ReLove: Small Businesses at Your Service

COVID-19 forced ⅓ of small businesses to close their doors. This is why we made ReLove: a digital platform that helps businesses who lost their stores continue to grow customer relationships.

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Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced ⅓ of the nation’s small businesses to close their doors. “⅓” It’s easy to throw out a statistic, but to one of our teammates, ⅓ meant watching her local tailor of 30 years pack up her livelihood into her home, with no clear path forward. We made ReLove for these small businesses and the humans behind them. We’re helping them continue to connect with customers and grow their relationships. ReLove allows businesses to overcome store closure and keep thriving against all odds.

What it does

After a business closes their physical storefront, they can turn to ReLove. Businesses register with our platform and set up their profile with their contact information, the city zones they serve, and information about the services they provide. On the flipside, users can search for a service that they need, browse from local providers, and book services–all directly from our app. We also feature community stories that spotlight small businesses and the rich, human stories behind them.

So, here’s what we bring to the table: Exposure and ease of access to businesses that would otherwise be invisible and near-impossible for customers to reach.

How we built it

ReLove is the product of a thoughtful, challenging, and exciting 36 hours of teamwork. First we held a session to get to know each other, as well as our strengths and interests, a little better. In this session we ideated by each presenting an idea for a project, and we discussed the potential features and feasibility of each. Once we all reached consensus to take on the challenge of helping small businesses facing closure in a social impact project, we discussed and defined the current problems businesses face. We brainstormed the features we wanted to include and defined the scope of our app.

We found a City of Los Angeles database for Business Closures, and created our own database to connect to the project based off of this real-world database. We identified key information we needed to collect from businesses using our application, including name, contact information, location, type of service, as well as user-generated information such as ratings and number of services booked. This would help the future users determine which businesses to select.

We created and iterated on wireframes for these features in Figma, including: login and sign in, user profile creation and onboarding, home page, keyword search, and service booking.

Utilizing Android Studio, we developed an MVP of our application and connected our database.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge that we initially ran into was defining the scope of the project. There’s a lot of businesses out there, and a lot of platforms made to serve them (think: Etsy, Yelp, etc.) We differentiated our platform from competitors by focusing on developing features that could best help small businesses that face the biggest challenges from not having a physical space. As a result, we emphasized services rather than products, local zones, and the human aspect behind these businesses. As we continued working on the project, another challenge that we faced was the gap between wanting to be very innovative in our app design and features versus the feasibility of developing them within the time constraints. Especially because there was limited knowledge of Android mobile development within the team, we had to communicate early and often about our expectations of each other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we accomplished a lot by moving through the design and development process as a team. We are proud of our quick team formation and ability to recognize the strengths of each of our team members. This realization came early on and paved the path for a successful collaboration that leveraged everyone’s unique strengths in app development, UX/UI design, feature ideation, and storytelling to the fullest potential. Moreover, we were able to empathize with the small business owner by using a team member’s personal anecdote as a jumping off point to grasp their needs. What features might these business owners need to pitch their services digitally? How can we give them exposure while maintaining a sense of security online? To answer such questions, we sourced real data from LA’s “All Closed Businesses” Database and implemented genuine case studies in our work. The real world implications of our product are multitudinous, especially in the midst of the pandemic. By wireframing screens based on these real user stories, we were able to design a functional prototype in Figma and develop a MVP of our mobile app.

What we learned

One major takeaway for our team from ReLove is learning about business needs, and learning how to balance serving those needs with our excitement for creating a fun, innovative product. We found that there was no shortage of intriguing potential features to explore, but learned that it is important to keep in mind the audience that our app is serving. Users of ReLove are most likely to be longtime business owners and older individuals. In order for them to effectively use ReLove, we strategically simplified some features to better serve them while creating a fun, clean app. As a result, we also learned that there is a continuous push and pull between the ideation, design, and development phases of the project–and between team members as well. Our experience was not a linear process, but rather cyclical and self-reflective as we better understood the business problem and our solution.

What's next for ReLove: Small Businesses at Your Service

This version of ReLove is only the start. One clear direction in which we can grow is by expanding our functionality to further increase contact between the business and consumer, for example, by implementing a chat feature where users can directly contact the business on our platform. A cutting-edge application of ReLove would be to incorporate Web 3 and AR/VR technologies to make the experience even more immersive. ReLove could essentially become an online metaverse with a real-life community of businesses, and AR/VR technology could be used to make this community (a “main street” of sorts) an interactive experience.

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