4 min read
It started with a VP who resigned on a Tuesday. By Wednesday morning someone had asked whether we were doing anything for her. By Thursday morning I had a link. By the end of the next week, forty people had written something and recorded video messages — real things, not "Best of luck!" things.
The first version was not a product. It was a link that worked. What surprised me was how seriously people took it. Nobody knew it was built overnight. They assumed it was a professional tool, and they treated it like one. They wrote things they'd never say in a meeting or put in a Slack message.
That's what WishWarmly is trying to protect: the conditions under which people write real things. Private contribution, no one copying anyone else, a format that feels worth the effort. The technology is straightforward. The hard part is making something that earns that kind of writing.
I'm a weekend tinkerer with a full-time job. I didn't build a startup that Tuesday — I built a form that worked.
The organizer enters a name and sets up the card. A link goes out. Contributors open it, type a message or record a short video, and submit. The organizer sees who's in. The recipient gets a link when it's ready. That was it. No landing page, no blog, no PDF, no AI transcription. Just the core loop: collect, review, deliver.
I put a lot of hours into it. And apparently it showed — because nobody assumed it was a quick build. When I eventually told one of my engineers how it started, he was genuinely surprised. He'd assumed it was a real professional product with a team behind it. That reaction told me something: the bones were solid enough that people treated it like a real thing, because it felt like one.
That core loop is essentially what WishWarmly still is today. Everything since has been making it better — the flip-book experience, the PDF keepsake, the AI transcription so video messages live in writing even after the video expires. But the bones were there in a weekend because the bones were simple. A form. A view. A link.
I wasn't solving a problem I'd read about. I was solving a problem I had every time someone handed me a virtual greeting card link.
The experience was always the same. Open the link, see that fourteen people had already written something, realize I had nothing original to say, type something that vaguely fit the room, and close the tab feeling like I'd checked a box rather than done something meaningful. The "Happy Birthday! 🎂" at the top set the tone for everything that followed.
And there was never a video option. Which felt like an enormous missed opportunity — because sometimes you don't want to write. You want someone to see your face when you say thank you. You want them to hear how you meant it.
So when it was my turn to organize a card, I thought about sending another one of those links. And I couldn't. I'd signed too many of them and felt exactly nothing. So instead of using an existing tool, I just built one that worked the way I thought it should.
The honest version: time. Building a product on top of a full-time job is a specific kind of slow. Weekends, early mornings, the hour after everyone goes to sleep. There were moments where the rational answer was to stop — to ship the one card, let the moment pass, go back to normal.
What kept me going was that I couldn't unsee it. Every virtual greeting card link I received after that felt worse by comparison. Now I knew what the experience could be. I'd seen forty people write something real and record video messages in a week, and I'd seen what the format had made possible. Stopping felt like knowing the better version existed and choosing not to build it.
So I kept going on weekends.
Not the biggest group card tool. Not the one with the most integrations or the lowest price. The one people reach for when the moment actually matters — when someone is leaving after ten years, when a teammate has a baby, when a VP who changed the direction of your career walks out the door on a Tuesday.
Those moments deserve something that earns the writing — or the video.
If you've got one coming up, start a card. It takes about twenty seconds to set up.
No noise. One email when a new guide drops.