Fifty states. Twenty-four hours.
One Guinness World Record.

The 50-state race for a candy of their own

JOYRIDE is the better-for-you candy brand co-owned by YouTuber Ryan Trahan. In 2026 they set out to answer a fun question: which state loves JOYRIDE the most? The answer would come on JOYRIDE Day, June 13. The day brought a 24-hour livestream, a Guinness World Records attempt, and a custom candy made just for the winning state.

The challenge

Ryan’s fans don’t trickle in. Every Wednesday and Saturday at 10am CT, a new video went up asking viewers to RSVP, and the traffic hit all at once. JOYRIDE needed somewhere for that energy to land. It had to turn someone watching on YouTube into someone repping their home state.

It also had to be fair. If the biggest state always won, the other 49 had no reason to play. And on JOYRIDE Day the site had to do everything at once. It had to take in thousands of Instagram photos and put live standings in front of Ryan on stream. It also had to keep a record clean enough for a Guinness adjudicator to sign off on. There would be no second take.

What we did

The first big decision was where not to build it. JOYRIDE’s store lives on Shopify, and it should stay there. But a storefront isn’t built for a live map, a real database, or scores that change while people watch. So we built the challenge as its own app on Vercel, at a web address short enough for Ryan to say out loud.

In April, the Launchpad went live. Fans picked their state, RSVP’d, and could apply to be a State Captain by sending in a video. The map started filling in, and people had a team long before the main event.

Then we built the day itself, in three acts. Before JOYRIDE Day, the site was all about RSVPs. During the event, it turned into a live scoreboard. Afterward, it became a recap and a winner reveal. JOYRIDE’s team could switch acts from their admin panel without calling a developer.

Fairness came down to math. States were scored per 100,000 residents aged 13 and up, so a small state had the same shot as a big one. When the counting stopped, Idaho was on top.

On the day, every Instagram photo tagged #JOYRIDEDAY2026 flowed into the site on its own. Each one was matched to a state, checked for duplicates, and reviewed before it counted. The production team pulled live counts straight onto the broadcast, and a random eligible post won a prize every hour. Behind the scenes, the site kept its own timestamped record of every submission. Our developers stayed on watch for the full 24 hours.

Building for a day that cannot fail

The hardest part of the build had nothing to do with the map or the leaderboard.

It was the count.

A Guinness World Record lives or dies on verification. When we tested ahead of the event, we found that a third-party data feed alone could leave gaps in the final number. That wasn’t a risk worth taking on a day that only happens once. So we built the site to record every qualifying #JOYRIDEDAY2026 photo the moment it arrived, each one timestamped. The Guinness adjudicators checked the count against that record and confirmed 11,495 approved photos.

The platform choice came from the same thinking. Shopify is built for online stores, and this wasn’t a store. It was a live scoreboard that had to count photos and update the map all day long. Vercel let us build exactly that, and it scales up on its own when traffic surges.

We tested in stages. The first test ran on a staging copy of the site ahead of Ryan’s first big video in May. The final full load test ran against the live site on June 10, three days before JOYRIDE Day. On the day itself, traffic peaked at about 6,000 visitors an hour, once at kickoff and again in the final stretch.

Not all organizations have someone like Ryan Trahan in their corner. But all of them have a day that can’t go wrong: a giving day, open enrollment, the morning conference registration opens. JOYRIDE’s day worked because the platform was chosen to fit the moment, not out of habit. It also worked because the people behind it were already watching when the crowd showed up.