SBS

Inspiration

We came together to form this project based on how the pandemic affected our surroundings and businesses, particularly small businesses. We saw how these small businesses suffered to reach their targeted audience due to being overshadowed by larger businesses. Our goal is to help and support local small businesses and connect them to their communities with a communicative platform.

What it does

This app was designed for both business owners and consumers. Users are able to find local businesses based on their interests and earn rewards with Karma (our app's currency) by purchasing goods and services. Business owners are able to create a business account and have better acces to reach their target audience. The app's pupose is to help small businesses connect with consumers and grow.

How we built it

First, we divided tasks based on our strengths and weaknesses (language skills. organizing skills, etc). After this we implimented the ideology regarding the reality of the completion of the project and what is expected of us with time in mind; this lead us to prioritisize tasks in an efficient manner while building a strong working team. Then we created flow charts and started throwing in ideas, we also thought about the pros and cons within these ideas which allowed for a more critical thinking enviroment. We selected flutter do to the ease of accesibility and the fact it can be used in many OS.

Challenges we ran into

Due to different time zones we felt there was a small impediment in that sense, however, we coordinated it well by having two members being in the PST work together during the day while the other two members that are in the CST and IST work together; everyone came together via zoom at an agreeable time. There were various problems we had to tackle, however, with the given time we had a hard time deciding on one. Do to our limited time and different skills in particular languages, we struggled to try to implement features to our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to come up with various ideas and make good progress with the short amount of time we were given. Unlike other platforms like Instagram's market place, our app allows for small business recognition and promotion without being overlooked due to larger companies; another perk is that this can be achieved without having to pay a fee.

What we learned

We came together to discuss what we learned about during this event and agreed that it brought us to learn about oursleves by seeing to what extent we were willing to comit and finish a task. We also learned about some weaknesses in our level of language mastery and became aware of our skills in comparison to our teamates. We all came here for the experience, and just like we heard from previous hack candidates, this journey is a reward all by itself. HackMerced also brought us to value ourselves and our team as everyone (coming from different cultures) was different and brought their own talent and skills to create a great project.

What's next for SBS

We would start hosting events more for people to get a better idea of SBS and get help from sponsers who want to help the community as well. With more time we will create chat features and allow business owners to interact with consumers prior to their visit. With our ambition, and resources we are confident in improving SBS like we improved ourselves with HackMerced.

Built With

• flutter
• google-cloud
• mysql
• rest-api