How it was built
A boring chore, turned into one tap.
This tool solves one small, specific annoyance from my own week. That is the best kind of first project. Here are the sorts of things I asked for.
Step 1 · Describe the chore
I didn't start with a design. I started by describing the exact thing that wastes my time: turning a chat full of replies into an email full of links.
When I can't shoot a wedding I ask a photographers' group chat for referrals. People reply with their business name and website or Instagram. Build me a tool where I paste those replies and get a tidy list of clickable links to drop into an email. It should run in the browser, no login.
Built a browser tool that parses your pasted messages, finds each name and link, and shows an editable list. It saves your list to local storage, no account needed.
Step 2 · Grab the links, ignore the chat
My first go tried to guess business names out of the messages. But group replies are full of “yes please” and “ah I'd love that”, so the names came out wrong. So I flipped it: just pull out the links, and leave the chatter behind.
Forget guessing names from the chat, it gets them wrong. Just extract every website and Instagram link, ignore the chatter and email addresses, merge duplicates, and lowercase them so a hastily typed 'Https://Www...' reads correctly.
Rebuilt the parser to pull only the links, skip emails and chatter, merge duplicates by site, and normalise everything to clean lowercase. The list is just the links now, ready to copy.
Step 3 · The one-tap copy, and the Pro line
The whole point is pasting into an email with the links still live. And, same as the other tools, the parts that need a server are what a paid Pro is for.
Add a 'Copy for email' button that copies the list as rich text, so pasting into Gmail keeps each name as a clickable link. Then tease a Pro version: reading a screenshot of the chat, and looking up each website to get its exact business name.
Added rich-text clipboard copy (with plain-text and Markdown fallbacks) so the links stay live when you paste. Added a tasteful Pro teaser plus a 'where it could go' section for screenshot reading, exact name lookup, saved templates and sync.
The build log
And it keeps evolving.
Every change since launch, newest first. Tap any entry to read the thinking behind it.
UpdateJust the links, tidiedSimplified to pull only the web links out of a thread, no more guessing names from the chatter, and to clean up the casing so every link reads correctly.
The first version tried to lift business names out of the chat, but group replies are full of 'yes please' and 'I'd love that', so the names came out wrong. Now it does one job cleanly: grab every website and Instagram link, ignore the chatter and any email addresses, merge duplicates, and normalise the casing so a hastily typed 'Https://Www...' comes out as a tidy lowercase link. Getting the exact business name for each link is a Pro job.
LaunchThe first betaPaste the referral replies from a group chat and it pulls out each name and link, ready to copy as live hyperlinks straight into an email. Free, no account, kept on your device.
This one came from a very specific chore. I post a wedding I can't cover in a photographers' group chat, a dozen people reply with their business name and website, and then I sit there copying each one into an email to the couple, one at a time. Shortlist does the copying for me: paste the replies, it finds the names and links (and works out a tidy name from the web address where the chat only left a link), you nudge anything that's off, and one tap copies the whole lot as clickable links you paste straight into the email. Reading a screenshot of the chat, and looking up each site's exact business name, are the Pro ideas.
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