The Problem I Wanted to Solve
As a developer, I tell people that my happy place is "hands on keyboard." But let's be real, I spend too much time doom scrolling. I'm a father, and it's hard to see all the toxicity in the digital world that my kids are exposed to. But, with a hat tip to Gandhi, "build the change you want to see in the world."
So I built The Daily Gratitude Drop. It's just a simple site that serves 5 curated gratitude stories each day. No ads, no comments, no infinite feeds. Not even any accounts or signups. Just anonymous people sharing moments of thankfulness. But, because of that? No drama or toxicity, either.
The Tech Stack
Built with Next.js and TypeScript, deployed on Vercel with Cloudflare workers. The whole thing runs on free tiers, which limits some of what I want to do, but I'm focused on getting this in front of people as quickly and efficiently as I can. I'm hand-reviewing every submission to maintain quality, because we know how anonymous people can be when they're handed an empty text field. Do I scale? No. But there are worse problems to have.
Claude Code helped accelerate development significantly, I can't pretend it didn't. It definitely let me convert ideas into working code faster than I could have alone.
The Reality Check
I launched on ProductHunt this week expecting... well, more than what happened. I got a handful of votes and 1 or 2 comments. Not great. That's ok. It's not like I was overly prepared for success. I just kind of threw it out there.
But here's the interesting part: I got visits, and I got content. And it's a start.
What I'm Learning
The gap between "sounds like a good idea" and "people actually use this daily" is huge. It's not enough for friends and family to support you, you need strangers who don't know you personally to independently see value in your offering.
Gratitude practice is real and popular, but getting people to read strangers' gratitude online every day? That's a harder behavior change than I anticipated. It's not a one-and-done. People need to come back every day. And I'm not exactly Wordle over here.
I know a number of ways I could improve that. I could have an email newsletter. I could implement web notifications. My kids tell me, "This should be an app." Maybe I'll implement one or more of them, eventually. Out of the gate, I wanted no barriers. Just gratitude - read some, write some for the next person. Early names for the project included "The Perpetual Gratitude Machine" and "Thank It Forward" but they were too long to find a good domain name.
But I'm also learning about people's character, too. When I first thought of the idea, I immediately thought, "People are going to spam the input form with no end of horrible things." So, I built a moderation queue to make sure that does happen. Know what? Hasn't happened. Other than an early misfire when I tried posting to reddit (where I got 2 very reddit-like submissions), I've had nothing but positivity. There's over 100 legitimate notes in the database now, and I've had to reject exactly none of them. So, people don't always just come to ruin things. That alone was something to be grateful for.
Building in Public Lessons
Platform fit matters - PH and other "look at my startup!" sites are very tech-centric. A gratitude site isn't really their vibe. But I also don't want to go spamming gratitude sites that I've never visited, either. It's a tricky balance. I'm not marketing a startup, I'm a solo dad just trying to make something positive. Honesty and integrity are important to me.
Engagement beats traffic - 25 visitors who submit content > 250 visitors who bounce immediately.
Content supply is everything - Without steady submissions, the whole concept falls apart. I'm constantly worried about running out of stories. I keep toying with a "recycle" feature that will bring back notes from past drops, but I don't want to go to that too soon and ruin the whole premise. I write some notes each day, but that's me being a user of my own service, eating my own dogfood.
What's Next
The core concept works for people who find it. The challenge is sustainable discovery and retention without burning myself out on constant promotion. I've decided that I'm not going to throw the kitchen sink into it as long as it's getting only a trickle of visitors. I'm picking and choosing changes carefully to find the right balance. Focusing on things like getting people to share the links, and to remember to come back regularly.
That doesn't mean I don't have bigger plans. If I actually got a significant daily audience? I'd love to create that email list. Maybe have some sort of special features for them, like sneak peeks or "best of" lists. I want to improve the share functionality, maybe do something with images for the likes of Instagram. App? Sure, why not. I've done apps before. But this isn't the time to lead with an app.
The Real Metric
Despite the launch disappointment, I've got the most content in my queue ever. Lots of observations on the weather and the sunshine, or family, which is to be expected. Many are short, but I gave people 280 characters so those who want to really paint a picture are encouraged to do so. My favorite part is that, as the content moderator, I get to read every one. It's kind of ironic - everybody else gets 5 notes a day, and I've read 100+. But because of that, the daily drop thing is lost to me :) Oh, well. Maybe some day we switch to a different moderation system where I don't see every note.
That authentic variety tells me something is working, even if it's not what I originally envisioned. I'm going to keep banging on it, and I'll try to keep posting here with interesting updates. I meant it when I said I wanted to build something of value, so I'm happy to discuss how I built it and what tech I used. I'm learning much of it along the way. I had no idea what Cloudflare D1 was when I started, and this is my first Vercel deployment.
Check out The Daily Gratitude Drop at gratitudedrop.com if you're curious. Always looking for feedback from fellow builders.
Top comments (5)
keep up the work, mate
Great read, and great story.
The app looks amazing. And I think it is exactly the kind of web apps we need more of.
Thanks, I appreciate it! Every day I stare at it and I think, "it's too simple! it's too simple! I have to add more stuff!" but then take a breath and also tell myself, "First get people who want to use it. Then add stuff. The greatest new feature in the world means nothing if nobody sees it."
The Daily Gratitude Drop - Already collected
And I'm grateful for that! :)