thanksbut.lol

Problem

Someone tweeted that a site for uploading rejection emails should exist, so I built one. It stayed a joke, but there is a real thing underneath: everyone in tech has a folder of 'thanks, but…' emails. Jobs, internships, scholarships, hackathons, uni places. Almost nobody shows them to anyone.

Approach

Make the pile public, and keep it light without mocking anyone in it. First sketch to live site took about a day. I designed it, reworked the concept a couple of times, built the frontend, wired up the backend, and shipped. Speed mattered more than polish, because a joke has a shelf life.

Key decisions

• The tone had to stay celebratory. It's an archive of persistence, so nobody's rejection is the punchline.
• Convex on the backend, so submissions and reads worked in real time with almost no plumbing. Most of the reason the build fit in a day.
• Submissions are screenshots, uploaded through UploadThing. A retyped quote reads as invented; a screenshot doesn't.

Outcome

Live, and people are still submitting their own rejections and passing it around. Feedback since launch keeps shaping what goes in next.