thepaulthomson

haha I read most of this page out aloud in my head and it was even funnier

Context, this specific field for 18mths. 2yrs in saas other areas, 7 yrs solo business (not saas)

Not going to lie, that sounds so tempting.

But I guess that's the point of the original question, quitting basically puts me on an entrepreneurial path

Totally fair

18mths for an AI saas product

I just don't know if recruiters or hiring managers would buy that. It feels like non-traditional career paths get penalized

Send kind voice notes to strangers: https://kindvoicenotes.com/

Thanks for the support! I sure hope so :)

That's actually quite classy! I guess reddit/HN is similar. Pseudonym on the front end with email auth. That could work here too. Thank you for the nudge, what a great idea.

Actually not as much as you would think (according to the recordings I'm getting). Though, I admit, this probably hasn't made it to "delinquent teens making farting noises" audience yet haha

Thanks! So far, the checks and balances I have in place to protect users and prevent abuse are holding. I hope it stays that way!

Thanks for the kind support. Glad this project found you!

It's been a mix so far! I just ran the numbers and the average is 29.4 seconds.

Glad you liked the idea. I appreciate the kind words.

Oh cool! I can imagine one day 12 months later I'd be talking to the voice agent of my plumber and hearing ME scheduling in a time to get my shower fixed haha

Thanks for the heads up! I'm not sure I have the scope to support iOS versions that far back, but I'll definitely dig into it for you. Sorry for the hassles!

Wow, thanks for the support! To get the first few voice notes, I sent it to family and some colleagues. It was a smoke test to see if anyone would actually record without me literally begging them haha.. and they did! After that, I was confident to start sharing the project more widely and here we are today.

Good callout. Will definitely keep that in mind. Thanks!

This made my day! Thanks for the kind support and I'm glad it landed for you. Hope you continue to enjoy it!

haha this aesthetic is very cool! Love the project, thanks for sharing. Lots of ideas in there that I could see potentially working really well for V2 or V3 of Kind Voice Notes!

Wow, thanks for sharing. Yeah, it's amazing how much of an impact a little pick-me-up can have.

As this continues to gain traction, I'll just keep chipping away at keep it safe and people protected. All I can do for now is take it one step at a time and keep solving problems as they appear.

Again, thanks a ton for checking it out!!

Good callout

Yeah, I'm thinking through some kind of profile creation (not the right wording). My concern is if I start to strip away some of the anonymity, then it might detract from the sentiment. But I'm open to ideas!

THANK YOU for the support

I figured there was quite a big surface here for misuse. But I've done my best to curb that. You're right, that if this scales, the compute to oversee moderation would be inaccessible for a solo hobbyist like me. I don't have a huge audience, so I think for now, at least, the moderation is in scope.

Also MQ is one of my all-time favourite shows (mainly first seasons, it kinda lost steam in the later ones).

Thanks! That’s a great addition. I’ll work on adding that. Appreciate the feedback.

Hey! So the backstory here is pretty simple. I was going through a rough patch earlier this year and I kept thinking about how weird it is that we have all this technology for connecting people but most of it makes you feel worse not better. And I had this moment where a friend left me a voice note, just a short one, and it genuinely shifted my whole day. Something about hearing someone’s actual voice, the tone and the pauses and all that, it just lands differently than text.

So I built this. You record a voice note between 5 and 60 seconds saying something kind, and it goes into a pool. A stranger somewhere presses play and hears you. Thats it. No accounts, no profiles, no sign up. Completely anonymous.

The moderation side was the interesting engineering problem. Every note gets transcribed by Whisper then a second model classifies it into kind/unsure/unkind/not_a_note. Only “kind” notes ever get served to listeners. I made the decision to run moderation inline during upload rather than batching it, so theres never a window where unmoderated audio is just sitting around waiting. The whole lifecycle gets logged in an append-only event table with request IDs so if something weird slips through I can trace exactly what happend.

Its a pretty standard Next.js + Postgres + S3 setup otherwise. Nothing too clever on the infra side, the interesting stuff is all in the moderation pipeline and figuring out what “kind” actually means when you’re trying to get a model to judge it reliably.

One thing I’m really curious to get feedback on: after you record you get a “ripple link” which is basically your only receipt. You can come back and see how many people heard your note and any anonymous reactions they left. I’m not sure yet if this is compelling enough or if I need to build more of a feedback loop there.

The site is live, you can record or listen right now. Zero friction. Would really love this community’s feedback on the product and the technical approach.

"now you're just a fruit that I used to know"

What will you have accomplished by Christmas, 2026?

Merry Christmas

What do you mean by decisions?