IHeartQuotes is Back (Maybe)
Always exercising my muscles for building things.
I took the opportunity of Medium re-opening access to custom domains to bring iheartquotes.com back. Click that link and follow the publication and good things will happen to you. Guaranteed.
Originally IHeartQuotes had been a very important side project for me, maybe the most important. I’d never built and launched anything of my own, so I challenged myself to launch something in 48 hours. I put a small database of quotes online, picked a name, got a domain, put some Rails code around it for displaying and rating the quotes and voila! I had a side project.
Then, months or years later, I did a second pass on it to connect it to Twitter’s first API. And somehow that led to a very popular Twitter account. I briefly had the 96th most popular account on Twitter. Can you imagine? I didn’t know that was important or worth defending, so I moved on to other things.
But then I came back to it again, years later, and put some volunteer moderators on the Twitter account. Followers would submit quotes and the moderators would repost them. That grew the account to 500k followers.
Still not knowing what to do with it, I abandoned it years ago. The site is down. The Twitter account is down. But I still have these databases of quotes.
So I guess, IHQ on Medium is pass #4. At first I thought I’d hook up a feed and do automated posts of what’s in my database, i.e. quote of the day.
But then as I was setting it up, I wondered what would happen if the quotes were mostly “Top Highlights” from Medium stories. So that’s what I used for the first four quotes.
And that wondering is really what I’m exercising when I build things. I’m not a cold calculating entrepreneur. I’m just curious. And all the time I find myself wondering… what would happen if? What would happen if you tried to coach people over text messaging? What would happen if I tried to package positive reinforcement into an app? A lot of times what happens is nothing. But sometimes the results are so interesting.
