Here, at Right Tech, we widely use social networks for promotion. One of the most useful ones is TikTok (go figure!). In order to stay relevant, we need to keep track of the current trends. As Bytedance is not the most data-sharing company, we have to use different workarounds in order to get data from TikTok. For example, we built a simple internal tool that gets data from Tikapi and shows us the most popular videos by keyword.

And at some point, we thought 'hmm, if we have that need, there might be people with a similar need as well'. So we decided to create a service that will send you daily trending videos by keyword. We call it trendz.watch.

As our main goal was to test the waters, we wanted to start with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). How do you build an MVP? You shave off features until you are left with absolutely crucial ones.

In our case, the core feature was 'send trending videos for a keyword by email'. And some kind of a web page where a user can enter their keyword and email.

Obviously, we also needed server-side logic behind the page to process the requests and trigger email sending. Or do we?

We came up with a solution that allowed us to minimize the initial investment to the absolute minimum. We (jokingly) called the approach VMVP - VERY Minimum Viable Product 😎

We created a landing page by using Clickfunnels - 1 hour.

Created an email template in Mandrill - 2 hours.

And created a simple script that we can run locally that sends an email to a user - 3 hours.

The script queries TikApi via APICache, so we use TikApi API limits carefully.

The use-case is simple: when a user subscribes to the service through the landing page, we add them to a Google spreadsheet. And then once a day we run the script against each user. All of that by hand, which is not a problem as there are not that many users. As soon as we have enough users to make this process tiresome, we'll have enough users to cover the development cost of automation.