So I made a thing today, to help small local businesses survive COVID19.
It’s a listing (another one!) of free tools, called “Tools for COVID19” to help brick-&-mortar businesses quickly implement a digital presence with little effort.
Some background: I was really enamoured by @bentossell’s efforts. He made nocode tools and app templates on Glideapps to help anyone struggling with running a restaurant/eatery now, to quickly transit to delivery/pick-up business model. The free Glideapps app template for restaurant owners allows them to set up a mobile ordering app within hours - get food menu online, make orders, receive payment. No programming required. Great for sole proprietors and small-medium food businesses who aren’t always tech-savvy, don’t have buffer resources to ride out this market slump, and need new solutions fast.
After Ben made this, he went on to make a few more: an app for check in daily with loved ones, a community board for volunteers and businesses, and an app for patients to book video appointments with doctors. I started sharing these around, and soon, I found more and more such tools. Now someone had to collect them, isn’t it?!
Moreover, with many countries in or going into lockdown, businesses are being ordered to close temporarily, or just simply affected by the lower footfall due to social distancing. Singapore is no different. We just closed all entertainment venues like bars, pubs, cinemas. All tuition centres for students closed too. No gatherings of more than 10 people. Foreigners barred from entry or transit, meaning flights are down. Pilots from our prestigious Singapore Airlines are told to take no pay leave. Businesses in tourism, entertainment, education, food and beverage, shopping, are all gravely affected. Some of our favourite local stores—especially the small, mom-and-pop type of shops—may never come back.
As fate would have it, a gentle nudge and spark by my friend Gaurav from civic tech collective better.sg today was just the push I needed to create this directory to (try to) help businesses, especially local small-medium enterprises, to survive the economic fallout from the COVID19 pandemic. There’s a need to quickly adapt to the new market environment through new businesses models, services and product offerings. Some trends I observed:
- Remote experiences goes mainstream
- At-home over in-store consumption
- Supply chain to your door
- Sanitation all of the day, all of the time
The list of tools will go some way to help businesses go remote/digital, especially for brick-and-mortar stores. And it needs to be done fast, therefore many of them are nocode tools. It’s based on the need for speed and remote delivery that I collected these tools and resources to help businesses ‘pivot’ and to innovate. Most if not all do not need any programming knowledge to set up, and many are free or low cost.
Admittedly this is just version 0.1. I’m not even sure this will be useful, to be honest, since I’m not even in F&B/tuition/healthcare/etc. It’s just a collection of links I saw shared on Facebook and Twitter, made this site quickly within a day and launched it, so that actual users, F&B owners, small business owners can try it and give feedback.
Please forward if you know anyone who might benefit from this. Happy to hear how it helped, or not. ??
-