Stitch
New small businesses are trying to establish themselves.
Old small businesses are trying to keep up with the changing times.
For all small businesses, finding support, adapting to a new generation, and creating community has been difficult.
Stitch uses an AI matching algorithm to allow small businesses to collaborate on events to attract new customers.
We recruited across two user groups — small business owners/managers and customers — visiting businesses on University Avenue and Town & Country Village in Palo Alto during non-peak hours. Our spectrum ran deliberately wide: from a brand-new hair salon to a bookstore open since the Great Depression, giving us insight into resilience at every stage of maturity.
Round 1 — Business owners & customers
Mark — Bubble Tea Manager
New manager, 6 months in. Watches YouTube videos to learn skills. Feels unsupported and isolated in his role.
Taryn — Hair Salon Owner
Brand-new business. Struggles with discoverability despite heavy marketing; handles everything herself.
Amy — Bookstore Owner
90 years in business. Observes corporatization has dismantled inter-business community connections.
Helen — Italian Restaurant
22 years managing. Losing younger customers; no formal network after 40 years of informal connections.
Beatrice — Customer
Shops 90% big stores for goods; frequents small restaurants. Convenience consistently overrides intentions.
Jessie — Customer
High schooler. Relies on peers and research. Reinforces concern about attracting younger demographics.
"You no longer have the ability to form a community among the people who run the businesses."— Amy, bookstore owner (90 years in business)
Round 2 — Validating collaboration
Val — Mini Cat Town (nonprofit)
Partnered with Gamelandia for board game night; refused other cat cafes over welfare concerns. Showed that values-aligned matching is essential — businesses won't partner with just anyone, even if financially beneficial.
Prof. Eric Liguori
Cited ice cream shop in Clearwater, FL that survived crises by embedding in community events. "Resilience comes from relationships, not just resources." Validated our direction entirely.
We organized all interview notes into empathy maps in Figma — capturing what participants said, thought, felt, and did — then ran affinity mapping across all nine participants to surface cross-cutting patterns. Three POV statements crystallized the core tensions.
POV statements
We met Taryn, a mid-30s co-salon owner struggling to attract customers. We were surprised to see that despite saying opening the salon was her dream, she puts no effort into knowing her community or interacting with nearby salons.
Taryn's definition of success ends at opening day — not at building community or attracting sustained customers.
Taryn could envision her business as a community anchor, seeing competitors as collaborators and embedding herself in the neighborhood.
Selected How-Might-We's
Retired grandmother who shops 90% big stores but exclusively eats at small restaurants. Surprised by her sector-specific loyalty — she genuinely wants to support local, but convenience and incentives consistently win.
She feels conflicted between a moral obligation to support small businesses and the superior convenience and quality assurance of big chains.
Beatrice had a way to get quality assurance and discover small businesses that offer the same level of service as chains.
Selected How-Might-We's
First-time manager, only 6 months in, watching YouTube tutorials to figure out how to manage. Surprised he has no structured support — operating entirely through trial and error.
He feels inadequate as a manager and must rely on trial and error to solve problems instead of drawing on experience or a peer network.
Mark felt validated while being encouraged to grow, transforming his lack of preparation into confidence and motivation.
Selected How-Might-We's
Opportunity: Small businesses need accessible tools to find values-aligned collaboration partners for community event embedding — addressing isolation, discoverability, knowledge gaps, and resilience simultaneously while demonstrating clear financial value.
After generating HMWs we derived three top solution directions and ran experience prototypes on each to test their core assumptions before committing to a path.
AI Collaboration Matcher — Pursued
AI matches businesses based on shared values, then surfaces relevant events and conversation starters. Tested with Benedict (On-Call Café manager) using a card-choice prototype — he chose financial gain as the top motivator. Assumption validated: businesses will act on matches if relevant and low-effort.
AI Milestone & Tutorial System — Abandoned
AI-driven milestone tracking to build manager confidence. Tested with Toby (On-Call manager). Stress dropped (4→1 on scale) but confidence and feasibility scores were unchanged. AI milestones didn't fit On-Call's values. Assumption invalidated.
AR/VR Scavenger Hunt — Partial validation
Gamified discovery of local businesses via QR-code clue hunt with prize at the end. Three Stanford students visited every location and became more engaged at each stop. Validated for awareness; doesn't address B2B collaboration. Not the primary solution.
We also evaluated AR, VR, web, wearable, and robot form factors before converging on mobile — the most accessible modality across all ages and tech skill levels, with no hardware requirements, and the only format that natively supports a community social feed.
Competitive analysis
To validate that our solution occupied a genuinely unmet position in the market, we mapped Stitch against four existing platforms. Every competitor addressed parts of the problem — but none combined values-based matching, joint event planning, and a B2B-only focus in a single tool.
BNI
Business Network International
340K+ global members organized into local chapters of one business per industry. Weekly structured meetings build deep trust and generate billions in referrals over 40+ years.
Key difference
BNI is referral-focused across different industries. Stitch enables collaboration between complementary, values-aligned businesses for joint events — with none of the ~$700/yr fees or mandatory weekly meetings.
Alignable
8M+ member digital network
Location-based small business networking across 35K+ US/Canada communities. Free and premium tiers with educational content and discussion groups.
Key difference
Alignable is broad networking — it can feel like “LinkedIn for small businesses” without deep engagement. Stitch specifically facilitates joint event planning with values-based matching, not just generic connections.
Eventbrite / Meetup
Consumer event discovery
Large audiences for event discovery with geographic and interest-based filtering. Easy to create and promote one-off events to the public.
Key difference
These are consumer-facing platforms: events are one-off and there is no values vetting or sustained partnership support. Stitch is B2B-only, built around recurring collaborations, not attendance.
Chamber of Commerce
Traditional membership orgs
Established community presence, regular networking events, and connections to local government. Strong credibility from decades of operation.
Key difference
Chambers offer general, broad networking without targeted matching. They often feel outdated and lack digital tools. Stitch provides targeted, values-based matching for specific joint opportunities with a digital-first workflow.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Stitch | BNI | Alignable | Eventbrite | Chamber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Values-based matching | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Joint event planning | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Community event integration | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Local business focus | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Digital-first platform | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Collaboration (not just referrals) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Business owner tool (B2B) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Structured matching algorithm | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
We designed three task flows covering the full collaboration lifecycle. Each round informed the next.
- Simple task: Send an AI-templated outreach message to a matched business from the recommendations feed.
- Moderate task: Create a formal co-hosted event ('Stitch') from an existing conversation, requiring two-sided approval before publishing to the community page.
- Complex task: After an event ends, log post-event feedback (star rating + private notes) and optionally set as a recurring event — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Design choices
Two parallel decisions — home structure and how the AI-driven feed should behave — both converge on a single, testable hi-fi pattern.
1 · Home & feed structure
2 · AI recommendation mode
On: comprehensive business profile in the feed.
Off: normal chronological feed.
Lo-fi
Hand-sketched digitally on iPad for a clean testing surface. Four small business owners and employees navigated all three flows while thinking aloud. Feedback primarily flagged labeling — the difference between "+ Post" and "Stitch" was unclear, and the Community page was hard to find for event management.
Med-fi
Full Figma prototype with consistent visual design. Heuristic evaluation by external evaluators surfaced 34 violations, prioritized by severity. Most common: Consistency & Standards (10 violations), Aesthetic & Minimalist Design (4), User Control & Freedom (4). All severity-3+ issues were addressed in hi-fi.
Hi-fi — production React Native app
The hi-fi prototype is a fully functioning mobile app, not just a clickable prototype. We turned our Figma prototype into a functioning app using React Native code, with a backend on Supabase and an AI layer on top.
Figma
UI/UX design & prototyping
React Native
Cross-platform mobile framework
Expo
Dev environment & device testing
Supabase
Auth, profiles, events, feed posts
Google Gemini API
Values matching + event idea generation
VS Code
IDE
The Gemini integration makes real API calls on each feed load: it reads each business's values statement and bio, then generates both a compatibility explanation and a one-sentence suggested event idea — giving every match a human-readable reason rather than an opaque score. Supabase handles all persistent state asynchronously, including sign-in, profile data, hosted events, and community feed posts.
Lo-fi user testing results
All four participants were small business owners or employees. Strong navigability across every task flow. Primary feedback: labeling needed work — the difference between "+ Post" and "Stitch" was unclear, multi-business message templates were missing, and the Community page was hard to discover for event management.
Heuristic evaluation — med-fi (34 violations, 4 evaluators)
HIGH LEVEL SUMMARY OF RESULTS
Severity Breakdown
- Sev 0: 1 (2.9%)
- Sev 1: 14 (41.2%)
- Sev 2: 10 (29.4%)
- Sev 3: 8 (23.5%)
- Sev 4: 1 (2.9%)
Below is the highest-severity navigation fix (Sev 4), followed by before/after screens for the feed and community pages.
All screens — Sev 4
Feed screens — Sev 3
Community page — Sev 1–2
Values reflected in design
- Transparency: AI match reasoning shown on every recommendation card — businesses understand exactly why they were paired, addressing privacy concerns around algorithmic decisions.
- Accessibility: Three-step onboarding teaches key features. AI templates reduce friction. Guardrail confirmation before sending preserves user control (H3).
- Empowerment: Community feed and Events tab let businesses showcase successful collaborations as social proof, normalizing partnership over competition.
- Trust: Two-sided approval required for every Stitch event. Collaboration is opt-in and conversational first: message → trust → formal event.
"Resilience comes from relationships, not just resources. Businesses embedded in communities stayed stronger during crises like COVID."— Prof. Eric Liguori, Associate Dean, Florida State University
Demo Day
