Celebrating 1 Year of TGIF - The MVP backstory

TGIF, our weekly Product & Design quiz, has hit a milestone – 52 editions or 1 year! What began as a simple weekly engagement activity now has its little community of curious minds, eager to test their knowledge, and have some fun while at it.

Here are some key stats so far:

This special occasion is the perfect time to reflect on how we built this MVP, a promise we made in our launch blog.

Building the TGIF MVP:

There were three main parts to our TGIF experiment

• Product Development: creating a framework through which Quizzes, Submissions, Scoring, and Results could be achieved
• Event Operations: setting up automation to help us run this efficiently every week without many manual interventions
• Distribution: the focus was again to automate most of the distribution

Product Development

Again can be split into three main components:

- Presentation/UI Layer: We mainly leveraged readymade UI components provided by Codyhouse and stitched them together. If you want to speed up your front-end development, you can certainly explore it

- Backend Layer: We leveraged Airtable to store Questions and options. And also used it to configure some meta attributes. For example, mapping questions to a particular Quiz edition

- Business/Logic Layer: The actual scores and rank calculations are where we wrote the custom code. Also, we added some factors like showing different messages based on a score threshold. Though as I have built more expertise on Airtable, I think a lot of it can be now achieved using it

Event Operations

Running a time-bound thing frequently is not easy. Period. However, if one can separate what is new and what is a pattern, a lot of operational overheads can be reduced.

And that's what we also did:

- Automation is Key: Running a time-bound event like TGIF repeatedly can be a challenge. We tackled this by identifying recurring elements and automating them.

- Pattern vs. New: Questions, visuals, summaries, and featured images are unique to each event and entered into Airtable weekly. However, elements like quiz naming conventions and schedules remained constant (Friday 8 PM - Thursday 8 PM).

- Scheduled automation via Make.com: While custom code is how an Event gets created in our backend, to create an appropriate entry automatically based on the Event name, we leverage Make.com. Every Thursday evening, it makes a web request to our domain and it's done!

- In fact, we run a sequence of web request that Make calls: Creating a new TGIF Event, Updating Event details (that happens on Friday 5 pm), and finally a call to publish the event

Distribution

Two parts to our Distribution strategy:

- Social Media Automation: Our in-house social media automation tool handles announcements for new events, ensuring consistent updates across platforms.

This one is pure no-code powered by Airtable and Make. Want to set it up for yourself? download it from here.

- Dedicated TGIF Community: We also have a dedicated WhatsApp group for TGIF (350+ members as of now)

Looking forward

We've made minimal changes to TGIF so far, but with a growing user base, exciting plans are brewing! Stay tuned for future updates as we continue to elevate the TGIF experience.