ToolMatching

Inspiration

The current situation reveals how many companies are still not taking advantage of the many digital tools that are currently on the market. Honestly, we can't blame them! It's hard to get an overview of what is available. Be it Slack or Zoom for communication or Trello and monday.com for task management. Especially for those businesses who are new to this way of working, it's hard to decide what best fits their needs.

How ToolMatching solves the problem

ToolMatching is a simple to use platform where anyone can answer a set of short questions to state which problems they would like to solve with a digital tool. Immediately, our platform presents you with a list of tools that fit your needs to start right away.

How we built it

48h ago, we started with the simple idea of providing anyone with just the right tools for this crisis and the challenge of digital and remote work. Now, we have a working prototype allowing our users to look for tools in the first couple of categories. The process of building ToolMatching started with the design of our website. We used Adobe XD for this task to be able to share the current status with the rest of the team at all times. The next step in creating ToolMatching was to build the website itself. By dividing this into Front- and Back-end, we were able to quickly create a first static version in HTML / CSS and later on added a Python Back-end using Flask as a framework. All of this is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform, allowing for easy scalability. To get the best suggestions for our users, we started gathering detailed information about the most common tools available in the categories of communication, task management, and file sharing.

Our tech stack:

HTML / CSS
Python
Flask
Node.js
Gulp
GCP

Impact now and in the future

Sometimes, education about existing solutions is the best way to help. Tools for almost any scenario exist, and more are coming. Still, it's simply too overwhelming to find the right one. While such tools can hugely contribute to how companies and teams keep their businesses running remotely, currently, there is just no time for detailed research. ToolMatching solves this and allows them to focus on keeping their businesses alive. You instead want to have your team work efficiently from home than having to lay them off. While this is especially true during the current pandemic, digitalization, and the usage of digital tools will start growing even faster. A single source of information about productivity tools will support everyone new to this.

What's next for ToolMatching

48h just isn't enough to build a fully functioning platform like this. Hence, we have already planned many improvements, additional features, and upcoming steps for ToolMatching. To only list a few, we are planning on:

Localizing the website to the most common European languages to allow even more small businesses and teams to be able to use it
Building a chatbot to provide users with even better suggestions
Adding "How-to" guides for most tools to get companies started even quicker

Another way to improve our service in the future will be to continually add new categories and tools to our database. This way, we want to ensure that we can suggest the best tools for every single one of our users. All of this is worth nothing, however, if we don't spread the word. So naturally, one of the biggest future challenges will be to get ToolMatching out there and encourage small businesses and teams to give it a try. Sometimes, you have to force people into their happiness.