Webmonkey got the chance to sit down with Dan McComas (aka kickme444), creator of the amazing Reddit Secret Santa program, for an exclusive interview. Since launching redditgifts.com a month ago on November 16, around 5,000 participants from the Reddit community have taken part in what is believed to be the largest Secret Santa program ever.

We spoke with Dan, who by day is a systems architect from Alameda, California (and a camera shy one at that, hence the portrait), and got some details about how the project came to be, how he built and launched the website in such a short amount of time, and whether he’s going to do it again next year.

The Story:

Dan thought up the idea on November 10. He posted on Ask Reddit wondering aloud if anyone would want to participate in an anonymous gift exchange.

Ideas began flooding in, so Dan created a Secret Santa subreddit and encouraged other users to subscribe to it. Within a couple of hours, over 1,000 users had subscribed and people began volunteering for the various technical tasks (setting up the servers, programming) involved with launching the project.

The community quickly fleshed out a set of rules — you had to have signed up as a Reddit user before November 10, for one, and they set a $15 cap on gifts.

Dan realized something this big couldn’t be administered by hand, so he created a quick site in Django and parked it at RedditGifts.com. At first, all it did was provide information and the rules and take sign-ups through a form.

The site launched on November 16th, less than a week after the idea was proposed. By this time, a small army of developers had come together to help make the project a reality.

The back-end was fully automated, so all Dan and his wife had to do was provide customer service via e-mail. In total, they sent out over 30,000 e-mails — an aggregate of different bulk e-mails to different subsets of users who each had different issues or needs. But still, lots of e-mails.

Around 5,000 people signed up to exchange gifts. By the night of Tuesday, December 15th, all but 300-500 had followed through. That’s a success rate of around 90 percent.

Reddit users spent over $114,500 on gifts. Yes, many people broke the $15 rule. The real gift was to FedEx and UPS — over $47,000 was spent on shipping. View the full stats here.

Reddit users were matched up with strangers, so they had to casually stalk one another on Reddit to learn as much as they could about their recipients’ personalities.

During sign-up, people were given a blank text field for special requests. Most left it blank, but others put book titles, food allergies or other special requests.

Most gave one gift and received one gift, but some people gave two or three gifts.

Participants were encouraged to document the gifts they received, and you can see the various unboxing shots on a Gift Gallery. In true Reddit fashion, you can vote up the cooler gifts.

Dan was matched with a 17-year-old from San Diego (his only request was that he received something his parents wouldn’t freak out about) and an avid Reddit user who was a bit older. Dan walked around the shops in his home town of Alameda and put together some packages of novelties like Space Invaders ice cube trays and sci-fi memorabilia. The avid Reddit user got a rare Upvote Breakfast poster.

Dan received two gifts. He got an ancient wooden ring from Ireland from one person, and a Gameboy Advance from somebody else — either from Sweden or Finland, he’s not sure. It came with a Donkey Kong game and a European power plug, so he can’t use it without an adapter.

Will he do it next year? He’s not sure. He and his wife are exhausted from all the work. Much of the informational copy, the sign-up form, the database and the rest of site he built are all reusable, but this project pulled in more traffic than any website he’s ever created during his professional career.

Wednesday December 16th will mark one month since the site’s launch. All that in a month! Amazing.