The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for offline businesses—small, often family-owned, ventures without an online shopping presence—to connect with local customers. People confined to their neighborhoods sought products nearby, and became more motivated to support their local small businesses.
Alimu Mijiti ’17 and Vincent Pan ’19 launched a location-based product search platform called iXopp (pronounced “I Shop”) in September 2020 to help small businesses connect with neighborhood customers. The platform now features more than 500 stores across restaurant, grocery, liquor, and hardware categories.
The cost of getting online and maintaining an online presence can be significant for small business owners, but iXopp simplifies the process by taking care of all the backend, including intelligent reporting. For shoppers, iXopp enables cross-store search for a particular product nearby, and offers price comparisons, as well as ratings of stores and products. For businesses, iXopp works with a store’s current inventory management system to upload a full store onto their unified platform, and products are immediately available for local shoppers.
“It’s all about the community,” Mijiti said. “The startup journey has not been an easy one. We’re still learning, but the positive feedback from our customers keeps us going.”
The co-founders met as students in Columbia University ‘s M.S. in Data Science program, and acknowledge that their experiences through the Data Science Institute (DSI) were instrumental to the development and launch of their platform. They are particularly grateful for John Hyde, DSI’s assistant director of career development and alumni services, who introduced them to the Columbia Startup Lab, which offers networking support, professional development, and access to a co-working facility.
“DSI networks have connected us to Startup Lab alumni, people who have provided product development feedback, as well as other resources and input,” Pan added.
Mijiti and Pan’s plans for the future include improving the application, and expanding the customer base. They are working to enable online ordering, and hope to expand their successful model to other cities.
“Our mission, like DSI’s, is to use data for good,” Mijiti said. “Our experience at DSI helped us with data mining and creating value from data. Our training enabled us to develop data-driven techniques to help store owners and design a system that leverages data insights for our customers.”
— Karina Alexanyan, Ph.D.