[johns]

I can give some context on that. Go back to 2011, visual HTTP clients weren't that popular. Postman, Insomnia, etc. weren't around yet. Working at Twilio, we regularly needed to show people how the API worked. Hurl.it was perfect for it. It was notoriously unreliable though so I pestered Chris Wanstrath and Leah Culver until they sold it to me for $1,000 (I expensed it, asked for forgiveness and jokingly call it Twilio's first acquisition). We kept it running for awhile. I left.

Then I started Runscope and we made a much better version of Hurl.it and RequestBin, but those two sites were by then linked in tons of API docs and we couldn't get those links switched to Runscope, so we acquired the links. Twilio was happy to get rid of it since they had actual infosec policies in place by that point and Hurl.it was regularly abused as an open proxy. Those two sites were the meat and bones of our marketing for most of pre-acquisition life of Runscope. We had direct links to Runscope for people who needed more features, and would tag visitors and retarget them later. Those audiences being shown an ad for a free, brilliantly-designed 'Everything is going to be 200 OK' t-shirt drove A LOT of sign ups[0].

Then we sold the company and I lost control of the domains to our acquirer.

Edit: Since Tod linked to hurlit.com instead of hurl.it, I assumed they had just cloned it but they also have the original domain hurl.it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVjhGa-wt9A

[todsacerdoti]

Yes, we own both URLs. The point of the post was to show that we got https://hurl.it back online and I inadvertently put https://hurlit.com as the link.

[darkhorse13]

That's really interesting. Thanks for posting this.

[markwillis82]

Amazing. I still have one of those t-shirts in the wardrobe came into it’s own on endless zoom calls talking about site availability.

[debaserab2]

Man that's funny. I saw those t-shirts EVERYWHERE for a couple of years. I think it got copycatted around quite a bit. Was yours the OG?

[johns]

Yeah we were the original and trademarked the slogan and had to regularly send takedown notices over it.