Hey there 👋

After surviving yet another week of finals in college, I suddenly decided to start a side project with some friends. It’s called HEYHEY, and its promise is to help anyone centralize their online presence.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Ideally, it should let people showcase their social media accounts and upload whatever they want. It should facilitate the process of selling digital goods, creating newsletters, running polls, and other stuff one would expect from using yet another internet service. Seeing insights should be trivial — metrics like how many people have visited a page, where they come from and where they are going.

Now, when you first read what I’m describing, several services might come to your mind, and one in particular is known to have already captured this space. Here’s a hint if you couldn’t guess:

Many creators seem to be on Linktree these days.

So, why are we doing this if the problem was already solved by a multi-million dollar company?

First, I want HEYHEY to differ heavily from Linktree in the long run, which means they can co-exist! While Linktree may encounter issues adding some features, mostly by virtue of being called Link-tree, we have no such limits. Whatever we feel would be useful can be implemented.

Second, I personally think that despite having raised millions of dollars to provide analytics services, Linktree still misses the main point of creating unified pages — they have to have great design. I am by no means a professional designer, but we will make sure HEYHEY has a coherent and consistent UI before adding any feature. Here’s an ultra-early sneak peek:

This is a prototype made with the excellent component library daisyUI. Expect many changes!

And lastly, I want to be able to use HEYHEY myself — proudly. That means no feature will be in production unless it meets our standards that definitely have a proven track record.

Running a web app is pretty inexpensive in 2022, so we can handle running it for years to come. We don’t have to meet growth targets every quarter, nor do we have to mine users’ data to squeeze every single dollar out of them. I simply want to build a decent service, use it, and let others have access to it too.

For now, that’s it. Time to focus and start building. The next post will dive deep into the technical side of things. See you soon!

— Gün