MisterPHP

This showcase is with Nick Schwab the Technical Diplomat (CTO) for GetAmbassador.com a new Social Referral platform.

What can you tell us about the team that built getambassador.com?

We're a team of 3 fresh out of the TechStars New York program - two web developers (myself and Cody Christian) building the platform while Jeff Epstein hustles on the business side. Cody and I each have over 7 years of PHP experience, 3 years of CodeIgniter experience, and have been building websites for over 10 years. In addition, Jeff and I both bring experience from capitalized exits from previous internet companies to the team.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Ambassador is a social referral platform to allow any company to get more users by rewarding their existing ones for referring their friends. We realized that many companies have built the same basic referral architecture for their websites and we wanted to break the chain of repetition by building a simple SaaS platform which manages the architecture at large scale. Not only do we save companies time and money with our full-scale referral platform, but we also deliver insights into the referral behavior and true value of their customers through an elegant dashboard. Ambassador is free for consumers who want to create a profile of their favorite brands to start earning rewards and we offer a variety of service plans for businesses who want to use our platform to power their referral program.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

We wanted a framework with great documentation and excellent modulation through the MVC approach. Naturally, CodeIgniter was a perfect fit. Additional factors included the liveliness of the CodeIgniter community (and some of the great 3rd party contributions they've made) and the framework's support of custom libraries to allow us to easily build a version-controlled API.

What is next on the plate for getambassador.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

We're building more integrations into 3rd party applications to make it as easy as possible for companies to get started using our platform and we're always building out more insights for companies so they can get a better look at the referral influence of their customers.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community?

We're hiring great developers to help us build out the platform and integrate with 3rd parties. If you're a programming prodigy who likes to solve complex relational problems, we should chat.

Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

Leverage the community. There are excellent libraries contributed by some talented developers which allow you to build faster.

Always build in modules. If (and when) the product changes, you'll be thankful you did.

Routes are your friend, especially when building a product with a versioned API.

Iterate. Start with a proof of concept - a minimal viable product - and test your assumptions before building features you might not actually need.

Posté le 16/11/2011 sur codeigniter.com .