Story Behind

I use Instagram extensively and while surfing there I see a lot of influencers add their YouTube links in the bio and stories but when I click on their link it opens it on Instagram's white browser which sucks for viewers.

I have been a YouTuber myself and have seen my friends complaining about why they don't click my bio link. To Summarise below is the problem statement.

Update: this project got me selected as a winner for AWS Amplify Hackathon .

Problem

Content Creators / Influencers on YouTube and marketers who use Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin for sharing their video links have observed that all these platforms use their own browsers while opening external links.

This might be good for Facebook as it makes people stay on their own platform for more time but not good for creators and end consumers.

End Consumers can't see videos in high quality and end up having a bad experience while creators can't get better ad revenues or better engagement since not all users would have logged in to YouTube on their browser.

My Solution ✨

I created richurl.tech which takes normal YouTube and Amazon links and converts them to magical rich URLs for absolutely FREE with unlimited redirects and unlimited links.

Generating Rich URL's for YouTube Increases the chances of viewers staying more on your video, better ad revenue, and better chances of commenting.

Generating Rich URL's for Amazon helps digital marketers increase the chances of users clicking the buy button resulting in better affiliate commission.

How does it work?

Let me try to put it in the simplest way. When someone generates a rich URL for their YouTube video, I create 3 links. one for the web(https), android(intent), and IOS. Later based on the user agent of the request I do a 301 redirect to the respective link.

Features 🔥

• Supports YouTube Videos/Channels
• Supports Amazon India
• Get click counts based on the device.
• Directly share the link from YouTube to richurl.tech or paste Links from Clipboard with one click.
• Resultant URL gets copied to your clipboard automatically so you can start sharing with ease.
• Progressive Web App

If you are a YouTuber this is a must try and let me know if you are liking it.

Developing Experience 😊

I had a basic idea of how to implement it but was not sure if it would work. That's when I started breaking the problem into small chunks and assigned myself small tasks every day till the 23rd of February to complete on Notion.

Notion is amazing. I created different pages for the Backend and frontend. Created boards and assigned work for every day.

Technology Stack

• Nuxt
• Buefy
• Mongo DB
• Express JS
• Amplify

In the first 6-8 days built the rest-api iteratively and added small features here and there when I got new ideas. The learnings from building Rest API were building auth, Relational Data with Moongoose, and the main logic to implement deep linking on the web. Learnings from building the front end side were Share Target API and Buefy .

The next 3 days setup the nuxt project handling and functionalities like Auth, Clipboard web API, web share api, and handling dynamic routes in Nuxt.

The final days(3 Days) were for building the UI side of things using Buefy Extention to Nuxt.

Challenges during the project ⚙️

• Deep Linking Functionality (it's different for Yt Video and channel)
• Implementing Auth in Nuxt (Once it's figured it's piece of cake but took me an entire day)
• BUEFY TABLES (Customization, handling clicks, and other small details are hard to find in the documentation and took me 2 days just to implement basic features in the frontend.)

Overall loved building this tool for marketers and influencers as I was new to most of the stack in this project and got to learn a lot by building this and pushed myself to write code every day. Shout out to Hashnode and Amplify for finally motivating me to build this.

Future Improvements

• Complete Statistics with Geo-Location and From location (on it right now)
• Add support for more social platforms
• Map to a custom domain for better branding ( not sure how this works. Need to dive deep in)

Here is the GitHub Repo - Click Here

This is a soft launch of RichURL.tech and my submission to Hashnode's Amplify Hackathon. Use it and please give feedback so that I can add more features and improve the existing ones.

Also, share this on Twitter with your other Youtube Friends so that they can be benefited.