Plant Trading app wireframe
What is the issue?
In order to prevent plants from growing wild plant care takers must prune their plants. the cuttings are still good to make another plant. however, variety in foliage would be nice and the house plant community is not really social.
What is my Solution
A social media app that behaves somewhat like a dating app except instead of looking for love you are looking for cuttings of plants to grow your collection. you can set the users to be a certain maximum distance from you such as a maximum of 25 miles so when you trade or buy a cutting or even some supplies you do not have to travel farther than you want to. you can also chat in a group chat with your local community
What are my goals for this app:
Foster local communities and friendships centered around gardening
to help others wanting to start a garden or terrarium but don’t know how or where to start
give users a means to trade and grow the variety of plants in their garden.
Why do PEOPLE care for plants?
In the survey that I have done, almost all participants have said that the plants give them a positive emotion like joy, satisfaction, or accomplishment. others do it because they want a byproduct of the plants such as fresh produce or air.
Why do you want to trade cuttings?
In my research, I have found that some people do not know that you can still use your plant cuttings to grow more plants or even make GMOs of plants. Socail media surrounding a niche topic can help many others learn more about their hobby and they can help each other improve.
What kind of PEOPLE would use this app?
Why not just have a club instead?
there are multiple reasons why not to have repeated meatings like a book club instead.
People have their own lives and not everyone has a 9 to 5 job, it can be hard to schedule around everyones routine.
it would be good to leave past discussions open like a forum for other users to view and learn.
I would not want people with social anxiety to be left out.
the option to debate and learn with others.
Do i have any competition?
The closest thing currently on the market to this is Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and R/plantrade all of which have some issues.
Facebook and Craigslist have a function to see how far the sellers are from you, or you can look in specific regions however you still have to sort through a bunch of junk that the sellers put a keyword related to what you want. On top of that most people unless they put it down as free are not up to bartering or trading for other plants.
On the other hand, there is R/plantrade, a subreddit made for the sole purpose of trading plants. while this is exactly what I want to make, there are still a few issues. The first issue is that the subreddit is not localized. reddit cannot make servers based on where you live so you can be trying to trade with someone in Australia so there are legal issues and shipping costs that come into play. on top of that even if you are in the same country you are most likely going to need to ship the plant and unless you professionally ship plants you will probably not know how to protect the plant while it is shipped.
What I want is to build local communities on a common interest where they can help each other grow their terrariums or gardens.
During my survey, the priorities users had for the app were plant swapping, some self-help guides, plant identification as well as a function to help identify issues on your plants.
