How GOAT uses cloud technology to scale their Black Friday operations

Muhammad Ali. Michael Jordan. Serena Williams. All strove (or are striving) to be the greatest of all time in their sports, and GOAT the startup is attempting the same thing in their industry of choice: sneakers.

Based in Los Angeles, GOAT is the largest marketplace for buying and selling authenticated sneakers. Launched in 2015, the company was determined to create a safe and trusted place where both buyers and sellers could rest assured that their merchandise was 100% real and authenticated. GOAT does this by verifying every shoe that is sold in their marketplace, with trained authenticators looking at everything from a shoe’s stitching and labels, to its boxes. According to Marko Vasiljevic, GOAT’s Director of Engineering, authenticators even smell, touch, and feel the materials as part of their check.

Given the size of the sneaker industry—$55 billion and counting—Vasiljevic is constantly thinking about scale, particularly when it comes to the technology behind GOAT. He says he learned this lesson the hard way, as a Black Friday contest they ran their first year drove an unprecedented amount of traffic to their site and they crashed and burned for three days (don’t worry, they survived and went on to make $400,000 in sales the next month). For this holiday season, especially for Black Friday, Vasiljevic says he is again expecting a huge spike in traffic but has various AWS services in place to help them scale at a second’s notice. Learn more about how they are planning to do this in the above video.