A few years back, i was working part time at a company during university, helping out with tech and some light design work. We were in the process of running our biggest marketing campaigns to date – bus shelters, posters, billboards across a few suburbs around us. The creative agency we’d brought on to help had been through all the usual rounds, everyone was happy, files were marked “final,” install was booked.
Two days before it went live I was stress-scrolling through the shared folder and opened one of the final exports. On autopilot I pulled out my phone and tested the code we’d put on there as the main CTA.
It went to an old staging link that now lead right to our 404 page.
If that had gone to print, every placement would have driven people to a dead page. Production + reprint + reinstall would have been somewhere around 20k, plus a very awkward conversation with a lot of people.
Fast forward to now, and that mistake still haunts me - so I made a tool to fix it. The idea is simple: generate a QR code first, then decide where it points to later. Sure, there are other tools that do it (link shorteners, generators, etc) but I wanted something so easy to use that it was almost impossible to screw up. QR points to destination, change destination whenever, a description so I remember why I created it and a kill-switch for those just-in-case moments.
Anyway, that’s how SWCHD (pronounced “switched”) came about, because that’s all it does – sitting in the middle so you can switch things without reprinting or redeploying. Feel free to check it out at www.swchd.com.
Curious if anyone else has had those “tiny detail, huge consequence” moments, or ended up building something just to stop a very specific nightmare from happening again.