During the Startup Weekend of Sophia-Antipolis (France) in March 2012, I met an experimented Ruby on Rails developer who was playing with the Twitter API to create hashtag battles.

At the time, I was doing Python and mostly frontend development. I was curious to see how a Ruby on Rails app was built. He was happy to show me the code and I was working on the frontend while he was doing the backend. In a few hours, we got the app up and running.

It went absolutely viral on Twitter and we got thousands of users creating battle.

In the following year, we were able to get awesome clients like FIFA and BNP Paribas (bank). The were using the tool during event to make the audience engage on Twitter with specific hastags or usernames.

At some point, we were on the point to sell the website. This is the pitch deck: PDF.

Key learnings

  • First Ruby on Rails experience in production
  • Scaling a Rails app to thousands of users per minute
  • Create a SaaS product and market it
  • Maintain an app for 8 years

Some screenshots