The Circular Network

Inspiration

CIC (Circular Innovation Council) ensures that businesses operate in a circular way and connect with the right partners. However, struggles with member retention limit the organization’s growth and, consequently, its global impact. We envisioned a centralized platform to incentivize members to remain part of CIC by easing collaboration with a product exclusively available to CIC members. Thus, CIC’s benefits are easier to reap, and losing membership also means losing access to the ecosystem and the connections it provides.

What it does

The Circular Network is a platform for members of CIC. Members get access to a Dashboard with their company profile, their own listings (resources, events, collaborations, knowledge sessions), and requests for services they seek. A Directory allows them to browse other members by industry and service, and the Recommended Listings page uses Gemini API to suggest listings that changes based on a member’s requests. Membership duration drives loyalty tiers. The app surfaces recommendations and context so members can discover and collaborate more easily.

How we built it

We built a full-stack app with a React/TypeScript frontend and a Node/Express backend. The frontend pulls company and listing data through a centralized API service, then displays it with search, filtering, and sorting for better discovery. We iterated in VS Code and focused on clean UI, reliable data flow, and strong loading/error handling.

Challenges we ran into

To make the platform feel realistic, we scraped the CIC member directory for company data. A major challenge was inconsistency across member websites—some had detailed, structured information while others had limited or unclear content. This made it difficult to reliably generate standardized descriptions and other metadata, and required extra cleaning and validation to keep listings accurate and consistent.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully collecting and integrating CIC member data, building a solid full-stack pipeline from backend data to frontend listings, and creating a user-friendly browsing experience with search, filtering, and sorting. We’re also proud that we handled inconsistent real-world website data and still produced clean, usable company profiles.

What we learned

We learned how challenging real-world data can be, especially when scraping from inconsistent websites, and how important data cleaning and validation are for quality results. We also gained experience designing a cleaner full-stack architecture by separating frontend UI logic from backend data handling through API services. Most importantly, we learned to iterate quickly—shipping features, testing with real data, and refining both usability and reliability as we built.

What's next for The Circular Network

Richer recommendations: Use more signals (e.g. industries of interest, past engagement) and maybe “recommended companies” as well as listings. Moving the Gemini call to the backend (e.g. Firebase Cloud Functions) so the API key isn’t in the frontend and we can add rate limiting and logging. Notifications or digests when new listings match a member’s requests. Stronger search and filters on the Directory and Listings (e.g. by industry, category, tier). Analytics for admins (e.g. which listings get the most recommendations, which industries are most active).