Marketplace for regional products

February 18, 2019February 18, 2019 Dr. Michaela Greiler 2 Comments

One of the first projects, I started building on my journey to entrepreneurship is an online platform to discover regional products.

Main focus on Learning

I chose that projects because of several reasons. Still, the main outcome for me is a huge set of skills.

First, it addresses one of my own problems. I would like to buy less from large cooperation and mass productions and rather spend my money investing in local business. But doing that online is hard. Finding those little artisan shops is a real challenge.

Second, it is a great project to build up skills. Especially, I aim at gaining marketing, SEO and sales experience. I have to pitch the product, make it rank well in Google, and attract visitors to the website. In a second step, I will have to attract artisan shop owners to use the platform.

Third, I use this project to understand social media platforms. This is really something new to me. I am still very puzzled by their role in marketing, business and in life in general.

Technology

I use Django and Python to develop this web application. It took me two weeks to finally settle with this technology stack, but I am very happy. With Django, I was up and running in no time. It is a well-documented and widely used technology. This means that I easily find solutions to problems I run into while developing online.

One of the reasons for choosing Django over Rails is my background with data analysis. And as I anticipate that data analytics will play a role for this projects as well, Python is just the right choice for that.