Prepared Everything Beforehand.

The headline "Prepared Everything Beforehand" doesn't have a hidden meaning..

It is what you thought, “Prepare Everything Beforehand“.

Since last month, my desire to learn Dart and Flutter has increased tremendously. I want to build and ship my idea as quickly as possible.

After completing the Dart course, I began learning Flutter Widgets and started building some small projects alongside.

So far, I've built a Currency Converter, a Weather App, cloned WhatsApp Settings page, and recently, the NIN Checker App.

The NIN acronym, National Identification Number.

The NIN Checker is an app I built to help my friends and me check our details on the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) database.

On Saturday, I was on the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) portal to register for a Fresh International Passport for travel purposes and use as a means of identification since Google rejected my government ID card (National Identity Card), and since then, I have been in search of another alternative.

I opened the NIS portal, and the first question was to input my NIN and date of birth. I'd entered it, and my data got populated in a tabular form (e.g., First, Last & Middle Names, Date & Place of Birth, Local Government Area (LGA), State of Origin, Country of Birth, etc).

The thought of I could use their APIs to build an App for checking basic NIN information pop-up.

Also, I've been searching for an easy and less costly way to verify students and sellers on the Paau Market App. (Paau Market is a student e-commerce marketplace for students to buy from students.)

With the NIS APIs, I could verify users and keep the platform secure from bad actors.

Paau Market's strongest value proposition is safety, strong security, no spamming, and a scam-free online platform.

The first version of our e-marketplace was absolutely built on a Progressive Web App (PWA) . There are some limitations hindering students and us.

First, some students spoke out and said they couldn't find our App on the Google Play Store.

Secondly, from our own side, we lack vibrant customer retention tools, such as Push Notifications. Note, we're not using a native app. The limitation kept our customers off our app.

Before we start building another app (native app this time). We've put out a survey to understand the market.

We put out a Poll and Questionnaire surveys, and discovered the students preferred trusted items and sellers rather than the cheapest items.

Therefore, the means of how to get students and sellers to verify arose. I began to look for a way.

Eventually, I find a way to verify students with their matriculation number. But then another question, what about the community people around the school environment who would like to sell, how can we verify them? because they don't have a matriculation number.

The idea of the National Identification Number came, but we don’t have enough money to get the NIMC APIs.

The NIS portal has less our costs with their APIs to help us verify users with NIN until we can afford the APIs directly from NIMC.

We're ready and prepared beforehand. Thank you.