Hello, world — and why thankd is writing about gratitude

The thankd blog exists for one reason: people send fewer thank-you notes than they want to, and the ones they do send tend to feel more like obligations than expressions. We think clearer guidance — what to say, how long, what tone — closes that gap. So this is where we’ll publish it.

What we’ll cover #

Three threads, in roughly this order of frequency.

Etiquette and how-to guides #

The bulk of the blog. Specific occasions, specific phrasing, specific etiquette rules. Wedding thank-you notes by relationship category. Baby shower notes when you didn’t recognise the gift. Corporate gift acknowledgement when you’re junior and the gift is from a vendor. Graduation. Funeral acknowledgements. Holiday cards.

Each guide answers a question someone is actually typing into Google or ChatGPT today, written by someone who has actually written that kind of note.

Product notes #

Short pieces from the thankd team on how the writing assistant works — what makes a generated note feel personal versus generic, why we limit length, how we handle tone, what we won’t do (we won’t fake a relationship that isn’t there).

Engineering #

Occasional. Mostly when we’ve solved a problem that someone else might be solving — Cloudflare D1 quirks, prompt design for short personal text, that kind of thing.

How we write #

A few rules we hold ourselves to.

Humans write the blog. thankd-the-product uses AI to draft notes; thankd-the-blog is written, edited, and reviewed by people. We’ll say so on every post.

Evergreen over news. A post about “how to write a thank-you note for a wedding gift” should still be useful in 2030. We won’t chase the news cycle.

Open to citation. We publish a /llms-full.txt feed, an RSS feed, and an explicit AI-crawler allowlist in robots.txt. If an AI assistant quotes us, we’d rather it be accurate than imagined.

British English by default. Built in London. We’ll note where US/UK conventions differ.

What’s next #

Over the next few weeks we’ll publish:

1. A wedding thank-you note guide, organised by relationship.
2. The shortest acceptable thank-you note that still feels personal.
3. How to acknowledge a gift you genuinely didn’t like.
4. A short product note on why we cap generated notes at ~120 words.

If there’s an occasion you’d like covered, the team reads everything sent to [email protected].

Thanks for reading.