About Huzzler

Designed and developed a community platform inspired by Reddit. The goal was to create a platform that would be easy to use and would allow users to create posts and comments. All while using minimal external dependencies for maximum control and minimal costs. The platform recently reached 1000+ members and is growing daily.

Main features:

• User posts & profiles: Users can create posts using a rich-text editor
• Comments & comment replies Users can comment on a post and someone else can reply. Users can then reply on those replies in a tree-like way (like on Reddit).
• A weekly automated startup competition Every week, from Monday until Wednesday, startups can add submit their projects to the competition. From Wednesday until Sunday, people can vote on these projects. On Sunday, the winners are announced.
• PWA with push notifications: Huzzler can be installed as a PWA (progressive web app). Users receive push notifications for comment replies and post replies. Admins can also send push notifications using the admin dashboard.
• AI Moderation Every post submitted to Huzzler is moderated by AI in a 2-step process. First step checks for NSFW content. Second step assigns scores (Eg. spam_probability, self_promotion_probability,..). Then, depending on the category in which the post was created, the post is accepted or rejected.
• Custom referral system Users can share a referral link. When someone signs up using their link, they get $10 in advertising credits.
• Custom advertising system Users can buy credits to schedule weekly ads to promote their projects or services.
• News articles: A user with the "editor" role can create news articles using markdown.
• Image processing: Each image uploaded to Huzzler is processed and cropped to the perfect format to strike a balance between quality and file size. They are stored using Cloudflare R2.

Saving 30% monthly on ad revenue using a custom advertising system

The main way Huzzler is monetizied is through advertising. For most websites, this is done using Google Ads. However, for Huzzler, I built a custom advertising system. A user can buy credits and credits can be used to schedule in weekly advertisements. Much like you'd see on Google or Facebook, fully automated. The benefit of a custom system is it allows Huzzler to sell very target ads (targeted to founders) and not have to pay a piece of the ad revenue to Google (which is usually around 30%).

Users can buy credits to schedule weekly ads. The price per ad is determined by the weekly impressions generated on the platform.

This way, an admin can simply enter the number of impressions that Huzzler got the previous week and all ad prices are automatically updated.

What people say about Huzzler

Technologies Used:

• Laravel 12
• Alpine.js
• Tailwind CSS
• PostgreSQL
• Cloudflare CDN
• Cloudflare R2
• Deployed on custom Hetzner server

Project Outcome

The platform successfully launched, receiving lots of positive feedback for it's simply UI and refreshing design. Huzzler has reached 1000+ members and is growing daily. People share project ideas, give each other feedback, and get help with their projects.