How I Connected with 10,000 people over a couple of weeks

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed, and will continue to change, the world and the way we work, rest and play. Some readers might be old enough to recognize I have stolen those words from a certain chocolate bar’s advertising strapline which helps you to ‘WORK, REST and PLAY’. Borrowing from the impactful worlds, COVID-19 has completely changed the way the planet works, rests and plays.

However there has always been a ray of hope with the new vaccines coming in. In India, we proudly produced our own vaccine Covaxine. We mass produced AstraZeneca and distributed them as Covishield. The first phase of vaccines were given to people with more vulnerabilities, which included front line workers, health workers and senior citizens.

The second phase rolled out from May 1st which allowed people of group 18+ to book vaccines via Cowin Portal. However due to a large rush people turned towards tech. Started to follow twitter, and applications. That’s when I thought to create something that allows people to find and notify their vaccine slot.

I thought of creating something that would help as many as possible. To achieve that, I created a chatbot with various choice and customization that was not available before. This helped to generate relevant notification and create a customized experience for the application user.

Here is the Telegram App https://t.me/Cowin_Availability_Slot_bot

The application was hosted on my personal Azure Account

The application supported Email, Telegram, Whatsapp and SMS. However due to high Charges from Twillio(Whatsapp & SMS API), I had to shutdown those to mechanisms.

Using the application was pretty Simple.

In a few weeks it was able to reach to around 10,000 people. I never marketed the application except one LinkedIn post. Hence I was surprised to see a lot of users onboard. I came to know that most of the them joined via “word of mouth”. This really made me happy that what started as a small project touched and reached out to many people?.

I wanted to see an visual impact and hence started to invest time on Power PI. It turned out to be a fun project. One more entity to my Stack ❤ . After plotting the data, the results ❤

I received a lot of feedbacks and a lot of appreciation. There were some constructive feedbacks which I would try to fix immediately. Anyhow reading the feedback made me realize that any small amount of work is never small. It has the potential to touch many lives. I got blessed from different people across the country.

Feedbacks were mainly about –

People wanting to connect and understand the code,

People wanting to collaborate.

People wanting to thank me.

People reaching out with constructive feedback.

A word cloud of the same is available below.