OhLife

» see ohlife.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every evening around eight, an email showed up asking how'd your day go. You replied from whatever mail client you were already sitting in and wrote a sentence or ten pages, then hit send. That was the whole thing. There was no app to open, no streak counter, no formatting, no social layer. The email also brought back something you had written on an earlier day, so the act of writing one entry meant reading an old one.

The insight, if it deserves that word, was that people do not fail at journaling because writing is hard. They fail because opening the journal is hard. OhLife removed the opening. It went to where you already were every day anyway and asked one question.

It came from Shawn Gupta and a co-founder, a team of two, out of a company that had been through Y Combinator's Summer 2008 batch. OhLife was their third product after IDidWork and MeetingMix, and TechCrunch wrote it up in August 2010. The retention claim they gave at the time still reads well: half the people who completed a first entry were still writing at least every other day.

This was a small American product built around an English prompt in an inbox, and I never put a line into it. What travels is the mechanic, which has been rebuilt by somebody roughly every year since.

~ the dossier ~

~ the money problem ~

An email-in, email-out journal costs very little to run and offers nothing at all to sell. Premium tiers were considered and mostly avoided, on the reasonable grounds that the product's only real feature was its emptiness and adding paid features would ruin it. Advertising against somebody's private diary was never going to happen either.

So it sat there working and earning nothing for four years. That is a long time to keep a mail server running for strangers out of your own pocket.

~ two weeks ~

The announcement went up on 20 September 2014. Hacker News carried it to 131 points and about 150 comments, and the tone was not the usual shrug. The complaint was specific: users were given roughly two weeks before the entries themselves would be deleted, not just before the site went away. One commenter called it laughably short and disrespectful, and a lot of people agreed in a way they normally do not when a free service folds.

There was an export. People used it and then argued about where the file should go, and strangers wrote importers for whatever they moved to. The site kept answering until 19 October 2014 and then stopped.

~ the funny part ~

The shutdown produced more clones than the product ever produced revenue. Within weeks there was MailDiary for people who wanted the same loop somewhere else, and Obie Fernandez built AhhLife because he had been an OhLife user and wanted his evening email back. Self-hosted versions turned up on GitHub with names that were jokes about the original. Importers for the export file were written by strangers for free.

Every one of them asked for something OhLife had never asked for: install this, or hand the same material to a stranger you have not met yet. Several of the clones are still running twelve years later. The export files are presumably still sitting in download folders.

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