24 Hours of HEY
The story of how I jumped aboard the HEY hype-train with a quick #nocode project to help tech-twitter connect via email, just like the '90s!
It was a cool Wednesday morning in Zürich, Switzerland. I had woken up especially early to catch up on some email backlog from the night before. The previous day I had just been invited to HEY.COM, a new and (at the time) exclusive, email provider founded by @DHH and @JasonFried from Basecamp in an attempt to revolutionise the communication status quo and to fix everything that has been wrong with email for decades in one fell swoop. I decided I wanted to build a page that would capitalise on the HEY hype-train through both earning me a couple of extra Twitter followers and also providing a new and exciting medium for people to meet likeminded HEY users and learn from each other via email.
The project ended up accumulating over 2500 individual users 👨💻👩💻, 350 user submissions 🎬, and in excess of 80 represented countries 🌍 , all in under 24 hours. This is the story of how it happened.
I had identified that HEY had a Screener feature with which every new email sender is essentially marked as spam by default and the user has to triage through this list to actively select people they would like to allow access to their mailboxes. It suddenly came to me as I typed my new vanity @hey.com email address into my Twitter bio; this Screener feature meant that we could all suddenly share our email addresses online freely because any spam would be screened out anyway.
As soon as I realised this, I set about creating a directory of email addresses where users could submit their email, twitter username, a short bio and three topics they would like to talk about. I built this website in a way that I thought might appeal to the two founders because a retweet from either of them would have been a significant turning point for this project.
I woke up at 6 AM that day, had the idea at 7 AM and by 8 AM I had a working prototype. My secret weapon, Carrd.co (referral link). I threw together a quick page, made a data template for adding new entries quickly and threw together a quick Typeform for user submissions before heading down for my morning coffee. I tweeted the link on my way down the stairs and thought, let’s see if any of my friends sign up. What happened next was crazy. @linuz90 and @frankdilo (shoutout Mailbrew 😎 ) reminded me to post the site on ProductHunt, so of course, I did this and began to see submissions slowly start to trickle in from fascinating people all over the globe. I posted HEYList on HackerNews too, which gathered some attention, and importantly I tweeted the link to the two founders of HEY.
Then this happened…
and then this happened….
This spike in traffic from Jason’s tweet lasted for around 4 hours, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I had not automated the site in any way and was doing everything manually. The submissions were coming in way faster than I could possibly handle them, and I did not want to miss the wave.
I had set up a Google Sheets integration with Typeform, and I came up with a great system of colour-coding for entries that were invalid, low-quality or posted to the site etc. Every time I had added someone’s profile to the site, which occasionally involved going to their Twitter profile and grabbing their profile picture and resizing it to fit, I would head on over to my HEY email and send them an email letting them know they had been added to the site. As you can imagine, this process took a very long time for 300+ submissions!
I spent the remainder of the day interacting with new members of HEYList and interacting with some really cool people, doing data entry and making sure everyone gave the correct data (there were many rejects 😞 ) and also interacting with the HEY team who gave me some extra invites and sent me this very… encouraging message 😁
I still receive submissions almost two weeks later, and I’m half-considering automating it, but at the same time, the bulk of the data entry has already been done so it may no longer be worth the time investment needed. I have a recurring task in my Omnifocus to check the Google Sheet every couple of days, and it seems to do the job adequately.
All in all, this experience definitely showed me that NoCode can be a blessing if it’s the right kind of project. Conversely, if it’s one of those projects where you have bitten off a bit more than you can chew, particularly with non-static sites, it can be a pain 😂.
HEYList.xyz was an amazing experience and really showed me what can be done with a couple of NoCode tools and an hour of spare time. I learnt a lot, met some amazing people and gained almost 150 new Twitter followers from it 😉 . That’s a success in my books!
Thank you for checking out my Substack, I hope someone out there found this story interesting, I had a blast writing it and look forward to publishing more similar content to the platform 😊
If you’d like to see more of my content and stay in touch, it would be amazing if you could subscribe for free using the button below 🤙 I promise I won’t spam you and I will work hard to make sure the content stays top-notch at all times 🦁