PulseIQ, a real-time social listening and brand-health platform

Executive Summary

We’re building PulseIQ, a real-time social listening and brand-health platform that scrapes Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok—wherever the conversation is happening—and applies a custom BERT-based sentiment engine (fine-tuned on brand crises data) to detect trends, surface influencers, and trigger instant alerts when volume or negativity spikes. The entire pipeline—API ingestion, stream processing, search indexing, analytics, and webhooks—runs in Kubernetes on AWS Fargate, with sensitive configs locked in HashiCorp Vault. Dashboards live in Elasticsearch + Kibana, and we even built a private “war room” Slack bot that DMs our on-call team whenever sentiment on a tracked keyword jumps >30% in an hour.

Why This Is Gold

20% CAGR for AI social monitoring

Brands pay $500–$5K/month per 50–500 keywords, plus overage on data volume

Real-time crisis detection can save a Fortune 500 company $1M+ in PR and ad spend

Our demo: spotted a product-swap scandal for a CPG client before their official recall announcement

Tech Stack & Under-the-Hood Details

Ingestion Layer

Twitter & Reddit Streaming via their firehose APIs (yes, we have privileged elevated access for enterprise clients)

Third-party crawlers for Instagram and TikTok (headless Chrome + Puppeteer, auto-rotating residential proxies)

Apache Kafka cluster (3 brokers, 24 GB RAM each) for durable event streaming

Processing & NLP

Spark Structured Streaming jobs consuming Kafka → batch micro-batches every 5 sec

Custom BERT Sentiment Classifier:

Base: bert-base-uncased → fine-tuned on 50K labeled crisis vs. neutral brand messages

Deployed via TorchServe on GPU AWS instances

Named Entity Recognition: spaCy + custom gazetteers for brand/product names

Storage & Indexing

Elasticsearch 8.x cluster (5 nodes, EBS-optimized SSD storage)

Time-series metrics in InfluxDB for sentiment volume, latencies, and anomaly detection

Analytics & Dashboard

Kibana visualizations: sentiment heatmaps, trend lines, co-mention graphs

React single-page app for client admin, built with micro-frontend architecture

Alerting & Workflow

Webhook engine built on Node.js + Express → triggers Slack / PagerDuty / email alerts

Smart throttling: Only alert on a sustained 3-point move in sentiment score plus a 10% increase in mentions

Auto-escalation rules: If negative sentiment remains >15 min, escalate to on-call PR lead

Security & Ops

All secrets in HashiCorp Vault, auto-rotated daily

CI/CD: GitHub Actions pipelined to build Docker images → deploy via Argo CD to EKS

Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana for cluster health, consumer lag, model latency

Market Segments (Shh, Our Target List)

Fortune 500 CMOs & PR Agencies

Need enterprise-grade SLAs (99.9%), SOC2 compliance, dedicated support

High-Growth Tech Startups

$1–10K monthly spend, looking to build brand trust quickly

Gaming & Entertainment Brands

Real-time monitoring during launches; influencer campaign ROI

Financial Services

Watch for compliance issues and rumor spikes

Consumer Goods / CPG

Track product feedback, recall readiness

E-commerce Platforms

Detect flash sale impacts, shipping complaints

Media & Publishing Houses

Measure story reach, sentiment across channels

Pain Points & “Painkiller” Features

Pain Point Severity Current Fix PulseIQ Edge

Slow crisis detection Critical Manual daily reports Sub-10 sec detection + auto-alerting

Data silos across platforms High Multiple dashboards Unified, cross-platform ingestion + graphs

No influencer insight Medium Spreadsheet tracking Graph-based influencer ranking in Neo4j

High false-positive rates High Rules-based filters ML-powered sentiment + contextual filters

Geo Focus & Rollout Plan

USA (largest spend; early adopters in Silicon Valley & NYC)

UK (mature ad agencies, London FinTech)

Singapore (Asia Pacific HQs; high social media penetration)

Germany (strong DACH demand, data-privacy conscious)

Brazil / India (fastest growth in social adoption; price-sensitive tiers)

Unit Economics (Internal Projections)

CAC: $12 000 (enterprise sales cycle: 3 months)

LTV: $180 000 (avg. $5 000/mo for 3-year contract) → LTV : CAC = 15 : 1

Payback: 3 months (early revenue covers acquisition cost)

Churn: < 5 % annually (sticky due to integrated workflows and data lock-in)