The Advent App I Made That Turned Into A Christmas Tool For Hundreds Of Companies
Tuesday, 9th December 2025
The idea arrived quite suddenly in late November 2024. It was the thought that it might be useful to have an online advent calendar that people could share easily. Something simple, with a short link that looked tidy, a custom QR code for quick scanning, and an embed code so anyone could drop the calendar directly into their own website. It felt obvious enough that it must already exist somewhere, although I did not check. The idea seemed fun, and it was something I knew I could build, so I decided to get on with it.
The first version came together over a few days. It was a free platform from the start. Anyone could sign up and try it without spending anything. A user would upload a cover image, then add content behind each of the twenty-four doors. The earliest version offered four types of content. You could add plain text, an image, a YouTube video or an MP3 audio file.
Choosing a name was the easy part. Adventify was the first thing that came to mind and it felt right straight away. The .com domain was already taken, but adventify.co was available. More importantly, it worked neatly with the short URL format I had in mind. A user's calendar would live at an address like adventify.co/my-calendar, which was short enough to remember and clean enough to share.
Users had access to a simple dashboard once they signed in. This allowed them to create calendars, update them and check how many people were opening the doors. It also showed how visitors were engaging with the content inside, which gave people a sense of whether their calendars were being shared and viewed.
By the end of the first week, the whole platform existed in a basic but complete form. It worked exactly as intended. It was straightforward to understand and, despite the speed at which it had been built, stable enough for public use.
Like most of my websites and projects, the launch came with no marketing at all. There were no adverts, no social posts pushing people towards it and no attempts to generate traffic. Even so, Adventify picked up a trickle of organic visitors. Around six hundred people signed up in that first year. This is not a huge number, but considering there was no promotion whatsoever, it showed there was at least some interest in a tool like this. It also suggested that people were finding it naturally through search engines or by word of mouth. For something that had only just been built, this was encouraging.
Because Adventify appeared so late in November, it was technically available for Christmas 2024, but many people had already finished their festive planning by that point. A lot of the early users were simply having a look around, testing the features or trying out a single dummy calendar. Very few were creating full calendars ready for public sharing.
Still, the small burst of early activity proved to be valuable. It became a way to observe how people approached the tool, what they tried first and what they struggled with. Early adopters provided feedback, this helped confirm which parts of the platform were working smoothly and which areas would need attention the following year.
By October 2025, I'd begun to get Adventify ready for the next Christmas season. One of the first decisions was to remove the option to upload MP3 audio files. During the first year, a noticeable number of users had uploaded copyrighted music. Hosting copyrighted material without proper permissions risked causing problems, so removing MP3 uploads was the simplest and safest solution.
The biggest change for 2025 was the introduction of payment tiers. The platform was still free at its most basic level, now called the Friends & Family tier. This allowed each user to make one calendar per year and gave them up to ten views per day. The statistics offered at this tier were intentionally simple. Users could see the total number of views their calendar had received, but no further detail. Embedding calendars into other websites was also removed from this free tier to keep things lightweight.
A new Professional tier was introduced for users who needed more flexibility. This tier came with a one-off lifetime cost of $19. It unlocked unlimited views for a calendar and provided more detailed engagement analytics. These analytics included daily open counts and a list of the top countries where views were coming from. For individuals and small teams, this was enough to run a proper campaign or create a calendar that a large audience could access.
Above this was the Enterprise tier. This allowed unlimited calendar creation and was aimed at larger businesses, agencies, or anyone producing multiple calendars for clients. Both paid tiers plugged directly into a payment system I had already built. It was a single gateway I used across all my projects, so integrating Adventify into it required almost no extra development work. It handled payment processing and account upgrades automatically.
November became the platform's first real test under pressure. More than 1,600 people signed up during the month. Many of them were preparing calendars early so that everything would be ready for the first of December. The range of calendars created during this period showed just how differently people approached the platform.
Some users produced highly designed layouts. They made custom backgrounds that matched the exact positioning of the doors. Behind each door, they placed images containing product information, end-of-year highlights or messages celebrating their staff. Others took a much simpler approach. They used a standard Christmas background and placed stock images behind the doors. Despite the differences in creativity, both approaches worked because the format allowed users to decide how much effort they wanted to put in.
As the start of December approached, more users upgraded to Professional or Enterprise accounts. They did this mainly to unlock unlimited views and access the more advanced analytics.
Handling these upgrades introduced me to a different type of customer relationship. In the past, most of my work involved selling tools or services to individuals. They were usually satisfied with a simple purchase confirmation email. Adventify attracted a different crowd. Many users were companies, and they needed formal invoices for their accounts departments. To meet this need, I added a feature that allowed users to download an automatically generated PDF invoice. This gave them the paperwork they required without me needing to produce documents manually.
Another thing I was beginning to encounter frequently with this project, which I had with others involved a user's right to have their data removed. Some of the people who tried Adventify decided it was not right for them, and wanted their data removed.
This is a legal requirement under data protection laws, which allow users to request their personal information be deleted. Without an automated system, this took manual work each time. To solve this, I built a self-service account deletion tool so users could remove their data without waiting.
Feedback from users who chose to close their account turned out to be helpful. Two missing features came up repeatedly. The first was the lack of clickable links behind the doors. The second was the desire from some businesses to collect customer data, such as names and email addresses.
Both features were added before December began. Links became available behind each door in the form of a QR code and a clickable button. This meant brands could now link to offers, deals or information pages. They could also see how many people scanned the codes or clicked the links.
Data capture was added as an option for Enterprise users. When enabled, anyone opening a door had to enter a name and an email address before the content appeared. This allows businesses to collect leads or track engagement in a more controlled way. The collected information could then be exported from the dashboard for use in their own systems.
When December arrived, there was another noticeable wave of upgrades. These often came from users who had originally signed up on the free Friends & Family tier but soon realised that ten views per day was not enough once they started sharing their calendars more widely.
To gain a clearer understanding of how people were using Adventify, and to help users discover how others were approaching their calendars, I introduced an option to make calendars public and discoverable. This had to be handled carefully. Most users were creating private calendars intended only for close friends, family or small groups. It was important to make it absolutely clear that all calendars were private by default. Nothing was visible publicly unless the owner chose to enable it.
For anyone who did want their calendar to be found, the new setting allowed it to appear in public search results, including Google. It also meant these calendars could show up in a new Discover section on the Adventify website. This section allowed visitors to browse featured calendars, popular calendars and other creations that users had chosen to make visible. Brands, influencers and even a few hobbyists opted for public visibility. It gave them a way to showcase their creativity and gain more reach during the festive season.
The take up on this setting has so far been low, but it was only added in the first week of December, by which time most users had already created their calendars and potentially never saw the option.
One thing that came as a surprise was the sheer volume of images people uploaded. The expectation had been simple. Most users would upload a background image for their calendar and possibly 24 images to sit behind each door. In reality, some accounts uploaded far more. This was likely due to people experimenting with different backgrounds, testing layouts or repeatedly changing the content behind the doors.
The problem with this is that storing images on a server carries a cost. Each file takes up space. For paid tiers, this is manageable because the subscription fee helps cover the storage. For free accounts, offering unlimited uploads indefinitely was not sustainable. To keep things fair and maintainable, I introduced a limit for the Friends & Family tier. Free users can now upload up to 35 images. This is more than enough to create a complete advent calendar with room for experimentation, without opening the door to uncontrolled storage use.
Professional and Enterprise users continue to have unlimited uploads. This makes sense for their needs, but it also acts as a natural incentive to move away from the free tier if someone wants to manage larger or more complex calendars.
To reduce storage demands even further, I added stronger image compression and lowered the resolution of uploaded files. Compression reduces the size of an image while keeping it visually clear enough for most uses. Lowering the resolution means the image contains fewer pixels, which also reduces file size. Together, these changes created a substantial saving in disk space. It also created another useful distinction between tiers. Enterprise users can upload high-quality images without compression, adding extra value to the top level of the platform.
The first version came together over a few days. It was a free platform from the start. Anyone could sign up and try it without spending anything. A user would upload a cover image, then add content behind each of the twenty-four doors. The earliest version offered four types of content. You could add plain text, an image, a YouTube video or an MP3 audio file.
Choosing a name was the easy part. Adventify was the first thing that came to mind and it felt right straight away. The .com domain was already taken, but adventify.co was available. More importantly, it worked neatly with the short URL format I had in mind. A user's calendar would live at an address like adventify.co/my-calendar, which was short enough to remember and clean enough to share.
Users had access to a simple dashboard once they signed in. This allowed them to create calendars, update them and check how many people were opening the doors. It also showed how visitors were engaging with the content inside, which gave people a sense of whether their calendars were being shared and viewed.
By the end of the first week, the whole platform existed in a basic but complete form. It worked exactly as intended. It was straightforward to understand and, despite the speed at which it had been built, stable enough for public use.
What Happened In The First Year
Like most of my websites and projects, the launch came with no marketing at all. There were no adverts, no social posts pushing people towards it and no attempts to generate traffic. Even so, Adventify picked up a trickle of organic visitors. Around six hundred people signed up in that first year. This is not a huge number, but considering there was no promotion whatsoever, it showed there was at least some interest in a tool like this. It also suggested that people were finding it naturally through search engines or by word of mouth. For something that had only just been built, this was encouraging.
Because Adventify appeared so late in November, it was technically available for Christmas 2024, but many people had already finished their festive planning by that point. A lot of the early users were simply having a look around, testing the features or trying out a single dummy calendar. Very few were creating full calendars ready for public sharing.
Still, the small burst of early activity proved to be valuable. It became a way to observe how people approached the tool, what they tried first and what they struggled with. Early adopters provided feedback, this helped confirm which parts of the platform were working smoothly and which areas would need attention the following year.
Building A Better Version For 2025
By October 2025, I'd begun to get Adventify ready for the next Christmas season. One of the first decisions was to remove the option to upload MP3 audio files. During the first year, a noticeable number of users had uploaded copyrighted music. Hosting copyrighted material without proper permissions risked causing problems, so removing MP3 uploads was the simplest and safest solution.
The biggest change for 2025 was the introduction of payment tiers. The platform was still free at its most basic level, now called the Friends & Family tier. This allowed each user to make one calendar per year and gave them up to ten views per day. The statistics offered at this tier were intentionally simple. Users could see the total number of views their calendar had received, but no further detail. Embedding calendars into other websites was also removed from this free tier to keep things lightweight.
A new Professional tier was introduced for users who needed more flexibility. This tier came with a one-off lifetime cost of $19. It unlocked unlimited views for a calendar and provided more detailed engagement analytics. These analytics included daily open counts and a list of the top countries where views were coming from. For individuals and small teams, this was enough to run a proper campaign or create a calendar that a large audience could access.
Above this was the Enterprise tier. This allowed unlimited calendar creation and was aimed at larger businesses, agencies, or anyone producing multiple calendars for clients. Both paid tiers plugged directly into a payment system I had already built. It was a single gateway I used across all my projects, so integrating Adventify into it required almost no extra development work. It handled payment processing and account upgrades automatically.
The Rush To Get Ready For December
November became the platform's first real test under pressure. More than 1,600 people signed up during the month. Many of them were preparing calendars early so that everything would be ready for the first of December. The range of calendars created during this period showed just how differently people approached the platform.
Some users produced highly designed layouts. They made custom backgrounds that matched the exact positioning of the doors. Behind each door, they placed images containing product information, end-of-year highlights or messages celebrating their staff. Others took a much simpler approach. They used a standard Christmas background and placed stock images behind the doors. Despite the differences in creativity, both approaches worked because the format allowed users to decide how much effort they wanted to put in.
As the start of December approached, more users upgraded to Professional or Enterprise accounts. They did this mainly to unlock unlimited views and access the more advanced analytics.
Handling these upgrades introduced me to a different type of customer relationship. In the past, most of my work involved selling tools or services to individuals. They were usually satisfied with a simple purchase confirmation email. Adventify attracted a different crowd. Many users were companies, and they needed formal invoices for their accounts departments. To meet this need, I added a feature that allowed users to download an automatically generated PDF invoice. This gave them the paperwork they required without me needing to produce documents manually.
Another thing I was beginning to encounter frequently with this project, which I had with others involved a user's right to have their data removed. Some of the people who tried Adventify decided it was not right for them, and wanted their data removed.
This is a legal requirement under data protection laws, which allow users to request their personal information be deleted. Without an automated system, this took manual work each time. To solve this, I built a self-service account deletion tool so users could remove their data without waiting.
Feedback from users who chose to close their account turned out to be helpful. Two missing features came up repeatedly. The first was the lack of clickable links behind the doors. The second was the desire from some businesses to collect customer data, such as names and email addresses.
Both features were added before December began. Links became available behind each door in the form of a QR code and a clickable button. This meant brands could now link to offers, deals or information pages. They could also see how many people scanned the codes or clicked the links.
Data capture was added as an option for Enterprise users. When enabled, anyone opening a door had to enter a name and an email address before the content appeared. This allows businesses to collect leads or track engagement in a more controlled way. The collected information could then be exported from the dashboard for use in their own systems.
Going Public & Understanding User Behaviour
When December arrived, there was another noticeable wave of upgrades. These often came from users who had originally signed up on the free Friends & Family tier but soon realised that ten views per day was not enough once they started sharing their calendars more widely.
To gain a clearer understanding of how people were using Adventify, and to help users discover how others were approaching their calendars, I introduced an option to make calendars public and discoverable. This had to be handled carefully. Most users were creating private calendars intended only for close friends, family or small groups. It was important to make it absolutely clear that all calendars were private by default. Nothing was visible publicly unless the owner chose to enable it.
For anyone who did want their calendar to be found, the new setting allowed it to appear in public search results, including Google. It also meant these calendars could show up in a new Discover section on the Adventify website. This section allowed visitors to browse featured calendars, popular calendars and other creations that users had chosen to make visible. Brands, influencers and even a few hobbyists opted for public visibility. It gave them a way to showcase their creativity and gain more reach during the festive season.
The take up on this setting has so far been low, but it was only added in the first week of December, by which time most users had already created their calendars and potentially never saw the option.
Managing Storage & Shaping The Free Tier
One thing that came as a surprise was the sheer volume of images people uploaded. The expectation had been simple. Most users would upload a background image for their calendar and possibly 24 images to sit behind each door. In reality, some accounts uploaded far more. This was likely due to people experimenting with different backgrounds, testing layouts or repeatedly changing the content behind the doors.
The problem with this is that storing images on a server carries a cost. Each file takes up space. For paid tiers, this is manageable because the subscription fee helps cover the storage. For free accounts, offering unlimited uploads indefinitely was not sustainable. To keep things fair and maintainable, I introduced a limit for the Friends & Family tier. Free users can now upload up to 35 images. This is more than enough to create a complete advent calendar with room for experimentation, without opening the door to uncontrolled storage use.
Professional and Enterprise users continue to have unlimited uploads. This makes sense for their needs, but it also acts as a natural incentive to move away from the free tier if someone wants to manage larger or more complex calendars.
To reduce storage demands even further, I added stronger image compression and lowered the resolution of uploaded files. Compression reduces the size of an image while keeping it visually clear enough for most uses. Lowering the resolution means the image contains fewer pixels, which also reduces file size. Together, these changes created a substantial saving in disk space. It also created another useful distinction between tiers. Enterprise users can upload high-quality images without compression, adding extra value to the top level of the platform.