How to support your local businesses during Corona with your dev skills

How my friend Tom and I built a voucher online shop in just 3 days and raised over $50,000 powered by the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

As in almost every city in the world local businesses like shops, restaurants, bars, movie theatres and cultural venues had to close in my hometown of Pforzheim due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In mid march our city administration reached out and asked if I could help build a digital platform to help our local economy retain some of their revenue through vouchers. So I teamed up with my friend Tom, a local web designer (www.kaundvau.de), and we created a website within just 3 days that allows consumers to purchase vouchers in different sizes of their favourite restaurants, bar, shops etc.
https://www.handeln-fuer-pforzheim.de/

100% of the revenue gets forwarded by the city to the local businesses every week. This way small business owners get fast cash. We have been overwhelmed with the success so far. In the past 5 weeks we sold over 900 vouchers totalling over $50,000 in revenue and we already have over 150 business registered on the website.

Time to market was absolutely critical in this effort so we build the backend in a serverless style using Azure Functions and Azure Storage. This was not only extremely fast to build but also has close to zero operational costs. On top we use Power BI to provide real time insights into sales for stakeholders as well as weekly reporting for each vendor to enable fast money transfers.

It’s very satisfying to support our local communities through our knowledge and expertise and provide solutions to real world problems and have an immediate impact.

If you are interested in more technical details or want to adopt this solution for your region please get in touch.