Earned media drives awareness — but no one was measuring it.
MEMO's founders saw a structural gap: earned media generates organic awareness and engagement, but lacks the visibility metrics search and paid media take for granted. Brands ended up crediting the channels they could measure and underweighting the ones they couldn't.
The core problem was the absence of comprehensive readership tracking — a real-time pipeline that could tell a PR team how many people actually read an article, where they came from, and how the sentiment trended.
The product had to launch with the top US publishers already onboarded, dashboards that PR teams could read without training, and a backend that scaled with traffic spikes from day one.
From idea to a five-thousand-events-per-second platform.
Runtime built a centralised platform aggregating readership and engagement data from major US publishers. The data model was designed for time-series ingestion and analytics queries from the start. The frontend (React Native) delivered the dashboards on web and mobile from a single codebase.
Two layers of intelligence sit on top of the raw signal: a linguistic sentiment classifier (positive / negative / neutral) and a visual ranking system that surfaces the most-read pieces by topic, region and time-window.
Throughput target: 5,000 events per second. The pipeline runs on AWS Lambda for elastic compute, with Rails handling API and admin, Python doing the linguistic processing, and Snowflake as the analytical warehouse.
Built to ingest 5,000 events per second.
A platform that aggregates readership across the largest US publishers needs to keep up with traffic the moment it spikes. The stack was chosen for throughput and elastic compute, not novelty.
Tracked readership that brands could finally cite.
MEMO went to market with annual-subscription pricing, with global brands signing up to make PR measurement decisions on actual readership rather than impressions. The platform demonstrated long-term value creation and continuous improvement: every quarter shipped a new analytics surface or integration.
The partnership ran from 2020 through 2022, with Runtime owning core engineering for the lifetime of the build. Trusted engineering team, duplicating revenue YoY.
Long-engagement, product-engineering shape.
MEMO is the kind of engagement we keep coming back to. Founders with a real insight, a stretch timeline, and the willingness to treat us as the engineering org — not as a vendor handing back a build at the end. The codebase was theirs from week one; the team that built it shipped every release.
