Ramping up at the CryptoChicks Hackathon
We’re Mind the Gap. A team of three women from around the world that want to eliminate the gender pay gap. In this step of our journey, we wanted to test our idea with lots of people, meet tech industry experts (and possibly mentors), and ramp up on a prototype design.
We attended a Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence conference called the CryptoChicks Hackathon and Conference from May 31st to June 2nd. The event was held at RBC Waterpark Place, the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Canada in downtown Toronto.
During the event, 22 teams (14 youth hackers, 73 adult women hackers) competed in the hackathon that happened in parallel with the conference. All team members were either women or youth under 18. We were one of these teams. For the hackathon, Tayanee Sriyotha joined our team remotely from Thailand as our UX designer.
Hackathon Theme
The theme of the hackathon was to come up with an idea that makes the world a better place, using blockchain or AI.
The requirements of the pitch to be presented at the end of the hackathon were as follows:
- find a real problem
- develop a business solution for that problem using blockchain or AI
- create a viable business model of the MVP
- develop a funding strategy
The Problem
The gender pay gap is a really big problem — but it is more of a litmus test of how economically equal is a society is, and many factors influence that number. One of those factors is the problem of negotiation for higher pay.
We discovered that only 36% of employees actually negotiate their salary offers, and women are likely to ask for 30% less than her male peers. (CITATION?)
The AI Solution
To solve this problem, Mind The Gap teaches young professionals, male and female, how to negotiate their salary, and using AI, we give them recommendations on what to ask for and how to ask for it.
The Business Model
This platform has two targets: Businesses and end-consumers. We plan on having a B2B and a B2C approach.
B2B:
We are going to sell this platform to recruiting firms, universities, and non profit organizations.
For example, it is in the interest of the recruiting firms to increase the salary of their consumers recruiting firms. Those organizations can then offer these negotiation classes to their members.
B2C:
Our platform will be based on a freemium model. The first negotiations levels are free, and then the customer has to pay to access the rest of the levels.
To grow the customer base and data set, we will partner with labour unions.
The Funding Strategy
Here is how we are going to make the business model viable.
Developing the AI platform will need Research and Development. To finance it, we count on grants from Norway and on Startup Lab accelerator, with whom we already are in contact.
The Work
Tayanee was working remotely from Thailand, and her main task was to design the UX of the application. Hadiya worked closely with her on the mock-up and had the task of presenting the mock up. Cathrine and Judith focused on developing the business model and investment plan.
The Result
We pitched our project in front of a room of ~100 people. We presented the problem we wanted to solve, how we want to solve it, with a mock-up of the app, and our business model. All teams had mentors that helped us along the way, and 20 judges that evaluated our pitch.
We are very happy to have placed 3rd in the Business Track of the 2019 Cryptochicks Hackathon in Toronto!
After the pitch we got a lot of positive responses both from the judges and the audience. We shared a link where people could sign up to our waitlist, and several people signed up for it and also reached out to us enthusiastically. We especially connected with one of the judges who was interested in mentoring us.
You can see the mock-up/design of app and our pitch slides on Devpost.
Other potential future plans for Mind The Gap are:
- To use SingularityNET to power our AI.
- To use DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) to keep user data private.
This summer, Judith is in Norway with Cathrine to work on Mind the Gap.
The conference
During the hackathon conferences also took place, and we set time out to be able to attend some of them. Here are some examples:
Vitalik Buterin presented “The Ethereum gift to this world” and explained how he sees the future of blockchains, and talked about dapp-interlinking. One of the key takeaways was that cryptography gives you proof of existence, whereas blockchain gives you proof of non-existence.
Ben Goertzel had a talk about “The social robot Sophia on blockchain”. He also presented the company he created, SingularityNET, a full-stack AI solution powered by a decentralized protocol.
He also discussed how Sofia the robot can be used as a meditation coach. He mentioned an experiment where Sofia was leading a meditation class that had really good results. It provided the “loving” space as a robot.
Buterin and Goertzel had a panel talk together about “The Future of A.I. and Blockchain”.
By invitation from Toufi Saliba, who has created the Toda network, we were fortunate enough to dine with Toufi and Ben Goertzel after the hackathon. Toufi and Ben co-founded the Daia Foundation, which is a global decentralized alliance that aims to bring the security of Blockchain into AI and not AI into Blockchain, and Daia is about to launch a new project called Todalarity that will help 100 companies get on a platform to collaborate between each other. 50 apps needing AI and 50 AI needing to distribute their AI to apps all in one place.
All in all, we accomplished our goals. We met a lot of people to test our idea on and improved it considerably. We shared our idea to scope out the type of audience that would respond to it. And we came up with a way to make it profitable and presented it.
A big thank you to Hycon and Glosfer for sponsoring our travel to this conference.
