Healthcare charity
Auction engine for a hospital charity
Wine and experiences, sold to fund children’s medical bills.
+28%revenue lift
What was stalling
A hospital runs charity auctions: wine, experiences and other items go up for bid, and the money raised pays medical bills for children who need the help.
Where this came from
Hospital charity auction program.
Standard auction tools let the server clock and each bidder’s screen drift apart. That drift leads to disputed bids and lost revenue, and at a charity auction, lost revenue is money that never reaches the children it was raised for.
What I did
- I led the build of a real-time bidding engine with a custom synchronization engine that keeps every bidder’s clock within 2ms of the master auction clock, so bids are sequenced in the order they were actually placed.
- It is built to handle 45,000 bids a second.
- A charity auction runs on trust. A bidder who thinks they were outbid unfairly stops bidding, and the cause loses. So the protocol was tuned until every bid landed in the exact order it was placed.
StackTypeScriptWebSocketsCustom sync protocolEdge computePostgreSQL
What moved
- +28%
- revenue lift
- 2ms
- clock sync, every bidder to the master clock
- 45k a second
- bid capacity it is built to handle
- Deterministic
- bid order: every bid lands in the order it was placed
What I’d look at in your company
The questions this work taught me to ask. Try them on your own company.
- Where do your customers lose trust in the moment before they pay?
- What does one disputed transaction cost you, beyond the transaction?
- Which part of your product would fail first if traffic spiked tomorrow?
Start with an email.
Tell me what is stalling. I will tell you plainly whether I am the right person to fix it.
Local business? I still take a few of those too. Email me.