Altruad
Built a Google Analytics-like analytics system from scratch
STORY: In 2011, I started working on my first company called Altruad. It was an interesting and unpopular idea which I thought would add a lot to the heritage of humanity. Starting with another co-founder, we soon had 2 more people join our team.
Altruad stands for altruistic advertising. We wanted to change the way users contribute to a social cause they believe in by driving quality traffic to web content of interest to their social circles.
WHAT IS IT?: We were the distributor of share buttons which acted as a powerful analytics tool in order to do social good. You could see those share buttons in my blog, which when clicked and shared will donate a certain amount of money to a charity of your choice. So, where does the money come from? Well, publishers. In this case, it is me. Buttons are located in my website so I am the publisher. What do I get out of this deal? Why do I pay for users to share? Simple: The system guarantees over 30% increase in visitors coming from social platforms and I only pay for the quality user which is the user who stays on my page for a certain amount of time, and does certain things that show that he is interested in my page. Great deal, right? Actually, it is a win-win. Publishers gets more qualified traffic for less, and people do good in their own will.
STATUS: Altruad ceased operations on August 21, 2012. Some of the code we wrote for analytics system is available open source, you can check it out here.