Fertilizer

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🌟 Inspiration

We were inspired by the challenges sustainability-focused projects face in finding the right people to collaborate with. Many great ideas fail to take off due to a lack of connections with the right experts or stakeholders. Fertilizer aims to "nurture" these projects by helping community leaders and environmental advocates quickly identify and engage relevant professionals, enabling impactful projects to grow and thrive.

💡 What it does

Fertilizer is a networking and outreach tool for environmental and sustainability projects. Here's what it delivers:

• Users describe their project idea and location.
• Our backend uses AI and PeopleDataLabs to recommend professionals (e.g., city officials, sustainability experts) who can help.
• Automatically generates personalized bios and outreach emails for these contacts.
• Helps users organize and manage these connections via a simple web portal with networking tools, resources, and messaging templates.

🛠️ How we built it

• Frontend: Built with React, TypeScript, Material-UI, and Framer Motion. Vite handles build tooling and bundling.
• Backend: FastAPI for API endpoints, OpenAI's GPT-4o for generating bios, relevance scores, and email drafts.
• Integrations: PeopleDataLabs API helps find relevant people based on job titles and location data.
• Location Services: Photon geocoding API for address autocompletion and validation.
• AI Pipeline: OpenAI-powered logic for project description analysis, generating job titles, scoring contact relevance, and creating outreach content.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

• Managing rate limits and API quotas with OpenAI and PeopleDataLabs when processing multiple requests in parallel.
• Parsing and handling inconsistent API outputs from LLMs (e.g., GPT-4 returning unexpected formats).
• Handling geolocation and place matching with third-party services (Photon) smoothly within the UX.
• Ensuring cross-origin compatibility (CORS) when connecting backend APIs to the frontend during development.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Successfully built an end-to-end pipeline from project input to actionable outreach recommendations.
• Seamlessly integrated AI-driven workflows into both backend and frontend for an intuitive user experience.
• Created a customizable and modular frontend with reusable components for networking, resources, and project management.
• The backend system automatically writes professional outreach emails tailored to project goals.

📚 What we learned

• How to leverage AI APIs (OpenAI) in production workflows beyond simple chatbots.
• The importance of clean and modular backend logic when chaining together multiple AI tasks.
• Best practices for working with people search APIs like PeopleDataLabs to retrieve and filter professional profiles.
• The value of user experience design in making AI-generated outputs actionable (bios + emails + relevance scoring).

🌱 What's next for Fertilizer

• Adding LinkedIn API integration for real-time connection requests.
• Building a collaborative workspace where teams can manage outreach efforts together.
• Implementing user feedback loops to improve AI-generated bios and emails based on user edits.
• Expanding to new geographies and supporting more granular location data for hyper-localized networking.
• Launching a mobile-friendly version to make networking accessible on the go.

Built With

• fastapi
• framer
• material-ui
• openai
• peopledatalabs
• photon
• react
• typescript
• vit