Business Buddy
Getting small business owners online without asking them to learn web design.
The product
Business Buddy helps non-technical small business owners build an online presence. An owner answers questions about their business and gets a site from guided templates. The app drafts social posts with Gemini and publishes them to Facebook and Instagram through the Meta Graph API, either now or on a schedule.
My role
Final-year project. I worked across the whole thing: the front end, the guided site builder, AI captions and Meta publishing, and auth.
We were a team of two.
What shipped
- A guided site builder: plain questions in, a website out.
- AI-drafted captions with Gemini.
- Publishing and scheduling to Facebook and Instagram through the Meta Graph API.
- JWT authentication and role handling across the React client and Express API.
The problem
Business Buddy is for owners of small local e-commerce businesses who don’t have much technical knowledge. Getting online, reaching more customers and growing the business all usually need skills they don’t have, or someone they have to pay.
Decisions we made
Help owners grow, not only get online
We started from how a small owner actually grows the business, and that pointed past the website. So we added social media management: posts and captions generated for them, and scheduled to go out on their own.
Let owners make their own templates
Picking from our templates only goes so far. Owners can build custom website templates of their own, so the site can look like their business rather than ours.
part two, solo
The redesign
Solo, after graduating. Designed directly in code, no mockups first.
Why redesign it
After graduating I learned a lot I didn’t have during the final-year project: Next.js, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, design systems, responsive design, dark mode and Figma. The old landing page was built before all of that. Redesigning it was the most honest way to show the difference, on a product I already knew inside out.
What changed
- The stock photo in the hero became product previews built from HTML and CSS.
- The placeholder testimonials on the old page are gone.
- Sign-up went from six fields to four, with the password rules listed under the field.
- The page now has light and dark themes.
What I'd change
Add sign-in with NextAuth, then design the dashboard, so the redesign carries past the landing page into the product itself.