Show HN: Thankuz - Send Thank You Notes

4 points by thankuz 14 years ago | 10 comments

Hi all,

I'm excited to share my new startup, Thankuz. It's a web app that lets anyone send instant thank you's to people, places and things for gifts, acts and expressions. People use it to thank family, friends, favorite businesses, or even celebrities.

Notes can be sent via Email, Facebook, Twitter or Short URL.

Been working diligently on the MVP for the past few months, so it's great to be able to keep working on it having got the "soft launch" out of the way. I've been lucky to have some great friends and family members trying it out for a couple weeks now and helping me to shape the MVP version. I'm excited to continue to keep improving the product in future iterations.

Please check it out and let me know your thoughts, you're always so much smarter than me - http://thankuz.com

ScottWhigham 14 years ago |

Congrats on getting started and building what looks to be a well designed and well built site. Here are some questions and feedback:

1) How do you pronounce it? My first thought was "thank-uzz" with a short "u" sound. After a while I realized that you probably want me to use a long "u" sound.

2) I clicked a sample note - http://thankuz.com/notes/5nyplqr - and I don't get it. How is this better/different than me sending the person an email?

thankuz 14 years ago | |

Thanks. It's been a crazy few months trying to get the MVP built and tested. We spent probably 2 months just validating our ideas and polling users to see if it's something they'd pay for, eventually.

Our UI/UX designer is stellar, he actually works at Twitter now (was really lucky to have him on the team for as long as he was).

1) It's pronounced like, Thank You's. Basically it's one of the cute, or fun ways people say thank yous on social networks. Along w/ thx, ty, tanks, etc.

2) We're not trying to replace email, or actual physical notes, but rather to nestle in the space between super formal thank you letters and cards, and the very informal social status updates. It's more personal than email, can be shared publicly / socially (unlike email) and it continues the conversation beyond the original, "thank you" and "you're welcome".

Thanks for chiming in, and asking such great questions. We want it to be much more than it is now, so I can understand how the MVP might look given that I know the roadmap, etc.

run4yourlives 14 years ago |

This is really nice. I really like that you used a little card and the fancy font to convey the messages.

One thing I would suggest is to maybe grey the template text a bit, or do something else to indicate that it is just default text that can be overwritten, since this wasn't obvious to me at first.

Question: How do you plan to make money from this?

Keep up the good work.

thankuz 14 years ago | |

First off, thank you for taking the time to check it out, and for leaving your thoughts. Really appreciate the feedback.

The fonts & cards are limited right now, but we have some big plans using these elements in the future. Glad you liked that aspect.

Love your idea about greying out the template text as to create more distinction between it and the user text. Will play around with some ideas that just popped into my head. Good call.

Lastly, we're thinking of a couple different model opportunities:

First, a Freemium model where users could upgrade their account in order to unlock additional features (physical sending of notes, additional themes, textures, fonts, using their own handwriting, etc.).

We're also looking into a Virtual Currency (kudos, karma, etc.) model where users would start with a set number of notes, and could "earn" more by reaching certain milestones, using the site, interacting with other users, sharing w/ friends and of course, using real currency to reload their notes. If we went this route I'd personally like to see some Gaming mechanics built in (something like stamps instead of badges).

We're also building a mobile version of the Web App so thanks could be sent wherever the user is, at any time.

Thanks again for the words of encouragement!

ayanb 14 years ago |

1) 'Get started by creating your first note' leads you back to the same page. I was expecting to land myself on the create note screen from here.

2) Yeah, something that indicates that the blanks need to be overwritten.

3) the size of the text window kept going up and down. Is this intended.

Overall, clean and functional app. What is the business model here?

thankuz 14 years ago | |

Great ideas. Appreciate you taking the time to write down your thoughts.

1) Interesting. It should have taken you to .com/notes/create Can you confirm your OS / Browser? Or, maybe you have JS disabled? Will look into this ASAP. Thanks for the heads up.

2) I agree that there needs to be some distinction between the filler-text, and user input text. Thanks for seconding that idea.

3) Yeah. It's supposed to as you write, but there are some buggy behaviors going on right now with it. It's a little choppy and if you add or remove too much text, or break lines too fast it can get hung-up. Am looking into this and should have it addressed in the next iteration. Thanks for noticing that.

Please refer to the comment above re: your business model question (didn't want to post the same down here).

Appreciate your kind words! Glad you commented.

JonLim 14 years ago |

This is a neat idea, and the visual editor on the page is really neat.

However, I'd love to chat with you on improving your email deliverability - right off the bat I saw that your SPF records aren't set, so let me know if you'd be interested in getting some help in fixing that up. :)

Cheers!

thankuz 14 years ago | |

Really appreciate that Jon. Still have some improvements to make with the editor and process, but it's getting there and we've gotten an overwhelming positive response from our users, so far.

I just followed you on Twitter, happy to connect and discuss our current email system in more detail. Obviously we've tried to stick to the bare-minimum with the MVP, but in future iterations we'd talked about more visually, and user appealing emails with more actions built-in to the system.

It seems like we could benefit greatly from your plugin, PostageApp! Feel free to email me, Tweet, whatever. first.last@thankuz.com

Matt Franklin

JonLim 14 years ago | | |

Hey Matt,

Apologies on the delay. I will definitely get in touch wtih you later today, cheers!