Saint George’s interactive story:

The Whatsapp bot that become viral on 23 April (27.325 users)

In Catalonia (Spain), Saint Gerorge’s day is one of the most original celebrations, book and flower stalls are set up along the streets of Barcelona 🌹📚

So I created a gamechat that explains the Saint George’s story from the point of view of one the characters (🐮👸🏼🤴👑👨‍🌾🐲), in order to advance the users have to interact with other participants and find the next character that unlock his story.

Let’s see an example:

(Note that all the texts are in Catalan)

As you can see, to start the history you must start a conversation with the bot and text the keyword: conte.

Then, the bot explain the introduction of the story and assigns you a character (in this case the princess 👸🏼). To continue, the user need to find another participant with the king 👑 character and attach the contact:

Finally, to end the story, the princess must find the dragon 🐲

Results

• 27.375 users started at least one story
• 133.707 messages and contacts processed by the chatbot during the event
• 2797 users complete the story as the cow 🐮
• 3571 users complete the story as the 👸🏼
• 3196 users complete the story as the knight 🤴
• 3281 users complete the story as the king 👑
• 2918 users complete the story as the farmer 👨‍🌾
• 2067 users complete the story as the dragon 🐲

Infrastructure

I developed the Whatsapp bot using the following elements:

• A laptop with this Python Whatsapp Web wrapper
• A mobile phone with Whatsapp installed (and a secondary telephone line)
• A MySQL database using Docker

Issues during the event

I noticed several scalability problems when handling requests from more than 10k users. The first hours the new users income where 2/hour (basically my family and friends), then it started growing exponentially until 1000 new users per hour.

At this point the system collapsed and the response time raised to 5 minutes in some cases, that delay stopped the exponentially growing curve :(

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family and friends who trusted in my idea and forward the Whatsapp bot contact.