Local First

The onus is on business owners to market themselves, but many don’t have the know-how to do this effectively, especially in a digital world. We wanted to address this need by creating a solution to help businesses create partnerships to amplify their marketing efforts, and also help their customers engage with those local partnerships.

Local First helps small local businesses establish partnerships and work together to create promotions that are both fun for the community and boost their brand awareness and customer engagement. Businesses can also easily leverage these partnerships in their social media channels to get the word out.

We designed local first in Figma and also created a working product in Atom text editor using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Our main challenge was to ensure that we are putting the business needs first while still creating incentives for customers to engage with our product. We wanted to make sure our solution was attractive for both businesses and their customers.

This being our first hackathon, we enjoyed the process of quick ideation, iteration, and design. We also enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with each other and discover our strengths.

The most educational part of this experience was having the opportunity to gather feedback from our hackathon mentor, get comfortable articulating our ideas, and digging into feedback.

I think we all learned a lot from designing Local First and hope to one day revisit this idea.