GlimpseA $20 gift website where each planned moment unlocks on the day.
It started as a birthday present. I built my girlfriend a private countdown site where each part of her day unlocked at its own time: breakfast, a class she didn't sign up for, dinner.
I posted it on Instagram. The most common reply was the same question every time. There wasn't an app, so I turned it into a product: you plan the moments, buy it for $20, and send a private link.
What app did you use?The reply that turned a gift into a product.
Times, places and a note for every moment, dragged into order.
Search a city or ZIP. Real places, real hours, one-tap add.
Each moment unlocks at the time you set, with a 15-minute countdown before it.
The four ideas everything else hangs off.
Four problems that were harder than they looked, and how I solved them.
Phones throttle timers when the screen locks, so a moment could miss its unlock.
I made the countdown tick-driven: whenever the page wakes, it checks the real clock against every reveal time and unlocks anything that came due while the phone slept.
Each gift needed its own address, like sarah30.glimpse.gift, without a server per gift.
Every subdomain routes to one gift page at the edge, the name is checked for availability before checkout, and one wildcard certificate covers all of them.
On phones, a drag handle and a scroll look the same to the browser.
Dragging starts after a short hold, so scrolls stay scrolls. Moving a moment clears its time so order and times can't contradict, and the server rejects two moments at the same time.
A half-built gift lived only in the browser, so I couldn't tell who left or where.
I built an abandonment funnel: drafts autosave to the server, people who leave mid-checkout get a short follow-up, people who leave a draft get one gentler email a day later, and nobody gets both. Now I can see whether people stall in the builder or at checkout.
Next.jsServer actions keep validation on the server; one edge rewrite serves every gift's subdomain.
SupabasePostgres plus magic-link sign-in, so buyers never make a password.
StripeCheckout plus a webhook, so a gift only goes live after payment clears.
Abandonment funnelServer-saved drafts, scheduled follow-up emails and a dry-run mode to test them safely.
GA4Step-by-step funnel tracking, from landing page to placed order.Making it personal. Glimpse started as a gift for my girlfriend, and the interest people showed in that one gift is the whole reason it exists. The real story did more for it than any pitch could.
I'd make more videos, sooner. Short videos are how a product like this spreads, and I held back because I'm not comfortable on camera. Next time I'd lean on formats that don't need my face: screen recordings, the gift unlocking on a phone, and real reactions.