O hai New Yorkers.

I made you a I ❤️ NY customized Valentine's Day Generator. You can use it online here.

Once you go through a basic flow, you'll get a cute Valentine that you can download or copy and paste in a text to a friend.

Here's an example:

How I Built This

This app took me a few hours to create this morning with the AI no-code tool, Replit. But it's inspired from an original idea that took me about ~100 hours (and many more people) to complete back in 2022.

In case you're curious, here's the backstory of Be Mine, NYC...

Be Mine, NYC <3

Throwback to Lockdown Life in the Winter of 2022...

I've never seen New Yorkers as low as in during the winter of 2022.

This was back when the COVID variations were surging like crazy, so many of us were avoiding indoor dining, gyms, and restaurants. Return to office culture was barely a blip on people's minds, particularly given that the the temperature was approximately 0 degrees outside all winter.

At the time, I was three months pregnant with my second kid, so I was hiding out even more so than usual, and in a pretty bad mood about it. On my annual offsite upstate that January, I decided to do something about it.

Something that would bring a little cheer back to everyday New Yorkers, for those of us who stuck things out during those totally shit moments of that totally shit time.

Enter: Be Mine, NYC.

Idea: A Guerrilla Valentine's Day Drop

I thought it would be really fun to do a super-secret and totally anonymous drop of Valentine's Day cards in iconic NYC places all over the city. Each card would include a hand-written poem about New York City (some happy, some bittersweet) and bring a little cheer to whomever discovered it.

Somehow, I managed to recruit about a dozen friends to help me in this volunteer endeavor, including Zack Moy, who has been a lifelong poet and computer programmer.

Together, we got a basic splash page website set up for Be Mine, NYC, which was just enough for

me to recruit a few artists and businesses to get involved with donating free gift cards to local NYC businesses.

Over the course of one three hour session at Company Ventures HQ office in midtown, we gathered together with a bunch of coffee and generated dozens of ideas for poems and Valentine's, along with places to drop them off all over the city.

The Artists

Obviously, Valentine's needed to have cutesy, I ❤️ NY vibes to them. But I also really wanted them to look like Valentine's. Which meant that we needed a logo and some light brand design.

Somehow, with less than a month's notice, I was able to connect with a few artists to participate in this endeavor. Here's what they came up with:

Logo Design

A friend of a friend referred me to Natalia Klimkiewicz, a New Yorker who was so excited to turn our idea into a brand vision with a logo and some cute images that we could use on stamps for our IRL Valentine's. Here's the final collection (which we turned into stamps to print onto each card):

Card Design

We also needed images for the front of the Valentine's cards, and I wanted the cards to represent iconic NYC that both reflected different artist's concepts, while following a similar Valentine's theme. I was beyond thrilled by how these came out. Look what they came up with:

Alison Cynamon

As a NYC based illustrator and painter, Alison was more than happy to bring this project to life through some of iconic Valentine's mash-ups. Each of these is a work of art in itself (I'm obsessed with the coffee cup Valentine one...)

Natalia Klimkiewicz

In addition to her logo design concepts, Natalia also designed a few card covers for us based on her own NYC love stories. Here they are:

Andrea Strongwater

Andrea and I connected about this project on Instagram, it turns out that she'd already made postcards based on several NYC iconic institutions and kindly granted us permission to reprint some for our project. Here are the ones we used:

Preparing the Valentines for the Drops

Once we had all of our cards printed and stamps created, we prepared Valentine's for the drops. I even got a few local businesses to donate $5 or $10 gift cards so a couple dozen Valentine's had special treats inside.

We tried to pack these cards with as much as possible–stickers, stamps, a doily, and of course, a hand-written poem. Here's an example from one that I wrote back then.

I wanted to get Valentines in as many places as possible. In the end, I think we dropped Valentines in at least three boroughs during the week.

You can see a few more of the iconic drops that some of our distribution crew sent back in our Instagram feed here.

The Drops

Doing the drops was the most fun part of the whole thing, particularly if you stuck around to see who picked up your card. But I did learn that New Yorkers get VERY FREAKED OUT by leaving a card on the subway. So, don't do that... :)

Here are some my favorite drops:

-The Strand Bookstore

-Murray's Cheese

-Times Square

-Bryant Park

-The Colbert Show

-Grand Central Terminal

-A COVID testing pop-up

-LaGuardia Airport

New York <3's You

In general, when times are tough, I think it helps to find something little that gives you a little bit of control back in your life. And even better if that thing can bring a smile to someone else.

So if you're feeling inspired to do any Valentine's Day drops tomorrow (whether with hand-written, human-generated poems or AI-generated ones), drop me a line and I'll share the image on our Instagram account too.

In the meantime, have fun with Be Mine, NYC (2025 version).