Built the outlier finder in one evening
Outliers against an account's own median, never raw views. 60 posts, 11 seconds, 23 cents.
Shipped v1 of the viral outlier finder in a single night sprint.
The core idea: raw view counts only ever surface big accounts. So it scores each post against the account’s own median and follower ratio instead. A 40x-baseline video from a small creator now outranks a merely-big number from a huge one. That is what an outlier actually is.
First live run: scanned 60 posts from one account in 11 seconds, found 23 outliers, top one sitting at 38.9x the account baseline. Total API cost: 23 cents.
Some builds take a month. This one took an evening and changed how we scout content. No correlation between effort and value, as usual.