Small Business Hackathon
I recently took part in my first hackathon during General Assembly’s Small Business Hackathon! 🚀
The event was a 3-day virtual hackathon with a kickoff & brainstorming, project work time, and a presentation in front of judges. This was an incredible opportunity to work alongside several software engineers and UX designers to come up with a solution for a small business and implement a product to help support them.
The prompt for the hackathon was:
Build an e-commerce Product or feature which supports small business in their recovery from the pandemic.
As the data scientist on my team, I worked alongside software engineers and UX designers to create Nomad Hack, a mobile-based web application that provides a business owner insights into their business and forecasts future business success.
The main concept for the app was to provide a business owner simple analytics to improve their business by using calendar bookings to forecast future business health.
The app provides a fairly hands-off approach to visualize the overall health of the business and alert a business owner that an increase or decrease in appointments may happen in the next few months, for example.
The calendar portion of the app is the main method of generating data. Based on the calendar inputs and the appointments booked, our database is updated. During the hackathon, I built a Flask app alongside the software engineers which communicates forecasts to the user.
I used a mock dataset from an eCommerce purchase history from a jewelry store I found on Kaggle and modified the dataset to be applicable to our project. I was mainly interested in the date-time column for forecasting.
I created Holt-Winters’ model to simulate a forecast for a target of sales. This model used past performance to forecast the next 3 months’ sales. This could be helpful to a business owner in preparing for seasonal sales and events as well as improving their inventory management. In addition, coded into the forecast is an ‘insights’ alert that can be adjusted for a business's unique needs. In the example below, the forecast was for a similar amount of lessons booked forecasted in the next 3 months.
Overall, this hackathon was a great experience and it was great working alongside software engineers and UX designers and learning about their process when developing products. Three days went by so quickly but I feel like I learned so much in such a short amount of time.
You can check out our repo here.
Thank you to our mentors and fellow teammates for working together on such a great project!