The Square Small Business Hackathon Winners

The last few months have been challenging for businesses of all sizes. In the wake of shelter-in-place orders, entrepreneurs have needed to adapt their businesses and weather the economic storm. We knew that sellers would need technology solutions tailored to the moment. We also knew the developer community was uniquely capable of inventing novel solutions to enable sellers to empower themselves through this challenging time.

Through the months of May and June we partnered with Google to invite developers in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, and the U.K. to participate in the Square Small Business Hackathon. Their challenge was to create applications for small businesses to help them adapt and grow through this moment. Entries were asked to choose from four categories:

• Retail, such as clothing shops, hardware stores, toy stores, and book stores
• Food & Beverage, such as restaurants, bars, delis, liquor stores, bodegas, grocery stores, and food trucks
• Healthcare, such as independent healthcare providers, mental health therapists, veterinary clinics, nutrition and wellness consultants
• Services & Other, such as house cleaners, plumbers, drivers, fitness trainers, barbers, nail technicians, spa operators, other independent contractors, or any other type of business that doesn’t fall in the other categories

Contestants could build for the web or mobile, with any language they preferred, using one of Square’s APIs and/or SDKs. We were thrilled by the enthusiasm we saw from the developer community as they stepped up to help small business owners. Many of the entries were inspired by input we collected and shared with participants from the Square Seller community about challenges they were facing.

Today we’re excited to announce the winners of the hackathon. In each category we selected a first and second place winner based on their strengths in three areas:

• Quality: the creativity and originality of the idea
• Implementation: how well the idea was executed by the developer
• Potential Value to Small Businesses: the extent to which the solution can help small businesses grow and adapt

The Winners of the 2020 Small Business Hackathon:

Retail

First place: Queue with Kyoo

Queue with Kyoo is the line management solution that lets you join a virtual line and receive a text when you're allowed to enter—you can even order while you wait.

Second place: Inventory Squared

Inventory Squared allows you to update your Square inventory in a flash using only a mobile device. The app uses the camera to scan UPC codes and allows a user to add or update item counts.

Food & Beverage

First place: Fetcha

Fetcha enables food and beverage businesses to easily transition into this new world, offering a simple, easy and seamless way to offer table service to patrons.

Second place: Voice Order

Voice Order is a contactless automated order taking service for use by restaurants, food and beverage locations, and the retail industry.

Healthcare

First place: StreamMD

StreamMD is the first full-service Covid-19 testing and treatment telehealth company to get your team back to work. Built by doctors for everyone!

Second place: Curatio

Curatio helps patients connect to specific doctors, find hospitals and pharmacies.

Services & Other

First place: ProFit

ProFit is a marketplace designed to help a plethora of fitness professionals develop and grow remotely in spite of large scale displacement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Second place: Hurdlr’s Automatic Business Expense & Deduction Finder

Hurdlr for Square Sellers automatically tracks their business expenses and self-employed taxes so they can keep selling. Our Deduction Finder scans their expense accounts for valuable tax deductions.

In the coming months we’ll be meeting with the winners to discuss their applications, get their feedback, and evaluate whether they’d be a good fit for the Square App Marketplace. We would like to thank everyone who submitted an application to the hackathon. We’re inspired by your creativity and ingenuity, and appreciate the time and effort that was put into the submissions. We would also like to thank our industry judges from the four categories for lending their domain expertise to the submission evaluation process. Finally, a big thank you to Google for partnering with us to make this hackathon possible and providing Google Home devices to the winners.