Inspiration
Covid has hit minority-owned small businesses especially hard, including Asian-American businesses. According to the SBA, the number of Asian-owned small businesses has declined by 37%. Why? These businesses lost their customers, and many of them didn't know how to access government resources designed to help them. Most of these businesses rely solely on face-to-face interaction for marketing and customer acquisition. Quite often, they do not even have a website or social media presence, tools that could help them stay in front of their customers in the age of social distancing. Our team's brief survey found that less than 50% of Asian-American hair salons have a web presence. In addition, these businesses lack the digital skills needed to find government resources designed to support them. We plan to address this Digital Gap helping Asian-American businesses with customer outreach and access to services.
What it does
Altruist is a one-stop-shop designed to help Asian-American small businesses close the Digital Gap by offering tools for online customer outreach and by offering industry-specific, timely, and multi-lingual guides to government resources and services. Customer Outreach: Altruist enables business owners to easily build and maintain an attractive website for their small businesses using a library of templates built specifically for different verticals. The process to build a website requires no technical expertise (only point and click), and vertical-specific templates eliminate the design challenge. The website even offers capabilities such as online booking (we have built a website with online booking capabilities for a small nail spa). The same interface allows business owners to easily modify the website when needed. Additionally, a social media module allows businesses to create social media posts and promote them on different channels. government resources and services Altruist offers an up-to-date repository targeted to specific verticals, where business owners can find relevant government regulations and resources in their own language. Businesses can find answers to questions such as the latest opening rules under Covid or eligibility requirements for SBA loans here.
How we built it
Product Design: Once we identified the problem, we interviewed small business owners to ensure our proposed solution would be useful and affordable.
Technology: We built our system using C#, HTML, Sass, Javascript, Typescript and CSS. We created a machine learning model using C# and our booking system was created using the rest of the languages mentioned above. The landing page was created using Wix.
Challenges we ran into
Our first and most important challenge was to correctly diagnose the problem. The initial idea, presented by Figure (a point of sale system), was to build a full-fledged online booking system. However, after multiple rounds of interviews, we realized that these businesses often lack even a basic website or the skills to maintain a website. Furthermore, the nature of their services quite often requires extensive exception-handling (e.g. customers asking for additional services at the last minute) that needs human interaction. So the addition of a full-fledged booking system would only cause confusion and add to their burden. During our interviews, we also noticed two more data points: 1- These business owners do not effectively use social media for customer outreach, so even when they offer Covid-compliant services, they are unable to inform their regular customers and potential new ones. 2- The business owners have a hard time keeping up with the changing Covid regulations or finding which government resources can help them.
So we decided to pivot from an online booking system and instead address factors that directly determine the survival and growth of these businesses. Specifically, we decided to build a system that addresses the Digital Gap to improve customer outreach.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A diverse and truly global team, spread across five time-zones, worked together to develop real solutions for Asian American Owned small businesses.
What we learned
Advanced Technology is often not the solution. Small Asian-American owned businesses that face the challenge of day-to-day survival are often too busy to learn about and use advanced technologies. The solution instead needs to focus on ease-of-use.
What's next for Altruist's
We would like to partner with government or non-profit programs that focus on small businesses to secure seed-funding. To begin with, we will target San Francisco and San Jose. Our goal is to enable San Francisco Mayor, London Breed, to announce that as of Dec. 31, 2021 all San Francisco hair salons, nail spas, restaurants, and dry cleaning shops are online.
Our website: Website: https://www.yashgadhade.com/
Website for QueenNails (our assigned business): https://ascentapphackathon.herokuapp.com/home
Reference : https://github.com/alievk/avatarify-python#driving-your-avatar
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