Connext

Our design allows the entire brand deal workflow to hosted on a single application. The way brand deals are made right now are inefficient and cumbersome. It involves finding the Influencers email by some means, communicating through emails, and then payment through a different app. Our app aims to remove the need for this hassle by providing a single application that hosts this entire workflow. This application will also provide metrics for Brands to make informed decisions on where to put their money. Our solution was made to be simple to use such that Brands and Influencers would not need to spend time on learning how to use the application, but instead get right to making brand deals.

There are other apps in the market that we are entering that allow Brands to view different Influencers that are on their website. To compete with these applications we created the ability to host brand deals on our application and to make the website easy to navigate and use. We believe that these competing sites are hard to use and are geared more towards Influencer discovery rather than brand deal creation. We provide the platform that does it all, but does not overcomplicate the process.

• Ease of Use
  • Or solution is meant to be an easy way to make brand deals. We made our solution so Brands and Influencers with a wide range of digital literacy could use our application. This meant making metrics easy to understand using charts, having the ability to send images with brand deal proposals to indicate what is expected, and having an easy way to pay out.
• Security
  • Our solution has no access to any of your passwords. Using Instagram’s own Online Authentication tool, you can get access to our app. We will not get any of your private information, but will still be able to retrieve your metrics.
• Metrics
  • Instagram provides a multitude of metrics through its developer API. We display certain metrics for Brands to see how quick an Influencer is growing, These metrics are essential to making brand deals.

We conducted a survey and spoke with over 50 Brands and Influencers about the current workflow for brand deal creation. Over 90% of them had issues with the complicated nature of finding potential candidates for brand deals and all of them thought that a single application for making these brand deals would help their online careers. We then introduced our application to them and explained how we were trying to solve this problem. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback and some recommendations on things that they would want in our application.

Our software was then rigorously tested using various testing techniques such that we could ensure our application could provide our service reliably. We tested all of our microservices individually with mock data, and then performed tests on the system running as a whole to test if each component worked as it was meant to.

We believe our application provides a needed service in a massive industry. After considering many different factors, we believe taking a fee of 5% from brand deals made on our platform to make our application feasible. This amount allows our business to thrive, yet not deter users from using our app due to financial reasons. After finishing the final application, we believe our business will be ready for market and can start operating right away.