Interview: Local rapper BGourd uses his IT skills to help local businesses

My friend and her mum started a home-cooking business (@tiaptiapwithsoph). My friend manages the administrative side of things and I know how tedious messaging and order confirmations can be! What’s worse is that other existing e-commerce platforms might be too expensive for these small businesses to adopt.

I decided to offer some help in the automation of message sending in the form of a runnable program. It mainly uses “Selenium”, a web browser tool that’s actually meant for website testing but in some cases can be used to help ease tedious tasks such as message confirmations. 

However, after that was done, I realised that this program had the potential to help other businesses and it would be a waste if only one company were to be adopting it into its operations. Simultaneously, I also noticed multiple Instagram bakers and food businesses like Able Bagel and Moody Pizza Company that donate a portion of their whole profits to charities. Thus, I had the idea to provide my program to these good organisations for free to help ease part of their administrative struggles.

Currently, I do a simple custom message and automation programme. It’s a program that’s meant to be run on your laptop or desktop computer after you have collated your orders (through Google forms, manually, or otherwise) and it’ll help to send custom messages to the respective customers. It works for most platforms – Whatsapp, Instagram DM and Telegram.

Even though the current iteration of my program is helpful, it can also be seen as relatively rudimentary. I spoke with Able Bagel to better understand the business and to see how I can ease even more administrative burdens as they continue to scale. 

I’m in the early stages of developing an online custom order sheet web-app called “QuickSendsg” that hopefully will solve most of her problems without causing much trouble to her day-to-day operations. If this collaboration is successful, I hope to get more food-based businesses onboard! 

I think what the team at Able Bagel has done is nothing short of remarkable, and their hard work and passion for good causes only gives me more motivation to help them improve the business rapidly.

Oh, it’s very important – 2020 has been a tough year for everyone. People in privileged positions such as myself must do all that we can to amplify the voices of the marginalised and help charitable businesses. 

It was especially heartwarming to see the amount of monetary support that music space and jamming studio, Lithe House was able to garner, I’m happy to see this business continue to push through this difficult year.

Another good example of creatives coming together – that I'm helping out with – for a greater cause is Archipelagirl, a budding e-magazine that aims to highlight stories and people who are underrepresented here in Singapore.

I’m actually interested in making a local vinyl logging mobile application, to help users in their crate-digging journey!