Logo
Homepage
groups
oauth
accessability

💚 ThriveTogether

Final Application Available at: https://thrive-together-iota.vercel.app/ Last Commit before deadline: 494597d

Created for the 2023 APEC App Challenge, with the theme of “Creating a Resilient and Sustainable Future for All.”

Fifty-one percent of these vital businesses, however, require more funding than they can currently access. Credit constraints are a serious challenge for SMEs. Without reliable sources of working capital, SMEs are unable to make investments needed for growth, leading to stagnation. Given the importance of SMEs as a source of employment, barriers to accessing financing become barriers to poverty reduction and economic growth. Blended finance can help firms fill this critical gap. (Runde et al. 2021)

What does this mean?

It means we believe that there is a better way for small-to-medium enterprises or SMEs (particularly from underrepresented groups like those from Less Developed Countries (LDC), those that are women-owned, indigenous-owned, disabled-owned or LGBTQIA+ owned, and more) to combat their unique challenges and join the global market.

How?

By creating a platform where small businesses (selling similar products, of similar backgrounds, or in similar regions) can combine resources to overcome common problems that SMEs face -- such as having working capital, ability to apply for licenses, exposure, and more by working together. This also allows the communities surrounding these businesses to grow stronger without relying on outside sources of assistance.

What it does

Collaboration

Share storefronts with other businesses to save costs on site hosting and have greater inventory.

Finances

Share and receive financial help in order to get necessary licenses, equipment, and more.

Exposure

Easily promote and get promoted by other businesses to increase business via social media!

How we built it

mongoDB
express.js
react
node.js
tailwind.css

We chose the MERN stack because it is designed to handle high-traffic applications and can scale horizontally by adding more servers or vertically by optimizing the existing servers. MongoDB, as a NoSQL database, offers flexibility in data modeling and can handle large amounts of data. Node.js, with its event-driven and non-blocking architecture, allows for high concurrency and efficient handling of requests.

Challenges we ran into

Working on a project together remotely was a first-time experience, as well as a project that was within a few days time-frame rather than an entire semester or just 24 hours.