About the Project
The Problem
Small and medium-sized businesses are everywhere, but their digital presence often doesn't reflect their real-world identity.
A business may have a physical location, loyal customers, products, services, and years of experience — yet there is often no simple, standardized way to represent who they are, what they offer, and why they should be trusted.
We wanted to solve that.
The inspiration behind Shinakht came from a simple observation: SMEs lack a trusted digital identity, and there has never been a genuinely simple way for them to create one.
Our Solution
Shinakht — meaning identity — is our attempt to create a digital passport for SMEs.
Instead of asking a business to build and maintain a complicated website or rely on scattered social-media profiles, Shinakht gives it a structured digital identity that can be accessed through a simple QR code.
A customer can scan the QR code and immediately access the business's digital profile, helping bridge the gap between the physical business and its digital identity.
Our long-term vision goes beyond simply creating business profiles. We want Shinakht to evolve into a platform that can help SMEs:
- Establish a trusted digital identity
- Present their products and services
- Make their business information easily accessible
- Build credibility with customers
- Share their identity through a portable QR-based passport
- Use AI to turn existing business information into structured digital data
How We Built It
We built Shinakht as a modern full-stack application.
The frontend provides the interface through which businesses can create and manage their digital identity. The backend handles business data and application logic, while Supabase provides the underlying data infrastructure.
One of the most interesting parts of the project was incorporating AI-powered vision capabilities. Rather than requiring business owners to manually enter every piece of information, we explored how visual information could be used to extract useful business data and accelerate the creation of a digital profile.
The final identity can then be represented through a QR code, making the digital passport accessible from the physical world.
At a high level, the flow is:
Physical Business → Business Information → AI/Data Processing → Digital Passport → QR Code → Customer
What We Learned
Building Shinakht taught us that creating an AI-powered product is not simply about connecting an application to an AI model.
The quality of the final product depends heavily on the quality and reliability of the data going into the system.
We learned how to combine:
- Full-stack web development
- REST APIs
- Database design
- AI-powered vision
- Structured data extraction
- QR-based digital experiences
- Authentication and application state
- Frontend/backend integration
More importantly, we learned to think about AI as part of a larger system rather than as an isolated feature.
The Biggest Challenge
Our biggest challenge was getting accurate business data.
Real-world business information is messy. Images can be unclear, information can be incomplete, and AI-generated results are not guaranteed to be correct.
This forced us to think beyond simply asking an AI model to "extract the information."
We had to consider how information should be structured, how extracted data should be validated, and how the system could produce something useful even when the original input was imperfect.
This was one of the most valuable lessons from building Shinakht: an AI system is only as useful as the reliability of the information it produces.
What's Next?
Shinakht is still the beginning of a much larger idea.
Our vision is to build a trusted digital identity layer for SMEs — one that is simple enough for a small business to use, but powerful enough to become its gateway to the digital economy.
We want Shinakht to eventually become more than a digital profile.
We want it to become an identity, discovery, verification, and trust layer for small businesses.
Every business deserves to be recognized. Shinakht is our attempt to give them an identity.
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