Hello again! In the past, there have been times when I had an idea, and I felt that this is it. This is my Eureka moment. In eagerness to start working on the project, I ended up forgetting to do some research to see if alternates exist or data supports my thesis. And well, I’ll just say that it ended up in a few disappointing endings.

Learning from these mistakes, over the past year, whenever I start a new project, I try to dig in some data to ensure that the idea brings something unique to the table, can be backed by data and it’s feasibility to reach the intended audience.

I ask myself, is it worth pulling all-nighters?

And with BeTheHope, it was a definite yes. First week, my brain was juggling around between a couple of ideas. Eventually, I let the data decide (so maybe I can call myself a data-driven person? 🤓). I had gathered enough data to convince myself to build a solution easing donations for everyone.

How’s the progress been so far?

Luckily, I’m almost done with the development, ahead of my schedule, so I decided to work on a couple of cool things to show my passion for the project. Firstly, since I had done the heavy load of digging some valuable data in the first week, I decided to prepare a deck with some numbers to show the importance of this solution. For now, here’s a quick peek (I’ll share the complete deck in the submission post):

Secondly, I never thought I'd be doing this, but since I have some time on my hands, I decided to try getting my hands dirty trying to edit a walkthrough demo video for the entire platform. To be honest, I basically realized how hard it is to edit videos (Salute to YouTubers!). Nonetheless, I’m super excited to complete it. If done right, I’ll be putting it into my hall of fame 😎

Before I leave, a quick update on the donations page (shared in first post) for the donors: As it is a mobile-first page, I re-designed the page to provide desktop viewers a similar experience as they would get on their mobile devices. Here it is:

I’m happy with the progress; hopefully I should be able to wrap things up soon and post my final submission by tomorrow 🤞. Until then, Happy Hackathon!