SociallyDistancedThanksgiving.com

​What was it?

In 2020, 2 weeks before thanksgiving - we decided to spin off the Thanksgiving version of RecollectYou as its own site and make it free.

2020 was a bad year for so many people, COVID19 was going to keep millions of families apart - it was a no brainer that this thing would go viral. Or would it?

For Context RecollectYou is/was a product where:

​To celebrate a special event, you send someone a bunch of audio notes covering memories and answering questions about them. These take ~7mins to record and we deliver them, one each day, 7 days in a row. At the end they're stored on a private URL forever.

Here's my walkthrough

​What were the results?

• We launched on ProductHunt (34 upvotes)
• We received ~2000 visits in the run up to thanksgiving
• 4 people sent it

​​Post mortem

• This one hurt - to me it had all the ingredients to go viral - serious ego knock
• A lot of people couldn't wrap their heads around giving gifts at thanksgiving (not a normal behaviour)
• Just because we made it thanksgiving themed and free, didn't change the fact that there is still a core user that loves it. An empathetic, nostalgic user.
• At the time we launched, we were still grappling with copy issues. We were artificially forcing ourselves to use less words to position it and the result was, well look at the video.