heyheyto

[heyheyto]

Shops v2: Commissions

Hey everyone!

We're very excited to tell you that our newest update, Shops v2, lets you offer digital services (commissions) to your followers without any middlemen (other than us 😄).

If you're subscribed to HEYHEY Pro, you should see a new tab called Services under Shop Settings. There, you can see your active orders and chat with clients.

After a purchase, the buyer will explain what they want specifically, and you can either accept or refuse their order. Don't worry though, they will get a full refund if you refuse the order (still, try to accept as many orders as possible and be a good seller 😁).

When you're done with the service, simply upload it as a ZIP file and click on Complete Transaction — this will notify the buyer and let them give you their final feedback before finalizing the transaction.

If you do not complete the order within 7 days, the buyer is entitled to a full refund and can request it by contacting us or by clicking on the Cancel Order button that shows up when the time comes.

Here's what the order flow looks like:

If any problems arise, the buyer can easily contact us so that we can swiftly take action and make sure everybody's happy, which should be a pretty easy job, right?

Anyway, we're proud of this update, especially since we managed to grind through this development cycle during a particularly though time at college.

What we're not proud of, however, are the themes 🤣, which we've decided to make our next priority. We simply NEED HEYHEY to look gorgeous even if you suck at picking colors for your custom themes, so stay tuned for the Themes v3 Update.

[heyheyto]

Themes v2

Hey there, HEYHEY-ers!

Today, we're thrilled to announce the release of Themes v2, the update that lets you fully customize your HEYHEY profile to your heart's content (or until you get bored, whichever comes first).

Gone are the days of boring, cookie-cutter profiles — with Themes v2, you can finally let your personality shine through! Want neon pink buttons and lime green text? Go for it! How about a rainbow gradient background? The world is your oyster (or your HEYHEY profile, at least).

And for our more design-challenged users, we've added some pre-made themes that you can easily apply to your profile with just a click. So even if you don't have an eye for design, you can still have a profile that looks like you put in some effort (we won't tell).

So what are you waiting for? Start customizing your HEYHEY profile today and show the world who you really are! And if you come up with any crazy ideas for even more customization, feel free to share them with us — we're always looking for ways to make HEYHEY even more awesome.

P.S. We're thinking about adding a feature that lets you add a hologram of yourself to your profile. What do you think?

[heyheyto]

Analytics v2

Hey there, HEYHEY-ers!

We've been diligently working behind the scenes to enhance our platform, and we're thrilled to unveil a significant revamp of our Analytics feature! With this upgrade, Pro users will gain access to an abundance of data, providing invaluable insights into their audience and content performance.

Not only will you be able to see which websites direct traffic to your page, but you can also discover the countries your visitors are from — finally, you can sleep soundly knowing that your profile is a hit in Kyrgyzstan!

Additionally, you can now analyze which elements on your page attract the most clicks, enabling you to further refine your content and optimize user engagement.

We understand concerns regarding privacy, and rest assured, we prioritize data protection and minimisation. We collect only the essential stuff (no personally identifiable information) needed to better understand your audience. We're committed to never selling this data to any questionable third parties — unless, of course, they're offering a few billion dollars (just kidding!).

In all seriousness, we recognize that data-driven insights are crucial in today's digital landscape. With HEYHEY's Analytics v2, you'll have the information necessary to make informed decisions about your online presence and content strategy.

So go ahead, delve into your updated analytics and uncover valuable insights about your visitors. If you discover anything particularly intriguing, please share it with us — we're always excited to learn more about our users' experiences.

[heyheyto]

Shops, Tips

Hey everyone!

We are excited to announce the new Shops update for our Pro users! Starting today, you can easily sell a variety of digital items such as video games, music, ebooks, and more.

Before explaining how it all works, let us get the most important detail out of the way: we only take a 2% platform fee from your sales.

We understand deeply the importance of competitive pricing: Other players in this space usually take a 10% platform fee. Giants like Apple, Google, and Steam take a 30% cut after the seller purchases a yearly developer license that costs around $100.

To make the payment process frictionless, we'll send purchased items to the email address that was entered during checkout, so your fans don't need an account on HEYHEY. Rest assured, Stripe securely handles payment and billing while we handle the Shop infrastructure and security. We also offer a refund policy for fraudulent sales.

In the coming weeks, we'll focus on enhancing the user experience — including translating HEYHEY to different languages, making UI improvements, and creating a new home page. Plus, we're working on an exciting project we can't reveal yet due to competitive reasons, but stay tuned.

As always, your feedback is valuable — happy selling!

[heyheyto]

Themes v1.1: Custom Backgrounds

Hey everyone! While finalizing The Shops update, we made a few quality-of-life improvements to HEYHEY. The biggest one of them is the ability to add custom profile backgrounds. Like profile pictures, they can also be GIFs – so you can make some pretty cool combinations.

Our goal here is to help our users express themselves as much as possible. This means you will be seeing more "Custom X" updates in the future. Since processing media takes more processing power, this feature will be exclusive to Pro members for now.

The Shops update is around the corner, stay tuned!

[heyheyto]

Independence Achieved

When we were just getting started with HEYHEY, it was more like a demo of what we could do if… well, if we simply decided to build whatever we wanted. Naturally, we initially focused on more captivating tasks. Things such as database provisioning and infrastructure management weren't at the top of our to-spend-energy list — this has caused us to make a decision that we now think was wrong: using Google Firestore.

Google Firestore is a proprietary database that makes it easy to build modern applications cheaply. Since we were already on Google Cloud at the time, we went ahead with it to have better integration between our services.

However, as more and more Google Cloud customers got de-platformed for unclear reasons, we grew worried. If the same were to happen to us, there would be no point in building a best-in-class web application. It would be game over for our project as no other company offers the same service.

These last weeks, we worked on transitioning to MongoDB, a source-available database developed by MongoDB Inc. And, as of today, the migration is complete — we now fully own our data! If, for any reason, we were denied service, we could simply move to another provider — this has so many benefits that it's hard to write them all.

Still, all things considered, we don't want to hate on Firestore — it's terrific! We just value our sovereignty more than maximizing convenience and minimizing costs.

In practical terms, this means more flexibility and better performance for HEYHEY as our server and database are no longer in different regions.

Unfortunately, the migration script has updated everyone's unique ID, and while the old IDs are still stored, they will stop working soon. It was the easiest way for us to continue developing HEYHEY without being slowed down by this change. If you have a username, though, you have nothing to worry about — they will keep working!

Also, when our incorporation process is complete, we will release our biggest update: Shops. Stay tuned!

[heyheyto]

RichLinks Are Finally Rich

Hey everyone! We've finally added richness to RichLinks. Starting today, when you share a link, they'll automatically turn into widgets if they're in our supported list of domains.

This doesn't mean your privacy is compromised though. The embedded content can't see the rest of the page and can't access anything — it is sandboxed. This is also the reason why we haven't added some websites like Twitter to our supported list of widgets — they require the use of unsandboxed scripts, which shouldn't be the default way of embedding content on the internet. Still, we're exploring ways of securely embedding them too.

Currently Supported Websites

twitch.tv

youtube.com

giphy.com

soundcloud.com

music.apple.com

spotify.com

deezer.com

Lastly, we're working on 2 redesigns: one for the short-term and another for the long-term awesomeness of HEYHEY. Hopefully, you'll like them as much as we do. As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, shoot us an email.

See y'all soon!

[heyheyto]

Hello World! Again!

After 3 months of non-stop development, many missed college classes, 1000+ commits on GitHub, and definitely more cups of coffee, HEYHEY is finally reaching its initial design goals. Just like we mentioned in our introductory blog post, HEYHEY is all about helping you centralize your digital presence while expanding on what a personal web page can be.

Today, as a free user, you already have access to 4 beautiful themes, animated profile pictures, the ability to post basic content, and your own username that points to heyhey.to/[USERNAME]. We even innovated on usernames: no longer are you bound to using the 26-letter English alphabet — you can use ANY alphabet you want. For instance, heyhey.to/Gün is possible on HEYHEY but not on other platforms.

As a Pro user, you get access to more themes that let you express yourself in different styles; Analytics, which allows you to see valuable information like how many people visited your page, how long they hang around, and if they clicked on anything; and The Shop, which lets you sell digital goods without any DRM.

In our first devlog, we outlined HEYHEY's tech stack. We are extremely happy with all the decisions that were made as they allowed us to quickly build software without causing any performance degradations. Fastify, TailwindCSS, and DaisyUI are simply the best tools for one-person-army type of development flows. If you're thinking about starting your own web-based venture, consider using them!

Now, we want to be clear: we are far from done. There are some rough edges, not every feature that's on the roadmap has shipped, and we're STILL debating how to do Widgets (we need to create a uniform way of embedding content that belongs to other websites — like a Twitch stream or a YouTube video — while respecting theming).

For Analytics, HEYHEY actually collects more information (in a privacy-preserving first-party way) than what's shown on the panel, we are exploring ways of displaying them as well. That means, in the future, you should be able to see where exactly people are coming from (digitally and geographically), and where they're headed on your profile page.

The Shop is missing many quality of life improvements, and we want to give more control to creators on how they choose to fund themselves. So a Tip Button, for instance, might be a reality!

The biggest problem, and what's blocking us from releasing The Shop, is a legal issue. We still haven't set up a company to manage HEYHEY. We are working on it, though!

We invite you to take HEYHEY for a spin, give us feedback (it has a considerable chance of shaping the product), and, if satisfied, support us by subscribing to Pro.

See you soon, hopefully with more feature announcements!

[heyheyto]

Hello Tumblr!

Hey everyone. We've moved our blog from Medium to Tumblr. The reasons are outlined here. But long story short, Tumblr is pretty cool! You can expect to see the blog post about HEYHEY's new update, SHOPS, here very soon.