I built a url shortening service called vb.ly because my girlfriend, Violet Blue, was using url shorteners all the time for her blog. She's an author and adds

I built a url shortening service called vb.ly because my girlfriend, Violet Blue, was using url shorteners all the time for her blog. She's an author and adds to her book income by linking people to her 30+ books on Amazon using her affiliate code. I was concerned that the various url shorteners she was using might swap out her affiliate code for theirs as a revenue mechanism, so I wanted to take it "in house". I discovered that this .ly domain registry had "vb.ly" available (her initials) and thought it might be cool engineering challenge to get that going for her and open it up for others to use. 500k+ shortened urls later, the rest is history. Literally