Help'n'Trade

84% of consumers prefer to buy products and services from local businesses, but 90% of consumers expect to purchase and find them online. However, small local businesses lack online visibility and e-commerce capabilities to do so, because it costs money, time and skills they lack. This became painfully obvious during lockdowns in the past year. Lack of local e-commerce is not only loss for local economies and communities, but is also a lost potential to cut up to 25% of carbon emissions in “last-mile-deliveries”.

Help’n’Trade provides an e-commerce platform, where local small businesses around the world can open their own web shop in under 5 minutes with just their mobile phone and start selling online immediately. Help’n’Trade is a marketplace for local goods and services, where each consumers purchase is measured on its impact on local economy, communities and the environment, driving change in local businesses towards sustainability.

Challenge: 84% of consumers want products from local businesses. Top 3 reasons are: support for local economy, quality expectations, and increasing sustainability awareness. However, 90% of consumers expect to find & purchase local products and services online because of convenience.

Problem: Small local businesses want to sell to local consumers, but lack online visibility and e-commerce capability to do so, because it costs money, time and skills they lack. For example, in Switzerland, a highly developed country, opening an online shop costs on average 14.000 CHF, 3 months of effort and additional investments in infrastructure, security, SEO, maintenance, payments, etc. Lack of local e-commerce leads to 2.3 billion CHF loss of value for Swiss economy and is a lost potential to cut up to 25% of carbon emissions in logistics and shipping.

Help’n’Trade has built a platform where local small business owners can open a web shop in under 5 minutes with just a mobile phone, by going through a simple guided setup. No setup costs, no maintenance costs, and infrastructure for digital payments is included. Additionally, Help'n'Trade's technical and SEO solutions makes small businesses discoverable online (i.e. Google search), despite the Help'n'Trade platform being a mobile web application. Help'n'Trade reduces the “time to market” to minutes and removes costly set up and requirements on technical skills as a barrier of entry for small businesses. Our solution enables small business owners to digitize their existing businesses and to engage with modern consumers. Additional benefit of Help'n'Trade is its focus on "local", therefore reducing cross country shipping, gaining our users valuable time and simplifying their daily business. 
We use cloud based technologies and infrastructure, and we partner with global service providers like Stripe to provide the same capabilities around the globe.

Our solution is primarily aimed at small local business owners, with little to no digital presence, which include professional service providers like handyworkers, but also craftspeople, farmers, artists, home-to-stay-parents. Local small businesses we aim to help are underserved, because they can't afford common solution like hiring a digital agency and because self-creating tools still require skills, time investment and investment in add-ons for extra functionality. Help'n'Trade takes care of everything technical, therefore small businesses only need to upload their content and are ready to engage with customers via cutting edge technology, without any need on skills or prior knowledge. Our approach saves local business owners valuable time, money and effort that can be spent on innovating products, engaging with customers and overall quality-of-life improvements.
Since we started with Help'n'Trade we interviewed around 150 owners of small local businesses and we are continuously testing our platform with them as well.

Help'n'Trade solution is blind towards race, gender, education, ability or digital literacy. As long as our technology partners (Amazon, Google, and Stripe) operate in a given country we can provide small local business owners around the world with the same tool to participate in the digital economy. We will do even better! As our technology progresses we will develop further solutions, which will be at users disposal by default, such as accepting cryptocurrency payments from consumers, AI driven optimization of web shops, gamification of consumer experience etc. We'll make sure that local businesses can thrive in the 21st century.

We launched Help'n'Trade here in Switzerland on 1st of May 2021 and started actively with onboarding of small local businesses for 2 weeks now. We are of course developing our platform further more and we will roll out our application outside of Switzerland in the next year, but we are already beyond prototype.

1. With Help'n'Trade literally anyone can open a web shop and become active in the digital economy from the get go, only condition is to have a device accessing internet.
2. No special technical skills nor technology investments needed, only your product/service matter.
3. Although our solution is a mobile web application it provides information to search engines such as Google, so that your business/product/service is discoverable by consumers on the internet.
4. Because of your web shop being on one platform with other web shops, we create a networking effect through which we organically bring consumers to your business.
5. Because we focus on local small businesses we reduce the need to ship products or purchase services from abroad.
6. Consumers' purchases are measured on their impact on local economy, communities, and the environment, which in a long term drives consumers towards more sustainable options, such as "local self-pick up" vs. "long distance delivery".
7. Consumers review businesses on 3 usual categories (price, quality, reliability), but also on 3 additional categories (environment, economy, communities), which enables consumers to put sustainable businesses around them in the spotlight of other consumers, again driving positive change at the local level.

We launched just 2 weeks ago, therefore we managed to onboard 10 businesses for now. However, our target is to onboard 960 businesses within a year, and 38.000 within 5 years, all within Switzerland alone. 

With native application development, this number is likely higher as it will open a channel for us to reach the global population.

We will have automatic systems in place that evaluate individual's purchases based on various variables, such as distance travelled vs self-pickup, type of shipment, local product vs locally sourced, personal interaction vs solely digital interaction, value of your purchase and use of your funds.
Our system will collect the information and sum it up in individuals' "impact dashboard" collectively across geographies. These will be summarised in monthly reports deployed to our users in a form of newsletter.

Current team:
2 FTE
3 x 0,2 FTE

Planned for the next 2 years:
+ 10 FTE

Stefan Kuruc - CEO - 5+years in IT consulting in various industries, lead project management, big data, visual analytics and agile project management projects. Leads Help'n'Trade to success by endless stamina as his parents lost their business due to lack of technology affinity. 

Hakim Ouake - CTO - 8 + years as a developer and CTO for various startups in Africa, develops Help'n'Trade so it can be used in the most rural areas in Benin in Africa as well.

Filip Popescu - Sustainability Ambassador - 5+ years as a Chemistry researcher and Environmental Scientist in Canada, and 2+ years project management in sustainable projects in Switzerland. Works on impact measurement and sustainability topics as it is his passion. Motto: "Prosperity for posterity." 

Katarina Terinkova - business development - 15+ years of experience in microbiology research and development, decided to join Help'n'Trade after her personal experience of being a home-to-stay mum and having no option to express and market her creativity.

We are currently looking for co-founders in Marketing and Sales as these 2 will become essential in the success building of Help'n'Trade.

Our approach is very simple. Everyone is welcome, as long as you want to do a positive change on a big scale and you speak English. Everyone is free to express their opinion, everyone has the same rights and therefore responsibilities. We do not disqualify minorities, different genders or cultures, as each of us, comes from a totally different background and each of us is a stranger in the countries where we reside individually.
 

We are at the beginning of rolling out our product and we need help on our journey forward. Simple access to software tools is already of a great value. However, through participation in Solve we hope to receive the needed mentorship and access to experts in our field who can help us deploy into markets which may benefit from Help'n'Trade more than our starting market of Switzerland. Our solution enables digital equality, but we need help to enable it on a big scale and reach those who will benefit from our solution the most. 

Additionally we hope to join a network of impact-minded leaders across various industries, especially connected to such a prestigious entity as MIT. 

Moreover we are currently developing our "impact metrics" to measure consumers' positive impact through Help'n'Trade and, truth be told, there is very little material when it comes to such as a small scale measurement as is individual e-commerce purchase. Therefore having support on our side building it together would be invaluable.

Exposure to media and conferences would be of course very welcome, but it is uncertain if we will appropriately benefit as we are based in Switzerland. Our team can't properly evaluate the interest of overseas media to publish our story. 

We are a very tech savvy team, however we lack the skills and resources to outsource such important roles as legal, PR, HR. Also it will likely take us additionally 1 or 2 years to have a perfect product market fit. Having help with critical feedback could speed up our finding and catapult us way ahead. Moreover, the greatest support we could use help with is in expanding client base. Having an expertise in this field that can help us growthack the the absolute maximum of value would be invaluable for us, especially in this early stage. 

Help'n'Trade plans to integrate AI solutions to optimise webshops exposure and to assure intelligent pairing between supply and demand. Such a feat can be accomplished through partnership with companies such as Miquido. With their experience in e-commerce we can work together to develop the best systems we need.

Another valuable input for Help'n'Trade can be the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. As Help'n'Trade is supporting digital transformations for local economies, we can benefit from this initiative's insight towards prosperous digital interactions between people and businesses. This can help us further improve our user experience, and our palette of services and tools.

Additionally, we are also interested in partnering with the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. We desire to measure the sustainability impact of local marketplace purchases, and partnering with this initiative can provide us with the insight needed to establish the most accurate and robust e-commerce sustainability metrics.

Help'n'Trade is here to provide access to local market within 5 minutes regardless of age, background etc. For students and youth it represents an opportunity to try and get their business ideas and home creation out there and see what the market thinks of it. With Help'n'Trade we can educate the next generation of entrepreneurs through simple means of trial on the market, learning from response, improving the individual products and innovate for greater traction. 
With ASA Prize we could develop our platform so that students and youth can offer their own creation in their local e-commerce. With the provided money we could set up additional privacy protection, design UX and product so that we highlight products from the students and youth and give them a greater chance on the market.

Help'n'Trade is here to provide access to local market within 5 minutes regardless of age, background, race or political status. Refugees using Help'n'Trade have an easy access to local market and can sell their own creations within minutes, without problematic language barrier, bureaucracy or other hindrances.  
With Andan Prize we could design and develop our platform to specifically highlight those who come as refugees and whose creations may attract the eye of the locals. The aim will be there to smash down prejudice and stereotypes, increasing the inclusion and acceptance of local consumers of rich and diverse refugees from various different cultures and backgrounds. 

Help'n'Trade values are based on helping local economy, communities and the environment. Our goals are aligned with those of HP Prize and so we believe we are a perfect match.
With Help'n'Trade small local business owners do not only become discoverable online in their communities, open additional channel to interact with already existing customers, but will also receive the newest technology to be competitive, strive in the 21st century and create economical opportunities themselves.... and all of it without any requirements on IT skills, IT knowledge, e-commerce knowledge or previous experience, as all of it is taken care by Help'n'Trade. 

We'll use the HP Prize to present Help'n'Trade in chosen American communities where our solution could bring the greatest benefit to the community and the local economy. Likely communities could be in the deep south of US, where racial inequality is the greatest and Help'n'Trade could start equalizing the economical unbalance through access to local digital markets. 

Help'n'Trade is here to provide access to local market within 5 minutes regardless of gender, race or background. Our solution is very good for women, especially those stay at home as full time mothers. Our solution enables mothers at home and women struggling to re-/enter the labor market to express their creativity and offer their home made products and talent to the local market. Enabling extra income, extra visibility for their product/service offering and a channel to funnel their interests and self-realization through. Our application gives equal chances to all genders therefore not disqualifying any from accessing the local markets.

We'll use the Innovation for Women Prize to design and develop our platform to specifically highlight products and expertise from women, making them stand out through our platform and supporting them in engagement with market without any hindrance or inequalities in place. We'll also use the money to offer workshops and training on how to start their business and successfully launch. 

Our product is here to make technology available for people who otherwise lack the skills, the knowledge or resource to access it. We plan to implement AI specifically to guide and help local small businesses opening and running their web shops without any need of IT skills. With Help'n'Trade the AI will be made available to our users to get not only access to cutting edge technology, without any additional costs, but also to be more competitive in the online world against the tech giants and provide additional value for the end consumers. 

With the AI for Humanity Prize we'll onboard a data scientist who will help us build our first smart algorithms to tap into the data, make them available to local businesses so they can run their business based on analytics and facts, rather then guesses what is right. With the prize money we'll probably be able to go even deeper build also suggestive system based on individual preferences matching the local demand with local supply even better and that way create even more positive impact on the local economy, communities and the environment. 

Help'n'Trade is here to support the digitisation of local marketplaces, promoting sustainable business practices and reinforcing local economies.

At our core, we are a sustainability-driven company, simplifying e-commerce for small business owners. Our long-term plan also includes the integration of cryptocurrency payment solutions, as they fit our peer-to-peer focus, are accessible and mobile compatible, and have little to no banking fees.
Our e-commerce solution is highly accessible as it doesn't require high levels of technical expertise.

With the GSR Prize we can build the platform to bring the spotlight on local businesses from underprivileged communities with the goal to alleviate poverty. Moreover, our infrastructure also allows us to build an Education section where we can expand on the education-related services available on our platform.