Vendito - SMB's Social Selling by unemployed

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  Chatbot to let SMBs create their microsite in 2 minutes

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  Helping millions of SMBs that don't have access to e-commerce

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Inspiration

By now, I'm sure you've already heard enough COVID-19 stats on how bad is the crisis and how the economy in every market is threatened, that the most vulnerable are the small businesses and up to 24 million people could lose their jobs by the end of the crisis. Considering that in latam, 90 percent of the companies are SMB's and they create 61% of the jobs, we identified a big opportunity to make a huge impact. If they are forced to close, and they can only sell over the phone or online, solution could seem pretty simple right? Well, something you may not know, is that in Mexico only 2% have an online payment method. that leaves us with 4.1 million that need to figure out how keep afloat.

As the COVID-19 crisis develops all over the world, more and more small businesses are forced to close their doors, unemployment is on the rise and could potentially reach 24 million people around the world, their only hope to survive is to sell online or by the phone. Sounds pretty simple right? Well, considering that , the spending capacity has reduced dramatically in just a few weeks, and that's not it..

Other important data: Up to 24 million people can become unemployed due to the COVID-19 Crisis SMB's stand for 61% of employment in Latin América, there are around, 7 out of 10 accept cash as main payment method Only 2% of SMB's in Mexico are doing any kind of e-commerce That's a SOM of 4 million businesses in Mexico alone

What it does

Vendito enables small business digital acceleration by allowing them to recruit the unemployed as micro-influencers selling through the tools they already use: like FB, Whats App end e-mail. It's like door 2 door, a very successful business model for many decades in regions like latam and india, brought to the 2020

How we built it

We were very lucky to find 4 ninja devs from Pakistan, sharing similar pains, and immediately got the idea of 4 crazy serial entrepreneurs with marketing, business and commercial skills from Mexico City.

Just one zoom call was enough to get everybody onboard and excited. The first 4 hours were all about ideation, then we moved forward with defining roles and priorities and each one worked from our side of the world. As soon as we got the first version of the mock up, I posted it on social media and users didn't wait, we0ve got more than 50 registrants in 12 hours.

The last 24 hours we didn't separate from slack, going back and forth with translations, mock ups, chat bots, ideas, tests and checkpoints.

Challenges we ran into

Building the plane on the flight presents huge challenges as we tested different technologies trying to get perfect, seamless user experience, just to come back to the basics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The team is the star in our show, everybody was very professional, owning thir thing and making things happen. Even with the time zones constraints we managed to have a good flow of communication with everybody engaged all the 48 hours

What we learned

We could have defined the scope of the project better, trying not to do a lot during the hackathon, but just focusing on the essential and important pieces considered in the criteria.

What's next for Vendito - Deploy the platform in spanish, and start validating the process with at least 100 businesses and sellers by the end of april.