CapySure

Women are underrepresented in the trade industry, and many women/non-binary people would feel more comfortable with a female/non-binary tradesperson. Our app connects customers with tradespeople.

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Inspiration

We wanted to make the app because women only make up 2-4% of the trade industry workforce, a severe underrepresentation. Women in trade face challenges in the forms of discrimination, lack of visibility, and possible harassment from male customers.

Additionally, a survey of 2000 UK adults conducted in June 2022 found that a third of respondents would prefer to hire a female tradesperson. Especially regarding work that needs to be done within the home, the presence of a male tradesperson could be intimidating, or could lead to incidences of unsolicited harassment. This would be especially challenging for women living alone/elderly women/LGBTQ+ customers.

Due to the trade industry being so male-dominated, it is difficult for female/non-binary clients to find female/non-binary tradespeople.

What it does

Our app aims to solve this problem by connecting customers with female/non-binary tradespeople. Clients can log into the app, and search for tradespeople filtering by the particular trade or errand that they require. Clients can then view tradesperson profiles, and initiate an enquiry conversation through the built-in messaging feature which ensures the safety of both parties.

How we built it

For the frontend, we made an iOS application using SwiftUI. This allowed us to rapidly prototype, make a visually appealing design, and ensure easy navigation. For the backend, we used flask and SQLAlchemy to make an ORM Database model on top of SQLite. We created entities for users, tradespeople, and messages between them. We made a secured REST API to interconnect the frontend and backend, with user authentication and authorisation via JWT tokens.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the backend and frontend were initially challenging as we encountered issues synchronising our database model with the frontend's requirements. Swift also posed some challenges with regards to JSON decoding although we were able to work through these and enable the app to make REST API calls to our backend, allowing us to insert mock data for our minimum viable product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to, in the span of 24 hours, prototype and design our mobile app and backend, and achieved integration between the two allowing for us to have demonstrable functionality and a data model.

By designing requirements together and looking at user personas we were able to build a solution in the form of a proof-of-concept that allows women and non-binary users in need of a task to find tradespeople through the platform and securely message them to obtain their services.

What we learned

We were able to greatly develop our technical skills in terms of gaining familiarity with database ORM models and using Flask to efficiently create a working backend. We also improved our efficiency in working on prototyping, translating low-fidelity sketches into more fleshed out views that follow friendly UX principles.

We gained additional experience exploring business strategies and presentation skills.

What's next for CapySure

We will launch a pilot program in Bath and Bristol - this will allow us to verify clients and tradespeople. We will then be able to expand the app nationally once we have gained stakeholder feedback.

We will work to integrate payments into our platform to further ensure safety of our users and tradespeople. When we do this, we will take a small commission fee for each job successfully secured through our app, in order to cover our running costs.

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