QMine

Inspiration

We noticed that developers may be struggling to come up with ideas for startups, or with problems that need to be solved. In addition, if they do come up with an idea, it is often not an idea that is most needed by everyday people. More specifically, at Hackathons, people often struggle to come up with valuable ideas. We wanted to create a method of connecting everyday people to engineers and developers so that the most urgent problems can be solved.

How does QMine Work?

The user experience flow of QMine is:

1. Every day people type any problem they face to the QMine bot in Slack along with a problem urgency from 1-10. These problems are added to a database.
2. Developers can search for problems to solve using Slack commands such as: /related-ideas photo, which will give them any problems containing the keyword photo or any synonym of photo and /top3, which will return the 3 most used keywords in problems. The developers can use the results from searches to help them come up with a startup idea that everyday people would actually appreciate. Once the developer has completed building the solution, they can upload a link to the project to slack with a command /completeproblem id.
3. Once a user's problem has been solved, they will get a message from the QMine bot with the link to the solution that was built. They will be given the opportunity to rate the solution from 1-5 and provide comments for the developers.

Benefits

Engineers get ideas of problems to solve, which leads them to create successful startups, and in turn earns them lots of money. They also receive free testing and feedback from the users who reported the problem. Everyday people have the problem they submitted actually get solved, and they have the opportunity to be one of the first people to test the finished product.

How we built QMine

We used stdlib Build, Slack API, and Airtable API to create our prototype.

Accomplishments that We're Proud Of

We are proud that our project has the potential to be very helpful to both everyday people and engineers and that we got a prototype with many features running smoothly. In addition, we were also able to catch a bug in stdlib Build, so we feel as though we were able to contribute to the company.

What's Next for QMine?

Our team has decided to continue with this project after EngHack. We are working with some of the organizers of StarterHacks 2020, which is a hackathon for first time hackers. We are planning to present QMine there and have it be used by students on the StarterHacks Slack workspace to help them come up with fantastic hack ideas. Some of the steps we are taking for that is to make QMine reliable for use by 1000+ concurrent users, as well as creating a UI for the engineers to search for problems, in addition to using the slack commands.

Built With

• stdlib-javascript-airtable