PR Distribution emerged as a prominent press release platform, publishing over 50,000 press releases and earning numerous G2 awards. During my tenure, I sold over $3 million dollars of press releases.
The biggest challenge was building a brand and product that could compete against venture capital backed behemoths in an already crowded market.
PR Distribution was mentioned by platforms such as Shopify, HubSpot and SBA.gov (U.S. Small Business Administration).
Backend Architecture
Managing traffic spikes was a challenge. Cloudflare helped absorb much of the bandwidth strain and thwart DDoS attacks during peak loads. However, Google's crawling overloaded the database server and halted operations. To resolve this, I set up MariaDB replication. Search engine crawls then queried the read-only database cluster, leaving the master database server unaffected.
Frontend User Experience
At the core of the application was the ability for users to upload, edit and manage press releases from a central dashboard. Throughout this process, we experimented with multiple editors like CKEditor 3, CKEditor 4, Froala Editor before finally settling on CKEditor 5 once it became available.
Generate PDFs
In the early days, we simply sent a list of links to customers. But as we expanded, customers requested presentable reports to share with their own clients. So I leveraged the FPDF and mPDF PHP libraries to generate aesthetically pleasing reports with vector graphics.
