Staple Studio Startups

Inspiration

Our original inspiration was to improve the financial literacy of small startups, especially since many 'mom-and-pop' startups don't gain enough traction to become profitable, yet are unable to guide themselves towards better opportunities. After, we realized that Staples Studios offices have great potential to help these startups succeed given that most of there clientele are like-minded businesspeople. However, people who rent a Staples Studio office typically focus on their own work rather than collaborate with others.

What it does

Our project incorporates some of Staple's previous services, including: Staples Studios, B2B analytical content, and various activities aimed to help startups grow (e.g. lessons on how to set up an e-commerce site).

Similar to crowdfunding, this project is a platform where startups can feature their products in any Staples Studio office, which invites discussion around the startups. Businesspeople who frequent Staples Studio offices have the opportunity to find inspiration from the new ideas in front of them, as well as spot enticing business partnerships without too much effort. Staples Studio clientele can also leave reviews and comments on the exhibits before them, which, after being aggregated and analyzed by our platform, will help startups drive in the right direction.

The goal of our project is to make Staples Studios a perfect incubator for inspiration, genius ideas, and passionate startups. Since startups benefit from having more engagement around their products, and Staples benefits by inviting clients to rent office space, this solution provides a win-win by bringing the right people together.

How we built it

This project consists of a frontend, a backend, and a database. The frontend made with React, and the backend is made with Express. The database is made with MongoDB using Mongoose.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into conflicting dependencies that caused it to properly compile on one machine, but fail to build on another. We figured out that separating the backend and frontend into different repositories resolved the issue by isolating the conflicting dependencies.

We also had trouble submitting to Devpost -- we wrote this segment three times, after forgetting to save once and losing internet on the second. This time, the third time, we will save this document into a Google Doc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our database, which was built on MongoDB using Mongoose. Since it was our first time with MongoDB Atlas, we were happy we could correctly apply the database. We are also proud of our backend, as we found using Postman to be very helpful in organizing our project. It is a shame only 3 of our total members could enjoy the endpoints we created, due to free trial restrictions.

What we learned

We learned that backend development is so much more different than frontend. For future hackathons, we are looking into swapping our roles for us all to experience everything,