Hello Product Hunters and friends!👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻
It’s been a while since we shared anything on here. So today we decided to share a tiny little website we built during our team retreat in 24 hours. Before we get into our product, a bit about us. We’re a two person team (Basile Samel and Joel Benjamin) running a little product studio called Layover where we work with other startups providing our design, dev and content services and on the side we build little products like Chirp.
Chirp.lol is a website to send anonymous emails to anyone in your contacts. Whether you want to confess your feelings to your crush, say something funny, or simply appreciate someone because they mean a lot to you while keeping your identity a secret.
The world we live in right now is very grim and sad and we think it could use a little bit of positivity. The core idea behind Chirp is to spread positivity, kindness and have an element of surprise. It’s all about making peoples day brighter!
Chirp is a very simple website with only one functionality and that is to send anonymous messages via email. But here’s what we support right now.
🫢Anonymous - When you send a message through Chirp, the email to the recipient is sent through one of our email addresses. And our website is also encrypted with SSL so nothing can be decrypted in transit and we don't have a database to store anything. So you’re identity will always remain a secret.
📩One-Way Communication - People you send messages to can’t reply back to you. So they have no way of knowing it’s you unless you tell them explicitly.
😤 Anti-spam - Our UI makes it impossible to send spam or anything except plain text. This greatly prevents attack vectors compared to traditional anonymous email services allowing HTML.
And last but not the least, in the words of the great ChatGPT
"Chirp.lol is not just an anonymous email service; it's a catalyst for candid conversations, a bridge for unspoken words, and a quirky tool for enhancing your relationships. Let's make communication fun and mysterious!"
@iamnottheway I guess, it won't end up in spam folder because most of the email domains will be included as a spam email if more people start to spam it.
And does it show a read receipt since we are emailing anonymous? 😊
Wow! Chirp sounds like an incredibly secure and private way to send emails - what a great way to protect your data and avoid spam! How does Chirp guarantee privacy and security? What measures have been taken to ensure that the emails
Congrats on the launch! It's a great way to play treasure hunt kind of games with loved ones. I love the anti-spam part of the product. Soon I am going to try it out. Atleast now people will do more emailing for personal reasons. 😉
Congratulations on the launch! I think it's a great idea, and the design looks really warm and inviting. However, I've been thinking about something. If I were to receive an email like this one day, how can I be sure it's a genuine, heartfelt message from a friend rather than a prank? Also, how can we ensure that it's not used for 'negative' purposes?
@dino123 what kind of negative purpose do you have in mind?
The way we see it, the risks are pretty low:
- Salespeople need to identify themselves to sell their products so an anonymous email service defeats the purpose.
- Hackers need to send links and images to fish for vulnerabilities. Chirp only allows plain text so looks hard to socially engineer anything that could harm someone.
- Harassment attempts could be thwarted with text classifiers (hate speech, etc.). We could work on adding this.
Email addresses are a pretty sensitive info so I guess the attack surface is limited in the first place?
Happy to hear more about what we could cover to prevent harmful usage!
@dino123@bsamel “Harassment attempts” is the first thing that came to mind. 😅 Hopefully nefarious actors won’t be attracted by your cute and wholesome branding though. There are other services for sending anonymous email.
Cool app. This type of product is ideal for teenagers. I'm sure they have a demand for it. After all, it helps to express any opinion you have while remaining anonymous.
I also liked the simple and minimalistic UI of the site
@iamnottheway lol. But really, it got me thinking, and even if I could not think of any more use cases, I'm sure there is one out there that could make it really valuable.
Chirp