MicroMingle

Inspiration

As college students living paycheck to paycheck, we find it very difficult to save up money that can go to investing. Even if we had money saved up, we have no time to conduct research on the right companies to invest in and finding companies that aren't larger corporations (i.e. Amazon, Tesla, Walmart) is harder. Therefore, having an app that will streamline the process for us will greatly benefit students like us.

What it does

Our app will be tailored to every user's needs. The user will login/signup through Plaid to connect their banking information. They then may choose a recommended amount to invest, and once they're ready, they will be given a list of Small Cap Companies in the form of cards to invest in. If the user is interested in investing in the company, they will swipe right on their given card and it will be added to a list of companies that they are interested in investing in. If not, they will swipe left and discard that company.

How we built it

We aimed to build a full-stack web app to solve our problem. For the frontend, we used React.js and Framer Motion while using Python and Flask for our backend, and MongoDB to store our database of companies with Plaid API to securely gain access to the user's transaction history.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges when completing this project including button implemnetation. This problem made it harder to incorporate multiple sites on our website and also broke the flow of the website. Along with that, we tried to use Plaid API, and while this worked and we were able to generate data from it, connecting it to the frontend proved to be much harder. We had some minor problems with the MongoDB to generate the data and use it, but we resolved that through debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our Tinder-esque card swiping feature for determining whether or not a user would be interested in investing in a company. Each of us also did our own fair share of both frontend and backend, exposing everyone to familiar and new technologies and challenges along with it. We are proud to have improved our critical thinking and development skills.

What we learned

We learned about handling challenges in project development, including button implementation, integrating external APIs like Plaid, React, browser routes, and working with databases like MongoDB. We also gained insight into troubleshooting complex issues, debugging, and optimizing both frontend and backend workflows to create a seamless user experience.

What's next for MicroMingle

We would next want to work out bugs within Plaid, authenticating users when they log in and having them enter a username and password. Another implementation would be to take them to the correct user dashboard page depending on whether they were a person looking to invest or a company looking to get invested in.