KaKi

KaKi empowers small businesses with big tools like customer acquisition and data analytics platforms to close the gap between small businesses and big corporations

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Inspiration

The odds are stacked against small businesses

Running a small business is hard. As a store owner, you’re responsible for finding stock, setting prices, taking payments, and about a million other things on the daily. Not to mention, if you’re running a boutique for your own wares, you’ll also be using quality time to make the highest quality handmade products for your customers. And after all that, who’s to say customers actually find your shop? You could advertise online, but you’ll be cutting your profits even more with a fat AdSense check just to get lost amongst millions of other shops also advertising online.

Big corporations have better tools

On the other hand, large businesses have entire teams dedicated to perfecting every minute detail in the art of sales, from getting the exact tempo of background music to catering stock for local weather events. One of the most powerful tactics they have is getting users to install an app. From there, a billion dollar corporation can track their customers to promote products with pinpoint accuracy to both increase customer loyalty and enable new pathways to discovery for new shoppers.

Access to such tools will provide fast feedback and retain customers

Small businesses could try the same strategy. But with the cash needed to pay a team of software engineers to support an app (or even multiple to target multiple platforms), creating a holistic app experience is simply impossible, especially with the hard times these past few years. That’s where KaKi comes in.

What it does

KaKi empowers local boutiques

  • Get discovered by customers. One of the biggest challenges for small businesses is attracting new customers. With KaKi’s novel coupon system, running a promotion for your boutique is as easy as creating a new discount through the intuitive Square UI and pressing a button through our app. KaKi will handle the rest by displaying your new promotion front and center to those interested, expediting the checkout flow, and tracking engagement with your newly created coupon.
  • Access tools that only large companies have. The KaKi platform means that any store powered by Square will have a mobile app without hiring an expensive team of app developers. Creating in-store promotions and tracking customer engagement is a breeze. KaKi will lift the burden of cultivating a mobile presence so that small business owners can focus on what truly matters for their store.
  • Understand customer base. In addition to crafting a mobile presence quickly for small business owners, KaKi also provides an analytics platform for tracking customers who engage with shops through the app. Upon logging in, a customer can select specific interests to receive coupons as they are issued. Shop owners can then track who viewed their store and when coupons are used. This is displayed in-app so there is no need to hire a data scientist or subscribe to an expensive data aggregation service.
  • Personalize the shopping experience. KaKi puts the customer at the front by tailoring the shopping experience based on selected interests, past purchases, and shop owner recommendations. Each customer will receive a unique set of promoted items and coupons as they use the app to shop. KaKi will help you find the things you want, handpicked to you seamlessly.

KaKi revolutionizes the in-person experience

  • Users love it because they get discounts. Many large corporations have their own apps where they can offer in-app discounts. Looking at engagement metrics, it’s clear users love the apps for this reason. In turn, shops build customer loyalty and get more purchases per user. KaKi makes creating and delivering these discounts to your customers easy, all without needing a specialized app for your very special boutique shop.
  • Support local shops over big chains. Shopping locally supports small businesses in your community. But this is often more expensive than big box stores since small business owners need to foot the bill for attracting customers themselves. KaKi eases this overhead so that customers get more of what they want for cheaper.
  • Get products faster. It’s often hard for customers to find exactly the right shop for what they want. On the other hand, not every shop has the time or resources to publish their stock online for searching. With KaKi, shops can use their pre-existing Square catalog to connect with potential customers. The days of calling in to check if something’s in stock at your local specialty shop is over.

KaKi helps small businesses do more

Try it on iOS! Simply download the apps below and sign in with Firebase and Square respectively. Issuing a dollar-based discount with items on Square tagged with [Fashion], [Plants], [Food], [Furniture], [Art], [Cars], [Computers], or [Video games] in the title will issue a coupon to all users with those interests selected when the Sync coupons button is pressed in the manager app. Then you can scan items and discounts to start a checkout flow for Square terminals paired with your account. Items should have a QR code based on their ITEM_VARIATION, while coupons will have their own QR code presented in the main KaKi app.

Let us know any questions, comments, or feedback you have in the comments below!

How we built it

Design

  • Figma
  • Not JS

Figma prototype

Programming

  • JS
  • React Native
  • PostgreSQL
  • GraphQL
  • Serverless (AWS Lambda)

Architecture

Architecture

Challenges we ran into

  • This was my first time setting up a GraphQL server
  • … and also using the Serverless platform
  • JS
  • Pushing secrets 🤫

What we learned

  • Analytics
  • JS
  • GraphQL

See our readme for building and testing instructions.

What’s next

In the coming months, we plan to iron out some bugs and continue building KaKi. Here are just some of the plans we have on our roadmap:

Generating better suggestions from shopping habits

Our initial recommendation engine is very rudimentary, so we plan to build a more complex AI-driven recommendation engine with more user insights in mind.

Creating an extension to find inventory matches with local boutiques on online retailers like Amazon

Small businesses often have items which may be similar to those on online retailers. Since we have access to detailed item data via Square, we can create an extension to track user shopping habits on online-only stores and suggest similar items at local small businesses on KaKi.

Deploying to stores

We plan to partner with local shops already using Square in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many merchants already use Square, so it would be easy for them to plug in KaKi to their pre-existing workflows.

Location-aware coupons

The KaKi app can access a customer’s location given the permission. We plan to have coupons which only become available if a user is currently in a shop. This should give a feeling of exclusivity and drive more in-person engagement.

Making things more polished and supporting more Square features

Currently we only support a single store per merchant since we’re targeting small boutique sellers first. Eventually we plan to expand to merchants with multiple locations and issue coupons based on those locations.

Migrate to TypeScript

Our server(less) is currently written in JavaScript and held together by duct tape and type coercion. Should we decide to add more complexity to the backend, we need to switch to TypeScript or some other more maintainable tech stack.

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