SmallTalk

Inspiration

We live and go to school in Hoboken, NJ which is a hub of small businesses. Especially after the pandemic, we saw many of these businesses struggle to get new customers and achieve great things. We wanted to make it easier for small businesses to connect both within their community and reach out to new people that they never would have connected with otherwise to help both businesses prosper and reach new heights!

What it does

Small Talk allows small businesses to directly connect with other small businesses. Company owners first create a profile for their company explaining what they do and what they hope to get out of a connect, such as a joint promotion or co-hosting a local community event. Then they can put in filters such as what their budget is, if the event would be online or in-person, and what their businesses category is- (food, services, consumer, health...). Small Talk promotes diversity and inclusivity by including tags to show women, minority, and LGBTQ+ owned businesses. After this is completed, companies will receiving connection recommendations. Users can either ignore the option, save it for later, or notify the potential connection that they would like to work together! Small Talk aims to integrate Twilio so the connection will receive a SMS message indicating what company wants to work with them and what the nature of the collaboration would be.

How we built it

We coded Small Talk in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The database was built in Cloud Firestore.

Challenges we ran into

Originally we wanted to code in android studio, but we were struggling to find up-to-date documentation relevant to our project and also struggled with finding a way for multiple people to work on a single code. We had issues integrating Twilio because we were using Live Share on Visual Studio and one person was trying to run a Parse Server while someone else was locally running the website, so we were not able to debug and achieve full functionality with the test messages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The database was a large project that we started to tackle later into the weekend then we would have liked. Despite this, the database is connected with our front-end and is collecting the user inputs. Overall, we are also just happy with the concept because we feel like if we keep working on this and really dedicate our time, we can create something that could help so many small businesses come together.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working together as a team, both in terms of technical tools and soft-skills. It took us a bit of time to find our roles in the group and see who would work on what part of the project, but by then end we found our groove. Additionally, we now have a better understanding on the software tools that we can utilize to make team collaboration on the coding easier.

What's next for SmallTalk

We definitely need to spend more time developing the front end to create an even more frictionless user experience. Once we are happy with the software, we would want to start by presenting the service to small businesses in Hoboken since it is the perfect target market and the inspiration for it all!

Built With

• cloud-firestore
• css
• html
• javascript
• visual-studio