Connectica

Inspiration

Over 30 million small businesses in the U.S. employ nearly half of the American private workforce. These small businesses range from catering and clothing shops to jewelry and restoration stores. But owning a small business isn’t always easy. Co-founder Samantha Su’s parents, for example, are in the jewelry retail business. They are unable to financially maintain advertisements in order to compete in Amazon’s big marketplace and have difficulty juggling texts of hundreds of customers over iMessage. In addition to daily competition with bigger companies to attract customers, small business owners have faced tremendous challenges in retaining and contacting customers during the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

What it does

Connectica is an online service app that connects local small businesses with consumers through one-on-one chats. Connectica easily bridges these businesses with their clients even when the clients may not visit the stores on a day-to-day basis. Not only does Connectica help business owners effectively build a loyal customer community, but also its chat function provides customers with personal experiences with the business owners, allowing a stronger and closer relationship to form between them.

How I built it

Connectica is built with Swift and Xcode. We used Cocoapods and based our project on existing Github projects with similar functionalities, then combined, refined, and integrated them into our own app.

Challenges I ran into

While developing, we had challenges with programmatically segueing between view controllers without the storyboard. Additionally, we have to set constraints without being able to visualize what's going on. Merging our chat function with the rest of our code was challenging because we had difficulties making both features of the code compatible with each other. Additionally, it was challenging to create an effective UI design that would be both simple to use and easy to navigate. We also struggled with narrowing the types of small businesses eligible to use our app because we want Connectica's users to access small businesses that may not have greater exposure to new customers otherwise.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of implementing a working chat function that allows businesses and customers to communicate with each other efficiently as well as connecting it to the rest of our backend development into a working app. We are also proud of our start-up design because we believe that it will make a great impact on millions of small businesses throughout the nation.

What I learned

We learned how to successfully combine the chat function code with other aspects of our app to create a useful app for our business. This hackathon also introduced some of our team members to Xcode and more of its features that can be used to create an iOS app.

What's next for Connectica

In the future, we will refine all the key features of Connectica and implement features such as an in-depth business profile page, reward system for users, and referral programs among customers. After making these adjustments, we will publish the first version of Connectica on the App Store in August. We will also make Connectica Android compatible by the end of this year.