Shipping day, RT Reach is out the door

April 29th, 2016

Starting something new begins with shipping the first version. I've been working on a social media campaign tracking app for a while now. It started early 2015 when helping the Detroit Grand Prix (opens new window) track their social activity leading up to and through race weekend. Although that initial version was launched, it left much to be desired in the codebase, which was thrown together in a weekend and hard coded for a single purpose.

# The perfect storm

Over the past year I've taken over the Laravel Detroit meetup group (opens new window) and in my spare time continued to re-write the app, multiple times, to learn and use it for various other events. Late last year Taylor Otwell (opens new window), the creator of Laravel (opens new window), announced Spark (opens new window), an addition that would make it easy to stand up a Saas app in Laravel. Jumping on board with the alpha, beta and now final release got me up to speed with Vue.js (opens new window) and gave me some time to think about the intended audience for this social tracking app.

# Shipping

Creator's ship. This week I was traveling a bit with some more down time than expected, it gave me the excuse to write this up and ship the initial version of the app, version 0.1.

# Audience

Down to the core, RT Reach is for small business and groups who run multiple events throughout the year and need to report the success and metrics of multi-channel social media campaigns. It tracks account posts, views, reach and most influential accounts per campaign on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube initially. Sums it all up with clear at a glance charts and daily summary emails.

# Sound like you?

Initially I'll be offering concierge onboarding to work with a first set of customers and walk in their shoes to refine the product for a wider audience.