A Month of Gratitude

Duane Morin — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:53:01 +0000

So I officially launched The Daily Gratitude Drop one month ago. It's entirely a guerrilla effort - I spent nothing on marketing. Just a post to ProductHunt (which flopped), a post here (where I talked about it), and the usual bothering of my friends and family. Luckily my kids, all in college, are more extroverted than me and have done what they can to pester their friends as well.

What is the Daily Gratitude Drop?

It's a simple site that encourages daily gratitude practice by showing you 5 crowdsourced, anonymous thank-you notes every day. No signups, no ads, no drama. Just gratitude. The idea is to take one minute out of your day to focus on the good things in life. You can also add your own notes if you'd like.

How's It Going?

Well right off the bat, we've got 367 unique visitors. And, let me tell you, I don't have that many family and friends! So at least I know the project's gotten in front of strangers, who hopefully found it useful.

People have added 143 thank you notes to the database! The site needs 5 notes/day to keep running, so we're basically right at the minimum of where we need to be. Honestly I'd like a much bigger queue, but I'm happy with how we've done so far. Am I writing some of them? Yes, but that was always part of the deal - there's plenty of stuff I'm grateful for, too. I always intended to make something I would use myself.

Time on site? A little under 2 minutes. Which for most sites would be crazy, but it's right in line with what we expected. The tagline even says "One minute, zero noise." It's not supposed to be a very sticky site. So we'll call this a win!

I have event tracking on all the different things users can do, so here's a quick summary:

"next note" tracks at a little over 5times/user, which is great! That basically means that all users are reading all 5 notes, just like we wanted.
"heart" clicks (for notes you especially like) is only being used by about half the users, who are using it 3 times on average. The three times makes sense, it wouldn't be a good feature if every user just liked every note all the time. But I'd like to see more users interact with that feature.
the "calendar" icon, which allows the user to add a daily reminder to come back to the site, has been used a little over 10 times (I did add that feature late). Whether or not those users are adding the calendar notification, I can't tell, but at least people see the feature and know it's there.

Next Up

The site needs more regular visitors, no question about it. I stressed that this was a "no signups" site, and I mean it, but I'm wondering whether to add an optional email collector that I could use to send people a morning teaser email.

I think the heart feature may need a tool tip or something else to make it clear what it is.

There's always room for more analytics. I want to get a handle on the "notes per user" metric, which I currently don't have. I can see the total number of notes and users, but I cannot see which users are writing the notes. You can add more than one, but do people know that?

I've toyed with the idea of a "Need an extra boost of gratitude?" feature that would allow users, for example, to see yesterday's drop if they missed it. That would allow for some more interactivity/stickiness, as well as an opportunity to add hearts and possibly decide to add your own notes.

Anyway, that's it for now. If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know! And of course don't forget to stop by and share what you're grateful for!

Why I'm Grateful I Flopped on ProductHunt

Duane Morin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:56:44 +0000

The Problem I Wanted to Solve

As a developer, I tell people that my happy place is "hands on keyboard." But let's be real, I spend too much time doom scrolling. I'm a father, and it's hard to see all the toxicity in the digital world that my kids are exposed to. But, with a hat tip to Gandhi, "build the change you want to see in the world."

So I built The Daily Gratitude Drop. It's just a simple site that serves 5 curated gratitude stories each day. No ads, no comments, no infinite feeds. Not even any accounts or signups. Just anonymous people sharing moments of thankfulness. But, because of that? No drama or toxicity, either.

The Tech Stack

Built with Next.js and TypeScript, deployed on Vercel with Cloudflare workers. The whole thing runs on free tiers, which limits some of what I want to do, but I'm focused on getting this in front of people as quickly and efficiently as I can. I'm hand-reviewing every submission to maintain quality, because we know how anonymous people can be when they're handed an empty text field. Do I scale? No. But there are worse problems to have.

Claude Code helped accelerate development significantly, I can't pretend it didn't. It definitely let me convert ideas into working code faster than I could have alone.

The Reality Check

I launched on ProductHunt this week expecting... well, more than what happened. I got a handful of votes and 1 or 2 comments. Not great. That's ok. It's not like I was overly prepared for success. I just kind of threw it out there.

But here's the interesting part: I got visits, and I got content. And it's a start.

What I'm Learning

The gap between "sounds like a good idea" and "people actually use this daily" is huge. It's not enough for friends and family to support you, you need strangers who don't know you personally to independently see value in your offering.

Gratitude practice is real and popular, but getting people to read strangers' gratitude online every day? That's a harder behavior change than I anticipated. It's not a one-and-done. People need to come back every day. And I'm not exactly Wordle over here.

I know a number of ways I could improve that. I could have an email newsletter. I could implement web notifications. My kids tell me, "This should be an app." Maybe I'll implement one or more of them, eventually. Out of the gate, I wanted no barriers. Just gratitude - read some, write some for the next person. Early names for the project included "The Perpetual Gratitude Machine" and "Thank It Forward" but they were too long to find a good domain name.

But I'm also learning about people's character, too. When I first thought of the idea, I immediately thought, "People are going to spam the input form with no end of horrible things." So, I built a moderation queue to make sure that does happen. Know what? Hasn't happened. Other than an early misfire when I tried posting to reddit (where I got 2 very reddit-like submissions), I've had nothing but positivity. There's over 100 legitimate notes in the database now, and I've had to reject exactly none of them. So, people don't always just come to ruin things. That alone was something to be grateful for.

Building in Public Lessons

Platform fit matters - PH and other "look at my startup!" sites are very tech-centric. A gratitude site isn't really their vibe. But I also don't want to go spamming gratitude sites that I've never visited, either. It's a tricky balance. I'm not marketing a startup, I'm a solo dad just trying to make something positive. Honesty and integrity are important to me.

Engagement beats traffic - 25 visitors who submit content > 250 visitors who bounce immediately.

Content supply is everything - Without steady submissions, the whole concept falls apart. I'm constantly worried about running out of stories. I keep toying with a "recycle" feature that will bring back notes from past drops, but I don't want to go to that too soon and ruin the whole premise. I write some notes each day, but that's me being a user of my own service, eating my own dogfood.

What's Next

The core concept works for people who find it. The challenge is sustainable discovery and retention without burning myself out on constant promotion. I've decided that I'm not going to throw the kitchen sink into it as long as it's getting only a trickle of visitors. I'm picking and choosing changes carefully to find the right balance. Focusing on things like getting people to share the links, and to remember to come back regularly.

That doesn't mean I don't have bigger plans. If I actually got a significant daily audience? I'd love to create that email list. Maybe have some sort of special features for them, like sneak peeks or "best of" lists. I want to improve the share functionality, maybe do something with images for the likes of Instagram. App? Sure, why not. I've done apps before. But this isn't the time to lead with an app.

The Real Metric

Despite the launch disappointment, I've got the most content in my queue ever. Lots of observations on the weather and the sunshine, or family, which is to be expected. Many are short, but I gave people 280 characters so those who want to really paint a picture are encouraged to do so. My favorite part is that, as the content moderator, I get to read every one. It's kind of ironic - everybody else gets 5 notes a day, and I've read 100+. But because of that, the daily drop thing is lost to me :) Oh, well. Maybe some day we switch to a different moderation system where I don't see every note.

That authentic variety tells me something is working, even if it's not what I originally envisioned. I'm going to keep banging on it, and I'll try to keep posting here with interesting updates. I meant it when I said I wanted to build something of value, so I'm happy to discuss how I built it and what tech I used. I'm learning much of it along the way. I had no idea what Cloudflare D1 was when I started, and this is my first Vercel deployment.

Check out The Daily Gratitude Drop at gratitudedrop.com if you're curious. Always looking for feedback from fellow builders.

Forem: Duane Morin