It was a cold December afternoon, and I was preparing quotes for a few new potential projects. As I often do, I copied the ‘Web Estimate’ URL from Harvest, our pseudo-CRM, and pasted it into an email to a potential client so they could review the detailed quote at said link. If you’ve ever received one of these links from me, you would know that the URLs are dangerously long and obnoxious.
It was at that moment that I knew something had to be done. I slinked over to the development department and casually asked Cody if we could create a link shortening app like bit.ly, but specific to the Studio123 brand. In true Studio123 fashion, he replied, “I’ve never looked into it, but I don’t see why not!” The conversation meandered from there and I noted we should really take advantage of the s123.ca domain we had conveniently acquired years prior for our development environments.
Months passed without a second thought of the idea, until one day I got a Slack notification to download Shortie. Cody and Reagan ran with this little app idea, and with pure magic and coding wizardry, built us a custom desktop app that has made all our wildest link shortening dreams come true.
Shortie takes our long links and automatically shortens them using the s123.ca root domain, then, automatically appends it to the computer’s clipboard for convenient and immediate pastage in Slack, Gmail, Trello and anywhere else we previously pasted long, gross links. Right now, Shortie appends a random 5-character code to the root domain, but future versions will give us the option to use custom URLs. And of course, Shortie has a killer UI and custom app icon for true brand connectification.
That’s the real story of Shortie, but we couldn’t resist producing a dramatization of the app’s inception. Check it out below.
