Sensus: Helping Local Businesses Find Product Market Fit using Social Media
Background: One of the biggest challenges that small businesses face is finding a good market to fit into. It is the reason a lot of them are not able to compete in a saturated market with other strong competitors already in the pool. In some cases, these small shops can help certain communities gain access to the goods they need or provide more accessibility for community mobility. Unfortunately, this would be hindered through poor access to markets for small, local businesses. However, our tool aims to provide a simple, elegant, and novel solution to this issue.
Solution: Our application, Sensus, allows small business owners to find product-market fit through analyzing markets via tweets from Twitter. The user is able to enter a keyword query alongside specific locations they want to understand the market of. This information is fed into a model trained on tweets as data to conduct sentiment analysis to gauge the general sentiment of that keyword or product in the location specified by the user. Through Sensus, small business owners can understand where to target their marketing, their future growth, and potential future customers through analyzing these niche markets.