About three weeks ago, we started our group project sprint at Hack Reactor. The class broke up into teams of 4-5 students to work on a large project of our choosing, that would showcase our full-stack development skills. I was part of a team consisting of Patrick, Elle, Alex, and Bill, and we formed an idea to create an analytics suite for Reddit.com. Our project is called Reddit Insight, and we launched our first version of the site 5 days ago. In that time, quite a lot has happened, and 100,000+ people (and counting!) have visited the site. The highlight of this experience so far is having TechCrunch pick up on the story and invite us to their offices to do an interview about our work. When we set out to create Reddit Insight, our goal was to create an app that would be interesting to the Reddit community, and would hopefully gain some traction. We also wanted to build an interesting app that would be exciting to talk about with future employers during job interviews. Our first course of action with this project was to silo responsibilities, and then start working on the app framework. I decided to tackle the front-end MVC structure with Patrick, because that required extending skills I already had surrounding Backbone routers and controllers. We decided on a single-page structure, with dynamic views that would be shown/hidden based on the user navigation. To help keep everything organized, we created a controller, which is typically not found in a Backbone application. We also created a global object with name-spacing, so that modules could be re-used throughout all areas of the application. We called this global object Redd, and we extended all of the Backbone events to this object, so that we could listen to all events from everywhere in the app. Some example app structure code: While Patrick and I were building the client-side framework, Alex and Bill were busy using Reddit’s API to download over 240,000 posts and over 200,000 SubReddits worth of data. Once we had that data in our Mongo database, they starting using Python machine-learning scripts to analyze specific segments of the data to find interesting facts that Elle could model using a d3 graphing library. After two weeks of working on this project, we had a working prototype to show to our classmates and instructors on presentation day. We made our index page an animated info-graphic, which worked well for large-screen presentations. We had also implemented real-time performance graphing of a specific post on Reddit, thanks to Elle’s work with dynamic d3 charts. Last Saturday, we officially launched an unfinished version of the site on the r/JavaScript SubReddit to get some early feedback. The results were not good. Most users did not like our animated info-graphic, and the site completely broke for mobile users. Users on Reddit also complained of a bad navigation experience, and pointed out a few bugs in different areas of the site. This was exactly the feedback we were looking for. All along, our instructors had been telling us to cut all features, and to get our app to market as quickly as possible. Having an unfinished website go live to a small set of users is way more valuable than waiting to launch until you think everything has been perfected. It is better to fail fast, then refactor, than to spend a lot of time building features that the public may not even like or use. I took the user feedback we received to heart, and I completely refactored the homepage and navigation on Sunday. I made the site mobile friendly using a responsive grid, and I created much clearer calls to action and feature lists on the homepage. The site was now ready for the spotlight. On Monday morning we posted a link to Reddit Insight on the SubReddit r/Technology, which was the section of Reddit we had identified as having a higher positive feedback rate than any other SubReddit. The user feedback was immense and immediate. As our post climbed higher and higher on Reddit, the number of users on Reddit Insight kept growing. Eventually, we got all the way up to the #4 post on Reddit Technology:

This is about when things started to get crazy. Gregg Finn, who writes for a marketing website called Marketing Land, saw our post on Reddit and wrote a blog post about us. He then sent it out to their 40k+ followers. This post was quickly picked up by Google Analytics, who sent it out to their 270,000 followers:

From that tweet, Reddit Insight exploded within the marketing community. We were re-tweeted and blogged about all over the world. Our traffic load started to strain our Heroku server, so we had to add 2 additional worker dynos to help with all of the traffic. Our app really struck a chord with the professional marketing community. There seems to be a great need for a brand awareness and analytics tool for the black box that is Reddit. If we were to move forward with this project, I believe we could focus on the marketing community, and make a tool for them that could be monetized.

Our press coverage reached it peak when we were invited to the TechCrunch offices to do a video interview about Reddit Insight! We couldn’t believe it. They would only let 2 of us on camera, so we used the JavaScript random number generator to decide who would get the opportunity. Alex and Elle got lucky at the right time, and they ended up doing the interview with Colleen Taylor of TechCrunch TV. The TechCrunch team was great, and they really took the time to learn everything about our project and Hack Reactor.

The TechCrunch article came out yesterday afternoon, and we experienced another traffic spike while we were at the top of their homepage. The spike was not as large as on Monday, when we were at the top of r/Technology on Reddit, but the traffic from TechCrunch stayed on our site almost 4 times longer and was much more engaged with the content. All of this has been an incredible experience in full-stack app development, marketing and launch promotion, and dealing with scaling issues. It is incredibly satisfying to have something you build be accepted and praised by the community you built it for. Reddit Insight has been used by over 100k people in 156 countries around the world in only 5 days! That right there is what is so incredible about being able to build things for the web. There simply is no other medium in which you can reach that many people, in such diverse areas of the planet, so quickly. A few of the websites that covered Reddit Insight: Tech Crunch Marketing Land Digital Trends SocialTimes The Slanted DailyJS PRWeb Reddit – r/Technology Comments We have a few more media interviews scheduled, so look for this list to be updated soon.