decent.
We are very satisfied that we were able to implement both frontend and backend with only two people in our team and in less than 48 hours.

🧠 What we learned

How to connect MongoDB Atlas to Flask backend
How to create and organize shared workspaces in Postman to test API endpoints
How to use Svelte
How to use Axios (with Svelte)
- Had a lot of issues understanding Axios at first, kept getting stuck on 400 errors TwT

⏭️ What's next for MentorMe

We would like to improve the UI and UX
- Ability to like people profile
- Ability to favorite a request
- Search bar to search for users with particular keywords
- Explore page that enable one to discover and connect with people with similar preferences
- Direct message that allows for more efficient communication between parties
- Greater security for user information, especially passwords