Reddit is good for many things. r/explainlikeimfive breaks down hard-hitting issues into digests that a 5-year-old might understand, r/lifeprotips is pretty self-explanatory, r/TIL is a knowledge dispenser where I learnt that it’d be no big deal if all the mosquitoes died, and r/everymanshouldknow is actually a rather well curated subreddit on tips for men.
Even according to Get Jio founder, Felix Lee, platforms like Reddit are handy in generating news and other useful things: they allow users to interact, discuss, and in turn, generate content and sometimes impactful ideas. He says, “I’m a firm believer of a good platform, a community-centric platform, a true crowd curated content driven platform.” Which is what he aims to achieve for Get Jio.
How Get Jio Began
“I always find great posts such as deals and events in Singapore shared by many friends on Facebook. However, whenever I want to find the same post again, I never seem to be able to, so I wanted to build a website which collates all these types of links into a list for easy searching all under one platform,” Felix says.
To put it simply, Get Jio is a platform that lists links and information from the community, showing the hottest, latest, and most well-liked events, happenings, deals, promotions and more. It also integrates the Reddit-style upvoting feature that keeps the popular posts at the top, so you can always keep tabs on it.
The Power Of Reddit
Currently, there are many categories up on Get Jio like Food, Sports, Announcements, and more. Users have posted suggestions on where to get a certain dish, or theatre festivals around town, but Felix says it will expand as the site gets more populated. To gather some advice on how to improve his site, he turned to his board of advisors — Reddit.
“I’m very happy to have posted this website on Reddit, as many users have suggested many great suggestions on what should be improved or added,” he said. In a short time, Redditors began to give comments and suggestions that he worked on immediately. New categories — like Nightlife — will be added, as well as two general tabs to house all categories neatly.
His goal is for Get Jio to gain enough traction, and for users to be able to sustain a thriving Internet community within the next six months. From there, the process of attracting venture capitals and investors to raise seed fundings will follow. First people he’ll need on the team? Programmers. More specifically, he wants to work on adding time fields, so users can identify when the deal or event is available, and create time sensitive posts.
As with all startups, challenges and roadblocks are inevitable. For one, Get Jio is a one-man operation: “Get Jio does not have a team. In fact, it’s all a one man show by me. However, the technology behind this website was not built by me. It was built on an open source web app, Telescope. So you can say the web app are the lego bricks, and my concept used these bricks to build it into a reality.
“Coming from a non-Meteor background — and the Telescope app is based on Meteor — I had to read a lot on their documentations and did a lot of trial and error. Luckily, there are a few friends who are willing to provide feedback on the private development period, as well as testing the site,” Felix explained.
On top of technical skills, Felix has to manage working on Get Jio, his day job, and attending therapy — he suffered a stroke at the age of 20, and had to undergo a major brain surgery which affected some basic functions, as well as his short-term memory and planning skills. The ordeal, he said, gave him a new perspective on life and made him a more positive person. “My body may not be functioning the way it used to, but I’m thankful my heart and mind still are,” Felix said in an interview with TODAY.
Here’s to more tech-y ventures, and adventures for the young lad.
