Second Brain

The Undux Bicycle Campaign

The Story

Boris built Undux, a simpler alternative to Redux (a popular React state management tool), because he couldn’t wrap his head around Redux. He considered himself an “average engineer” and figured if he was struggling, others probably were too.

He first tested it at a nonprofit where he was volunteering. Their engineers liked it. Then he joined Facebook and saw the same frustration everywhere: there was an internal support group for Redux users full of people asking the exact same questions he had.

But posting about Undux and waiting for people to come wasn’t working. So Boris wrote a script that scraped the internal Redux support group, tallied complaints by team, then personally reached out to each team’s tech lead and manager. He scheduled individual tech talks for each team: 20 to 40 in total over a few weeks, biking around Meta’s campus between sessions.

“People were so engaged and excited that someone cares about solving this problem they really have.”

Undux became Meta’s most popular state management framework (before being replaced by newer tools like Recoil and Relay).

Lesson for Creators

Distribution matters as much as the product. Boris didn’t just build something good and announce it. He found the frustrated users, tallied where they were, and showed up with a personalized pitch for each group. Nobody comes to you. Go where the pain is, and make the pitch about their problem, not your solution.

Backlinks