Introducing `secret`

send a message through a safe, private, and encrypted link that automatically expires to ensure your stuff does not remain online forever.

3 min readNov 30, 2017

Secret is a side-project that I built to solve a single problem. I still remember many times my old bosses and friends sharing with me keys or passwords through a chat platform (Slack, WhatsApp, etc) and these secrets probably still exist there.

To solve that I built Secret where you can share those kinda of information through a safe, private, and encrypted link that automatically expires.

But what that means?

It means that when you use Secret, we receive an encrypted copy of the secret. We don't have the ability to access the content of your encrypted secret, and only keep it until somebody opens it.

We use WebCrypto API with the AES-GCM algorithm to encrypt and decrypt the secret in the browser, meaning the secret that’s transferred to our server is already encrypted and its contents can’t be viewed by us.

The true story!

I actually built Secret because I thought it would be a cool project to practice my coding/design skills. I'm always creating something new every day and Secret is one of them.

When I had the idea I came to a friend and talked about Secret with him, he told me that it was a simple and interesting project. And that got me excited, on the same night I started building the API, it took me less than 2 hours.

The next morning I started designing the website and building it (front-end code, connecting with the API, …).

After finishing Secret, I worked in the post-production of the website.

Writing a good readme on Github
Making the repository public
Sharing on Social Media (facebook and twitter)
Publishing on Product Hunt

It got some attention on Facebook groups, people really enjoyed Secret and I was really happy. I thought that was it.

Since a lot of people liked Secret I added more features/improvements like:

Add optional passphrase
Add copy link button
Add help page
Add about page

And I thought that was it… 🎉

I don't know why. I don't know how… But secret was the #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.

#3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt ❤ (at the end of the day it was the #4)

It was a Sunday afternoon when I saw Product Hunt’s tweet about Secret. And to be honest I didn’t believe at first because I wasn’t expecting at all. At the same time, I was really excited!