Inspiration
From the prompt, we took to the internet and our personal lives to research what are common struggles small businesses and influencers have. One persistent problem we discovered was engagement. According to Hubspot, “70% of brand managers say that building an audience is more valuable than direct sales”. Additionally, one of our teammates is friends with an Instagram influencer who commented on how difficult it can be individually reaching out to businesses and brands, especially if there’s no interest. To solve this issue, our team wanted to create a space where small businesses and influencers can go for collaborations. Both parties come into the website with the same intentions to connect with each other in an efficient way.
What it does
Our product was meant to function similarly to Tinder. It would connect businesses and influencers to each other to provide an easy platform for collaborations. Influencers would get paid extra money, and businesses would garner more attention. Businesses and influencers would create accounts on the platform and fill out a form in which they described their business/social media presence by applying tags to themself (such as fitness-focused, verified, family-owned, etc). Once these tags were applied, the product would match the businesses to influencers. Businesses can swipe left or right on an influencer, and if an influencer also swiped right on a business, they would be put into a chatroom where they could talk about a collaboration and share contact info.
How we built it
Our website initially used Hugo, a modern web based framework written in GO that creates simple and scalable solutions. However we later switched to Vanilla Javascript after facing challenges with the Hugo implementation. We used tools such as Replit.com and GitHub to collaborate and document code changes. The design of our website was made in CSS and HTML while our filtering algorithm was made in JS. The databases for our businesses and influencers were static and stored in JSON files. Finally, we used Github Pages to deploy our website.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was definitely using Hugo. While Hugo is an amazingly powerful site generator, we had very little experience with Hugo and really struggled with using it. Eventually, we were forced to abandon our Hugo website halfway through and transition to vanilla JS.
Another challenge was using Javascript to make our filtering algorithm. All of us were rusty with javascript, so making such a complex function was not easy for us. Coming from Java backgrounds, which have overloaded method declarations, we struggled to design a data structure which could help us filter across user characteristics.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were very proud of our ability to learn/polish our CSS, Javascript, HTML skills. We were also very proud of our Hugo site and how we were able to use Github pages to host our very own website.
What we learned
We learned the importance of being realistic with our project vision. Our project was ambitious, and we were not suitably equipped to handle a project of such a large size. We should have considered things like time constraints and technical ability more carefully. We also learned about the challenge of having to create a project that everyone could contribute to. Our skill sets were very diverse, and as such we had few common areas. It was a struggle to be able to apply our skills on the same project.
What's next for Quik Konnect
If we had more time on this project, we would have liked to fully finish it and realize the potential the app/website could have had. Our finished project would have a way to make accounts, add tags to your profile to identify your business/profile, and our algorithm would match you with influencers/businesses that would make sense for you to collaborate with. We feel that if our idea could have reached its full potential, it could’ve helped struggling businesses and influencers all around the country.
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