The Nostalgia Machine

A weekend project turned viral success

The Nostalgia Machine lets you relive your favorite childhood tunes by taking you on a musical journey through time. By simply selecting any year, you can instantly access and jam out to the top 100 hits that defined that era. The project struck a powerful emotional chord, going viral on Reddit and amassing an impressive 3 million page views in its first week of launch.

Learnings

This passion project taught me valuable lessons about product development and business strategy. By treating it like a mini hackathon and setting strict time constraints, I was able to ship quickly and effectively. However, the viral success also highlighted a missed opportunity in monetization - while we still maintain healthy traffic of around 100,000 monthly views, having advertising and merchandise strategies in place earlier could have capitalized on the initial surge of visitors.

View the project here.

UI

0.1 - The landing page

0.2 - The year selection page

0.3 - The top 100 hits page

0.4 - The song selection page