supportHer

Join our small business community empowering women and get help starting your small business at a successful location today!

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Inspiration

We know that many women and minorities struggle to start their own businesses. However, ever since COVID hit, a boom of new small businesses has started. Many women and minorities have come up with so many new and creative ideas such as selling scented candles, offering finance coaching, and many more! As a result, we wanted to create a community where anyone can connect with others to share their small business idea and help start theirs in the right location for them based on collected data of current businesses.

What it does

supportHER is a website that allows women to share their ideas and experiences on their own small businesses to help other women get inspiration. Its features include a forum for people to look at examples and then add their own business to the list, a short form asking what kind of business and location the user is trying to start, and then providing data from AI machine learning to help determine successful locations to start their businesses; a nearby page that uses the user’s location (with permission) to find small businesses within 25 miles away.

How we built it

We used HTML, js, and CSS to develop our webpage on repl.it. There were 3 main parts of this project: the forum, the data, and the nearby businesses. For the forum, we made it using a table where each row described a business. Information such as the name, image, description, and link to support was added for each business. Finally, the user could input information in text boxes to add to the table. We wanted to build a community of people supporting small businesses. For the AI part of the project, we used pandas python data analysis on Google Colab to plot out the data sorted from the most popular locations to the least popular locations of all the top successful businesses. Therefore, depending on what you are looking for, you could choose to have your small business to be in the area of less competition, or you could start your business in the middle of New York City to become the hidden gem people discover. For the nearby locations aspect, we used a geolocation API to get the user’s current location (latitude and longitude) and compare it to the latitude and longitude of each element in a database of women-owned businesses. We created an algorithm to calculate the distance between the two points and programmed our website to only show locations that are within 25 miles of the user’s location for convenience. This feature is a useful tool to raise awareness around local businesses owned by women and encourage users to support these businesses.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges such as finding a good dataset to predict the best location to start a small business using KNN Classifiers as machine learning along with determining the accuracy of our model. Since we are not too familiar with Javascript, we encountered many issues with the formatting of tables and increasing the textbox size for the user inputs. We also had trouble putting in pictures of our own data because they did not have image addresses, but we were able to upload them at the end. It was extremely difficult to find a comprehensive database of businesses owned by women, so we used a sample dataset for the purposes of this demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we are proud of as a team is building our own webpage from scratch. We were able to design the webpage, using CSS, and customize it to what we wanted. We are also proud of making use of Google Colab and using the Pandas data analysis because it is something new we just learned about this year.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web design using Javascript and HTML, such as background color, pages, including a small survey, and more. But most importantly, as a team, we learned to communicate and check-in frequently. We also learned a lot from the mentors who helped us along the way!

What's next for supportHER

Next time, we would like to learn more about the AI model training to be able to predict the exact locations that would best meet the needs of our users. Rather than generating a plot graph to let users determine the best business location for them, we would love to be able to generate specific locations for them along with generating the accuracy of our suggestions based on their needs. Similarly, there are also a few issues with making the site user-friendly. When we improve our knowledge with databases, we want to connect the forum to one so that it is constantly saving. We could expand the database of women owned businesses in the location finder by working with local organizations to advertise this opportunity. Another cool idea would be to be able to add a chat function where people can talk and support each other.

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