WOCChat

The login page for the app. Consists of buttons for signing up and a contact us link in case any difficulties arise.
The customer statistics page. The details will be provided by the customers themselves via WhatsApp.
The Search panel for the creator to search through their orders and supply materials.
Menu/dashboard where the user can have full control over her account and manage it efficiently!
Analytics page. All the detailed analytics of the creator's trade would be here.

Inspiration

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to develop an app that would help women, but we weren't sure how until we came across Twilio. That sparked an idea that Twilio would be a great way for seller and consumer interaction. This got us thinking about how women owned businesses struggle significanlty more than other businesses in society, but are still strong and courageous enough to try. We decided we could implement Twilio to help make life a little easier for women of color owned businesses and help their businesses grow.

What it does

An app which uses inputs from customers on Whatsapp to curate helpful and analytical data for woman-owned businesses. Since women are often left alone on their ventures, this app allows them to have more accessibility while managing their e-commerce business stores all merged in a single, comfortable space.

How we built it

We used Twilio, Figma, Flask, and Google Cloud for the project. We used JavaScript to work with Twilio to create a bot in WhatsApp that would respond to customer questions, and we used Figma to design the app for the creator to use, calling it the WOCChat creator base.

Challenges we ran into

The majority of us were first time hackers, and half of us were in different time zones. It was difficult to coordinate and meet up, but we managed. For designing the creator base app, learning Figma for the first time was challenging, and for working with Twilio, we had issues connecting our service to ngrok, but in the end we deployed with Twilio's serverless toolkit. We also made switches from Django to Flask, and then from Python to Javascript, which was a bit challenging to get used to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of completing everything we planned to do within the time, and learning all of these new softwares and technologies that can potentially impact people positively in real life.

What we learned

We learned much more than we expected. We learned how to work with Twilio, Figma, and Javascript. Most importantly, we learned more about the challenges women of color face when managing their own businesses.