One Click Battle : realtime voting system
A few weeks ago, we decided we needed a fun project to finish the week. We had been working on a lot of clients and we had a few ideas of small sites we wanted to do. We picked the realtime voting system idea. It was a simple idea, you create a page where you ask a question and give two options to answer from. The twist: the results are presented as the background and update in realtime as people vote. Basically, you see the background move as the results come in. Did I say it was a simple idea?
We found a name: One Click Battle. It’s a battle between two things and you need one click to participate. So the name was kind of obvious. The domain name was available, so we packaged it.
Right before the weekend, we posted it to Product Hunt and the next day we were #1 in Tech and on the homepage. Unexpected surprise, it was a great feeling. Oh wait, what do I see? A Javascript injection, damn! The PH community challenged our site and found vulnerabilities. It was great, we spent our Saturday night fixing the bugs, improving the security and implementing some interesting feedback we received. Our backlog was full, we had new ideas and bigger ambitions for that small site.
A few days later, 8am in Montreal, I log in to Google Analytics, we had 1000 hits already and abou 90 people active on the site. What? Where is this traffic coming from? 24.hu, a Hungarian news website. The journalist wrote a piece about our OneClickBattle.com and created a poll about what seemed to be a political decision. We were super excited of course until we realize that our Digital Ocean droplet was not going to hold all that simultaneous traffic. Since day 1 we wanted to grow but didn’t expect it to happen so fast. We had to scale and we did! That day we got over 10 000 hits on the site, people were voting and users were creating their own polls.
The numbers
In 7 days we got over 20 000 hits on the site, 188 users registered an account and 90 polls were created. That’s more than we expected!
We have a full list of features we want to add in the next few days, if you have ideas, comments or suggestions please send me an email : sleiman@tanios.ca.