Spark Royalty

Inspiration

We have always wanted to create a startup business, but we always lacked funding to create one. Thinking about how to solve that scenario led us to think of the idea behind Spark Royalty.

What it does

It allows entrepreneurs to post their startups and for freelancers to apply to work on those projects, getting paid out in royalties rather than the traditional flat fee.

How we built it

We used Next.js to build our app. We used a MySQL database through PlanetScale and connected it to our app with Prisma. We wrote our api routes with TRPC. We styled our application with Tailwind. We used Clerk for authentication. We deployed it with Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

The two biggest challenges we faced were figuring out the ideal workflow for users and handling two different profile types. Organizing our website in a way that was easy for the user to understand what they were meant to do next was difficult, but we just did our best to map it out before we started implementing. It was also difficult to allow people to sign up as both entrepreneurs and freelancers. Each clerk user could have two different profiles and keeping track of that was difficult. We also had to conditionally render things based on whether you were currently logged in as an entrepreneur or a freelancer. We solved this by storing metadata in the clerk user object.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a full stack application within the time constraints of DubHacks was definitely hard because we were working with technology that we were not super experienced with.

What we learned

One of the main things we learned about today was how to collaborate with Github. We both have a decent amount of experience with Github but only with solo development. So understanding how to keep our code in sync without messing each other up was difficult, but by the end of the hackathon we have gotten pretty good at it.

What's next for Spark Royalty

• We plan on scaling spark royalty by expanding the product to include longer term contracts for freelancers, and venturing into spaces outside of tech, such as creating ways for patent attorneys to be paid out in royalties through our platform.
• We also want to create a trust network for Spark Royalty users where Spark royalty accounts can be reputation and identity verified to establish better relationships with our customers.
• We see potential for spark royalty to exist on the block chain assuming blockchain continues to evolve and grow. If everything is on the blockchain, spark royalty could use smart contracts could be established to automatically pay out money based on revenue, ensuring a trustworthy exchange

Built With

• mysql
• nextjs
• prisma
• react
• tailwind
• typescript