FollowStats

Overview of My Submission

As part of the MongoDB Atlas + Dev hackathon, I am glad to present FollowStats. FollowStats enables you to be more intentional about building an audience and helps you to track your followers, subscribers from various platforms periodically. It keeps a daily track of your followers and subscribers count. You can view your growth/ decline of your followers and subscribers in an organized dashboard. It also sends you a weekly overview of your audience to your email every Monday morning at 09:00.

Live Application

Submission Category: Action Star

How to run the application locally

The realm-backend folder contains the code for MongoDB Realm Functions.
A Sendgrid API Key is needed to be used in file https://github.com/geekysrm/follow-stats/blob/main/realm-backend/functions/sendFollowersReport.js#L66.
The sendgrid email HTML code is here: https://github.com/geekysrm/follow-stats/blob/main/sendgrid-email-template.html
Install all dependencies for the frontend: npm i
The root app is a Next.js app which can be run by using: npm run dev.
Auth0 also needs to be configured with GitHub as social login.
Please create a env.local file at the root of the project with the following content:

AUTH0_SECRET=<Auth0 secret>
AUTH0_BASE_URL='http://localhost:3000'
AUTH0_ISSUER_BASE_URL=<Auth0 domain>
AUTH0_CLIENT_ID=<Auth0 client ID>
AUTH0_CLIENT_SECRET=<Auth0 client secret>

Additional Resources / Info

Screenshots and Video

User Dashboard

Settings Page

Weekly Email Report

I have prepared a demo video which can be viewed here: Video Link

Technologies used

MongoDB Realm functions for backend
MongoDB Realm Triggers to keep track of follower count on schedule and send email on Monday
Auth0 for login
Taiwind CSS for styling
Next.js as frontend framework

My experience

I had previously used MongoDB but was unaware of the cool functionalities like Realm functions, triggers etc. I was really fascinated by how easy it is to build your backend using MongoDB Realm functions. We can easily import npm packages and use those too. I also used triggers for the first time to fetch followers' count everyday and send email report every Monday.

Challenges faced

The major challenge was to figure out the way to fetch followers/ subscribers data from various platforms. I had to try many methods (like using official API, scraping etc.) before I arrived at a method that works.

What's next for FollowStats?

Add more platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn and newsletter platforms like Mailchimp, Convertkit, Buttondown etc.
Add charts and graphs to visualize followers' growth.

Try it Out