Thank You Year: Year-End Story Pages for Small Businesses

Role: Product Designer & Creative Developer Tools: Base44, Claude, JavaScript Status: Concept project. The Base44 app is live with public example stories. The create flow and sign-in are still being finished and tested. The café and salon in the examples are fictional.

Year-in-review recaps like Spotify Wrapped are loved because they turn plain numbers into a story people want to share. Small businesses have the same numbers (visits, best seller, busiest month) but no easy way to say thank you with them. Thank You Year turns a few answers into up to ten animated 9:16 story pages a business can post for its customers.

I wanted it to look made by a person, not like a generic SaaS app. The whole product is a printed paper zine: cream paper with a dot grid, riso-style inks (pink, blue, yellow, orange), photos printed in one ink, washi tape, hand-drawn marks and a serrated seal as the logo. Type is Fraunces for headings, Big Shoulders Display for numbers, Courier Prime for the receipt page and a handwriting font for notes. Each page has one number and one sentence.

One builder turns a single data object into the story pages. A page only appears if its data exists, so a business with fewer numbers still gets a good story.

Wording changes by business type (a café says "you came in", a salon says "you sat with us").

Every photo page has a no-photo version, shown below for a fictional salon.

Mobile-first shell: logo header, a torn-paper tab bar with a seal button, and back buttons on every screen.

Designed create flow: basics, numbers, human details and words in four short steps, with a live preview of the real story next to the Next button.

Designed so a Shopify orders file is read only in the browser and only totals are kept.

Public share page for each recap, plus sharing to Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, X and LinkedIn.

The example stories are public, no login needed: https://thank-year-story.base44.app/r/example-cafe

Finish and test sign-in and the create flow, then get a few real small businesses to make a recap before I show any results.