New way to surprise your loved ones: 'Wishly', a fully indigenous personalized website platform

We usually use messages or social media posts to celebrate a loved one's birthday, expression of love or a special moment. But bypassing these common mediums, 'Wishly' is a completely indigenous initiative to make special moments memorable. It is a web-based platform that allows anyone to create a beautiful, personalized or custom website for a loved one without any prior coding experience.

Wishly founder and independent web developer RA Fahim recently spoke to 'Voice of Startup Bangladesh' about the platform's story, challenges and future plans.

Inspiration for Creating Wishly
The story behind the creation of Wishly is very simple, which matches everyone's life.
RA Fahim said, "Everyone wants to share emotions and special moments with their loved ones. I thought, instead of just sending a text message, what if one could create a complete digital experience for the other? Something that is personal, unexpected and that the recipient will remember for a long time. This is where Wishly's journey began."

On the platform, users can create a website with their own photos, music, videos and personal messages and share it through a link.

900+ members and international response within 20 days of launch
Although Wishly was launched keeping in mind the Bangladeshi market, its response was surprising. Over 900 members joined the platform in the first 20 days of launch through Facebook and Instagram alone without any paid marketing. The most surprising thing is that users from not only Bangladesh but also India, Pakistan and other countries started joining it.

Currently the most used on Wishly are the 'Birthday' category and the 'Master Birthday Template'.

Technical Challenges Behind Development
Creating a website builder for common users who don't know coding is not an easy task at all. As an independent developer, Faheem has faced many challenges.
Notable among these were the creation of a flexible template system, visual website editor, image and media support, live preview, shareable website link generation and secure user dashboard. The biggest challenge was making sure that user customizations didn't break the design of the original template. Besides, the platform has been fully mobile responsive keeping in mind the mobile-dependent internet users of Bangladesh.

Future Planning and Sustainability
Wishly is currently completely free to use. The platform has no premium templates or ads.

According to Fahim, "I wanted people to create something for their loved ones without worrying about payment. However, as users and traffic grow, so do hosting and infrastructure costs. Optional paid services or premium features may be added in the future for long-term sustainability, but that will never hamper Wishly's core vision."

In the future, he wants to establish Wishly as a well-known international platform for creating personalized digital experiences. Among the new features, he plans to add an 'anonymous messaging experience' and richer multimedia tools.

Wishly has proven that the right combination of technology and human emotion can make a product reach people without a huge advertising budget.

To know more about the platform or to create a surprise website for your loved one visit: https://wishly.rafahim.com/