cg021 / seedforce

Seedforce

SeedForde is an online, easy to use platform that aids small and diverse business owners in current world situation. Many businesses have been impacted by COVID-19 and along with that many businessowners of color have suffered a lot of racial discrimination.
So we decided to create a platform that allows regular people like you and me to support these businesses and help them grow.

Inspiration

Startups founders don't have those connections or profits to get funding and especially in a year full of uncertainties many big investors are scared to invest in small businesses. And not all startups makes million dollars in their beginning years.
Meanwhile, most people are not as rich but want to invest. So we want to build a platform that benefits color businesses (because majority of them are quite small) and Investors both. Investor can earn badges that they could trade for small investment prices from us!

What it does

seedForce is a an app for small businesses to get crowdfunding by retail investors for equity.

• Users can login and authenticate their credentials via Facebook/Google/LinkedIn.
• Home page displays some recommendations for business investment based on user search history
• Home page has a section that shows the businesses that user have liked and have saved as potential future investments
• The most unique feature of this platform is the highlighted businesses of the month. Underrepresentation and discrimination is a huge problem in business investments so we want to represent those businesses by having a separate screen for them.
• Utilizing the data from work.com, Seedforce also have a feature to pinpoint COVID-19 locations, as these are where businesses are hit the hardest. We have a map with highlighted locations, so our investors know who needs the help the most
• Finally, if an investor decided to invest in one of the highlight business then they will earn special badges that they can trade for small investment prices from us! We wanted to put the fun back into giving. 🎉

How I built it

• Salesforce Lighting web components: Created web-app :)
• Salesforce Lighting design: Used SLDS is a CSS framework that gives access to the icons, color palettes, and font that we used to create Lightning Experience. Basically beautiful UI :))))
• Work.com: To pinpoint COVID-19 locations where businesses are hit the hardest
HTML/CSS/JavaScript

##Potential Users

• Tech founders - who will be investing in the companies that are listed on our platform
• Small businesses - they sign up for crowdfunding in exchange for equity.
• Startups - they sign up for crowdfunding in exchange for equity.
• You and me - Seedforce allows everyday people to become VCs with the power to help organizations and individuals they value.

Challenges I ran into

• Working with lightning web components (LWC) and Work.com for the first time
• Figuring out how to give incentives to investors for investing in highlighted businesses on our platform using Lottie animations
• Making dynamic user interface for startups took some time

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Working effectively remotely with teammates we had never met prior to Futureforce
• Able to learn Salesforce Lighting, Design and Work.com in such a short amount of time :)

What we learned

• Learned how to divide tasks as a team and be accountable for it, setting report time
• Communicating remotely with other teammates in different time zones
• Utilizing Salesforce tools took time initially, but the benefits became clear quickly

What's next for Seedforce

• Make the Business side as well, if we would had even time in this Hackathon we would have done so :)
• We plan on expanding Seedforce's investment process and scaling it to a wide audience. Instead of simply expressing interest in companies, however, Seedforce's next features will be geared toward discovering companies that users might want to invest in through surveys and other methods.