Inspiration
We were motivated to begin this project after hearing about the drastic impact COVID-19 had on the community around us. Restaurants, in particular, were hit badly by the pandemic, with businesses in Oakland and San Francisco seeing a 50-90% drop in revenue over the course of just a few short months. Many small businesses were unable to support themselves and closed down, which in turn put many people out of work and took away their ability to support their families.
We wanted to come up with a way to help these people in need, while also supporting local businesses. While our platform may not directly help individuals regain financial stability, we are confident that it will alleviate financial burdens experienced by two of the most vulnerable communities suffering from COVID-19.
What it does
Our platform allows for different groups affected by/looking to help with COVID-19 to interact: interested sponsors can contribute to relief efforts by donating to a "universal pool" of funds, affected restaurants receive evenly distributed funds from our platform daily as prepaid credits for meals, and people in need claim a weekly quota of meal credits from this pool of funds to "purchase" food from restaurants.
How we built it
For our frontend UI, we use React/Typescript, along with Express and Node.js. On our backend, we utilize the Flask framework, Python, and Postgresql. In addition to these, we use Heroku for deployment purposes.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many technical issues when trying to deploy our website to our domain. After ironing that out, we ran into some issues with our backend and frontend not being in sync, causing the website to render incorrectly. We were able to resolve these issues, altho parts of our production site are still currently using test data.
Our biggest challenge, however, is raising sufficient funding to make this project a success. Our current model is completely reliant on donations from our supporters. We are working towards gaining more media attention in order to bring more visibility to our cause.
To make our project more sustainable in the long run, we plan on expanding our functionalities to include partially subsidized meals, with the option for requesters to pay for part of the meal. We will continue looking into other methods such as creating a subscription model to allow donors to commit to donating on a monthly basis and engaging corporations/well-funded organizations to donate as part of their marketing and PR strategy. In the future, once business stabilizes, we are also looking at monetizing restaurants for a 5% -10% in commission for every sale generated through OpenMeal so that we can be more sustainable and continue helping as many people as possible.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Currently, we have partnered with four restaurants located in San Francisco Chinatown for our pilot run: China Live, Dim Sum Corner, Uji Time Dessert, and Adam’s Grub Truck. We have also received interest from restaurants in other major metropolitan cities (including Seattle and Chicago) that are seeking to partner with us.
In addition to this, we have received $1600 in donations that we will use for our pilot run to feed people in the SF Chinatown area. We are excited to start making a difference!
What we learned
This project was a huge success in terms of being a great learning experience, even though we have just launched. Through the course of this project, our team has bonded over our entrepreneurial experience and the long hours put into building/refining our initial idea. We’ve learned to make the most of the resources we have, to pick up new technology quickly and integrate it into our existing platform, to fast pivot as our product and ideas evolve, and most importantly, to keep our minds open to the endless possibilities that can come from just a simple idea and a motivated team.
What's next for OpenMeal.org
Our long term plan is to scale our platform to major cities across the United States such as New York, Seattle, LA, Chicago, Boston, Houston, etc. We also hope to raise more funding, starting with a $10,000 fund established via GoFundMe that will be highly critical for our initial growth and launch in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood.
We will continue refining/building out our platform post hackathon to support the needs of our user base as best as we can and to achieve the goals above.
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