We were thinking about how we could help combat climate change and brainstormed many topics in this problem space. Every topic ultimately left us feeling powerless as we realized that most existing apps out there revolve around telling individuals how they can be better. However, corporations & other enterprises are the real reason we are facing a climate crisis, so we wanted to build something that addresses this fact.
Our web app, Ecologico, helps enterprises to be more eco-friendly. It does this by offering a variety of questionnaires on systems and processes they may be using that consume energy or cause pollution. Then, once the app understands what the company is currently using, it provides suggestions on better products they could install or more efficient processes they could implement.
We created a web application using React Typescript with Firebase as being our backend to store company information regarding product recommendations that they have been given. We also built an API with Express to scrape sustainable, energy-efficient products' data and integrated it with SendGrid to send product recommendations through email once a questionnaire has been filled out. Deployed on Heroku and served the domain through domain.com.
Finding recommendation systems for given inputs from the questionnaires is incredibly difficult. There aren't many libraries out there including the sponsors that can provide this information. Being able to complete questionnaires depends on the amount of time we have to create these forms. A lot of time beyond the hackathon needs to be done if we want to have forms for many categories.
Completing 6 pages of our frontend and having our hardworking UX designers create such amazing designs under the 24-hour mark is a feat I don't think I would ever think was possible.
A lot of cool technologies along the way! There were so many different libraries that helped support our needs and being able to understand more about the entrepreneurial aspects of creating an organization helped made our project much easier to understand.
We have lots of ideas on how we could grow the app's functionalities. For one, finding more data to add additional categories would be an obvious first step; we would spend more time researching or find additional APIs to implement. Coming up with a realistic revenue model would allow us to monetize the app and keep growing. Also, creating incentives for companies to use this app would make it much more helpful - this could be through partnerships with governments & other powerful bodies to get funding for companies, or through growing public knowledge of the app so that enterprises are pressured to do better. Of course, we could add a ton of features that just weren't possible in 24 hours, but we are happy with what we were able to create at this time!