How we built an alternative to email marketing in just 24 hours !

A few weeks ago I started working on a small weekend hack for the marketing team. The idea was to build a network of users who will tweet directly our competitors products. We tested out the concept and it worked. We were able to increase the site visits dramatically, so dramatically that we thought we should give it away to others out there as well.

The pitch

TargetCompetitor sends a personalised tweet to all the followers of your competitor on Twitter and asks them to check out your product.

The setup

• A java server that handles the order processing.
• A basic front-end server that accepts input
• Slack

I have been working on spring-boot boiler plate with a lot of bells and whistles for POC works. I will be releasing it in a few weeks in Github. Our setup did not have login user signup or anything fancy. Just the basic information text fields. Writing the basic api and deploying it in AWS took us around 4 hours.
The backend recorded the target, number of users to target and the message and collected a payment against it.

After a few hours the front-end looked like this. The front-end was built with reactjs with the help of ant components.

I know this looks as if it was done by a total amateur. The idea was to build something super simple and get it going. We really did not know whether the product would fail or succeed.

After seeing the first draft of the webpage I was a bit skeptical. Will people pay for this ? It doesn’t have anything a good site would have. No login, no contact us page. No support page not even a header or a logo. The only thing it had was an SSL thanks to LetsEncrypt.

For alerting whenever a new order came, all we did was write a simple web hook to a channel in Slack. Easy simple and effective. A support contact would email the user within 48 hours and explain the process.

Yes, we work on slack.

The transaction id ensured that we had something we could go back to look at incase something went wrong.

How do we do it ?

We transfer a portion of our earnings to people who post this tweet to the target-competitors. Is it spammy ? Let me know about some guidelines that can be used to reduce the spammy nature of the product.

Yes, humans talking to humans about your product

Interested ? Check us out at https://www.targetcompetitor.com