Legal Reach is a startup in San Francisco with a strong founding team and some pretty strong investors.  The CEO and I were the only two full-time developers and I got to work with large databases and other neat tools.  I was in charge of the growth segment and my work directly contributed to a 300% increase in attorneys registered on the website.

Website: www.legalreach.com

Work

According to the Wall Street Journal, Legal Reach is the largest network of legal professionals in the United States.  I increased attorney sign-up mainly with the email and invite feature that I built and A/B tested.  Most of the challenges involved dealing with large queues and incoming webhooks from our Mailgun account so that we could properly track our metrics.  I was able to do things such as optimize the best hours to send emails, by time zone, in order to get the highest rate of sign-up.  An attorney on the west coast, for example, signs up more frequently if they receive an email at 1pm, while attorneys on the east coast prefer it between 7am and 8am.

I also started building a “add your LinkedIn connections” feature for those users who chose to signup using LinkedIn.  Overall, I worked with Redis, Resque, Haml, large datasets in Postgres, and various APIs (Mailgun, LinkedIn, Facebook).