15 comments

[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] thread
Hey guys! I built this little tool after seeing all of your wonderful side projects in a recent Ask HN post. I decided it was time I stopped working on multiple large projects that I never wind up finishing and just build something small. So here is the result of your inspiration and a few nights of work :)

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Curious about the technology stack since it seems suggestive of Whisper.
Well I think Whisper is more of a social sharing site while this tool is about sending anonymous messages to a specific target number. As for the stack it is Rails(which was probably overkill but I have yet to do much with Sinatra), Twilio, with Stripe integration. I send the messages via Twilio and then use their API to redact the logs so I can't see what people are messaging using the service.
Great example of an ideal passive income project - low upfront costs, little maintenance worry, and easily marketable.

I hope you circle back later to talk about your marketing and revenue figures.

Thanks! The hardest part right now is finding the right audience to put it in front of.

I definitely will! Another benefit of actually finishing a project is being able to share with others the challenges/successes/unexpected that happen during.

please enable bitcoin support on stripe. Was about to test your service.
There should be a bitcoin tab on the stripe payment form. Is it not there?
What about Square? I'd love to see BTC integration there.
There is already bitcoin integration. Click on the blue "Send Message" and click on the bitcoin tab.
That's interesting, I created a similar service but targeted at the Dota 2 scene.

https://chattywizard.com

Did you by chance look at spoiled.io before you created your service? That's the service that inspired me :)

edit: if you sign up you get a free message!

Haha I actually stole the idea from dollarfuckyou.com but have yet to reach his level of success. I hadn't heard of spoiled.io but from their FAQ I can tell we have the same sense of humor. I'm actually planning to rebuild the site with dropdown options rather than "send anything" since I think its too much work for most people.
How are you using Stripe without an SSL certificate on your website? I just looked at the Stripe documentation, and it says you need to have an SSL certificate on your site in order to use Stripe. Is that more of just a suggestion than a requirement?
I'm using Stripe.js for the actual payment which uses SSL and sends the payment info directly to Stripe without ever touching my servers.
(comment deleted)