Find My Competition

Inspiration

Small businesses rely on their communities and their communities rely on them. It is important for small business owners to be able to quickly find out what their community likes and dislikes, and find out what their competition is doing right and wrong. Using this information, small business owners can make decisions about how to improve their business and community. This was the inspiration for me to create Find My Competition.

What it does

Find My Competition is an easy-to-use web application to get insights into your local market. Upon describing your business as you would in google maps (eg "bakeries" or "Chinese food") and entering your latitude and longitude, the app will find a business near you and sort them by the Bayesian average of the rating and number of reviews (an aggregate score that takes into account both). Then it will summarize top reviews of businesses in a succinct, masonry format color-coded by the sentiment of the review. With only a scroll and a glance, you can get an idea of what your competition is doing right and wrong, what your community likes, as well as what they don't like. You can see all this data in one place quickly without combing through yelp or google maps. You can use this data to inform decisions about your business. Additionally, you can view top photos of successful competitors, that way you can know what these establishments look like and think about possible improvements to your business.

How I built it

The app is completely front-end. It uses the google maps API to get the data. The UI was built with react and styled with pure CSS.

Challenges I ran into

Getting the google maps API to work with react was a challenge because there is no official node package for it (it is intended to be used with a simple script tag). Building the UI with pure react and CSS was also a challenge, but a welcome one since it helped me learn CSS fundamentals a lot better. Especially the fully responsive layout. A big challenge was also coming up with the idea.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of / What I learned

I learned how to use the google maps API and got experience with using the Google developer platform. I also got more practice using git. I learned what to do if you want to use a hosted library in a node environment, without npm installing any modules. Furthermore, I got a lot of practice using pure CSS which boosted my fundamentals a lot. I learned CSS flex very well from making the responsive layout. Also, HTML table, which I had not used before.

What's next for Find My Competition

The next step would be to show more than 20 competitors and give more options such as the search radius. I also need to figure out how to use the library loader hook that you need for the google maps API and useEffect hook to automatically load your location data. I could not get this to work within the allotted time for this hackathon, but I am definitely going to try and figure that out. This would allow the app to automatically get your location data. Furthermore, a feature that uses some sort of natural language processing AI in order to summarize and pick keywords and phrases related to your small business out of the reviews and highlight them would be very cool. I also see a backend in the future of this app in order to better manage the API and implement some machine learning features.