Hi there,

I am Steven, and I am working alongside a friend on a project called MartLn. A few months ago, I ventured with a colleague into a tech training business that was to equip tech beginners with the necessary skills. While it was a paid training, getting customers was difficult, considering the fact that it was new and financially not capable enough to opt fully in for massive advertisements, we decided to look out for one of these Twitter users with large followers to promote the training online for a week and voila it worked out.

After I proceeded to compare the cost margin between opting in for Twitter promoted ads and the Twitter influencer option, taking the engagement and desired results into consideration, I came to a conclusion that the latter option is more cost-effective for new businesses.

As this experience led me to explore more about the problems new or small-scale businesses face at making their brands known, I figured out that there could be a business solution to tackle these, and thus the idea of MartLn was birthed forth.

What Are We Working On?

MartLN is a platform that gives social media users who have a large following the opportunity to earn by promoting brands (products) for businesses and also ensure that any business thrives with a minimum cost of advertisement to grow using our AI and Web-based technologies. Our primary strategy is to make brands and products known to potential customers in a very cost-effective means. Once we take charge of the internet to promote brands effectively, we intend to take charge of the physical environments by giving room for making businesses known on roadside billboards even from any part of the world with just a click through a partnership with governments. Here is a link to our website in development! martln.netlify.com

A screenshot of our login page.

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How It Started.

After careful observation and thorough research about the idea in terms of market size & validation, target customers’ demands & reviews, we decided to move ahead to think of how we could develop a prototype and have a minimum viable product (MVP) to pitch to investors who we can raise seed from. Any other person could have wanted to start immediately with turning the idea into a product but then from our observations, there is a lot of great products outside there which aren’t accepted in the market and this is the reason we tried as much to be patient enough and go business-wise by putting our potential users in our mind before kickstarting the development.

So What’s Next?

Okay, considering cost-effectiveness, one of us decided to learn and have some Figma screens done. Interested to have a look at the design? Link here! figma.com/file/z9vCxuojsgXmowLbzMCppX/Martl..

A screenshot of the Figma screen

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The Implementation.

This is an important concept that must be taken into consideration in software development, it includes layouts such as system design, architectural tools, file structure & codebase, and each of these as regards this project will be discussed.

System design.

In this process, the software was broken down into smaller pieces called components based on functionalities, communication, and interaction as parts from requirements gathered, without which the system will be complex to develop. Interested to know more about system design? Use this link! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_design

Architectural tools.

The frontend was written mainly on ReactJs without any UI libraries but non-UI libraries such as react-router-dom for routing, react-preloaders for screen preloading, redux for state management, Axios for making network (API) requests, and some others which I might not include here.

The backend was written in NodeJs with MongoDB as the database and ExpressJs as the framework with some NodeJs libraries which include: cors for setting cross-origin policy, body-parser for request handling, mongoose for MongoDb schema-based model solution, bcryptjs for password hashing, jsonwebtoken for jwt auth, nodemailer for mailing, crypto for encryption, and some others.

File Structure & Codebase.

According to techtarget.com, a codebase is the complete body of source code for a given software program. It is the foundation of a software program that consists of other components such as layouts.

Why were we concerned about a good code base?

- Readability: We needed to put in mind future development as it won’t be good practice for any new developer to find our codes confusing to comprehend.
- Code consistency: We wanted to ensure all our codes were consistent enough for ease of navigation and readability through the codes.
- Clarity and cleanliness: Writing codes on a poorly designed code base will not aid in code clarity and cleanliness because any developer can get confused later.

How were we able to achieve these?

- Analysis: As I said earlier, we never started coding on the first day we conceived the idea but instead we sat and analyzed what the product will be about and even ensured all thoughts and processes were documented. These documented thoughts became our product requirement which guided us through.
- Our file structure: With the adoption of standard file structures of ReactJs for frontend and NodeJs for backend and grouping of related entries, routes, and components, and also putting into consideration file hierarchies, we laid out our file structure. Images of the NodeJs and Reactjs file structure here!
- Naming convention and consistency: We adopted the pascal and camel rules for javascript while block-element-modifier for styling.

Images of our file structures.

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Interested to know more about this part? Link here! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case

In conclusion, I have just taken you through the five phases of software development processes from how it started; the first paragraph being the requirement gathering, the second as the design, third the development, testing, and deployment phase. Enough of the technicalities, now let's talk about the business aspect of our project.

What Stage Are We At?

MartLn is in its pre-early stage seeking a pre-seed fund to ensure it stands out and also cater for its internal use of funding as it is going fully live soon.

Market Niche.

We have discovered that most new SMEs are financially incapable to promote their brands through advertisements, thus their demand for a cost-effective means which we are providing. Research has shown that 71% of customers who transact a product they see on social media are likely to recommend such a product to their friends and family.

Market Opportunities.

While the market is large, we expect to grow in the next few years in

Sharing part of the market to have a large user base.

Creating more niche with the user base to outrun its competitors

Competitive Advantage.

The social media platform itself is a large ecosystem that provides promoted advertisements. Our two primary competitive advantage will be the COST of branding and the OPPORTUNITY to earn Other advantages include:

We will also provide AI sales & analytic tools that will scale up business growth and keep our users informed of the trends in business and technology just like LinkedIn.

Our Big Mission Statement.

Our mission is to create employment for over 50% of social media influencers and ensure the majority of businesses thrive with minimum costs in the next five years. Isn’t that interesting and intriguing enough? Yes, it is and we would love to have you become part of this big mission.

Who We Are.