Small World

Introduction
Our Mission
Our Mission
Thank you DubHacks

Our Inspiration & What It Does

After seeing the first-hand financial impact impact of COVID on local-owned business in Seattle, we decided to create Small World as a solution for small businesses (especially women and minority-led businesses) to promote themselves on a open and accessible app platform. Our app allows our users to exclusively browse through locally owned businesses and interact directly with business owners to learn more about their services. Supporting small businesses in Washington today is essential to help grow the local community one step at a time.

How We Built It

We built the app using Google Cloud's AppSheet. We scraped data from the WA State Office of Minority and Women Business Enterprise and other data sources and built a data pipeline where our app feeded new data from our data back-end. Our front-end team designed the interface on AppSheet that would be where user's interact and learn about each business service.

Challenges

We had to scope our what type of data we wanted to gather and how to automate the data pipeline in the database. We also learned about how to use AppSheet as our app development platform to build the POC.

Accomplishments

We are proud to represent a solution for small businesses succeeding in hard times especially in COVID-19 world. We hope to continue building new features that can be used by our customers and enable the new connections and diverse experiences with our customers and business owners in our "small world" to grow in these difficult times.

ORIGINALITY

Currently an easy gateway for small businesses to promote themselves is currently a challenge because Google Maps selectively outlines only "larger" and long existing franchises on maps. Even within social media like Instagram, it is rare for a small business owner to have the bandwidth to maintain an active media presence. Likewise, food delivery apps often favor large companies because of its existing customer base and fails to recognize the potential of small businesses who may not have enough funds to market themselves on these apps (UberEats, GrubHub).

TECHNOLOGY

With our research in mind, we jumped to think about what types of platforms we can easily build a functional app that will not only allow for fast feedback between customers and business owners - mobile apps. The challenge we encountered was weighing in the time it would take to ramp up on a new mobile app development technology like Swift versus not re-inventing the wheel and jump straight into cloud-based platforms like Google Cloud's AppSheet to build an app with our data. In our technological process, we utilized data mining and data wrangling with Google Cloud services to build a rigorous database of small owners and identified our data schema that would be piped into our app's UI.

DESIGN

Putting our hats on to think for our app users and potential business owners who would be interested in joining our platform, we implemented features like "Join Our Platform" that would populate a form that gave business owners a fast way to join our platform. Likewise, we focused on designing an inclusive and accessible platform that highlighted soft colors and inclusive language.

GOALS & CONCLUSION

Throughout the hackathon, we focused and completed on our MVP: to deploy an end-to-end app hosted through Google Cloud. Currently the app is directly offered to clients with email authentication for security reason, hence we provide video demonstration of our app and screenshot/gifs that walk through our current features. Our functional prototype will be scaled up to meet the needs of more customers, as we plan our marketing strategy and how we can continue build on new features (ML profile personalization, geolocation) to craft the perfect experience for our diverse customers.

THANK YOU DUBHACKS

Thank you DubHacks team, sponsors and judges for the rewarding opportunity to take part in a unique experience. We are a team of aspiring engineers and first-timers to DubHacks that are thankful for the resources, inspiration, and direction that you have provided us this past weekend. We learned from and mentored each other, built new connections with rising technologies within Google Cloud, dived into understanding the needs of our community and those who have been marginalized by COVID-19, and successfully deployed our first app to directly support the women & minority-led businesses in Seattle and help them flourish in the competitive marketplace. All of this would have impossible without the push of inspiration and resources from an incredible DubHacks team. Thank you!

~Elizabeth, Andrew, Yan, Terry