'Scroll it to me' brings back the magic of '90s HTML
A conversation with developer Ajay Menon about minimalism and making things on the internet.
Updated April 18, 2025
Today’s newsletter is a conversation with developer Ajay Menon. I found Menon’s work through the launch of his website “Scroll it to me” on Product Hunt. The site lets you create a screen of scrolling text.
“Scroll it to me is a callback to the marquee era of the ’90s HTML where scrolling text was as dynamic as things can get,” Menon wrote on Product Hunt. “As a kid in a computer lab, sans any network, one of the ways to broadcast a message was to marquee something with large fonts onto a page. I wanted to bring that back.”
I spoke with Menon about Scroll it to me, his other projects, and his minimalist approach to making things online. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
PHONE TIME: When I saw Scroll it to me, it stood out because you have a lot of people saying ‘This is my AI agent that I made, and it can do all these different things for you.’ Scroll it to me is simple, but really cool. So I wanted to talk about how you built it.
AJAY MENON: What keeps happening is that I build something, and it just takes a lot of time to keep building. So while I’m building something, I wanted to build something really tiny on the side so that I can just launch it and put it out into the world.
As you said, everything right now is just AI-this and AI-that. So I wanted to step back and go retro on this. I was brainstorming what’s the simplest thing I can make—which probably won’t be a lot of effort, but just a fun sort of thing.
I started playing with computers back in school. At that time, we were learning HTML and CSS and all that. There used to be this marquee element, which was really popular back in the late ’90s. Sites don’t use that anymore, so I wanted to bring that flavor in somehow. It was just a result of one evening sitting and sketching ideas.
PHONE TIME: I was going to ask about the response you’ve seen.
MENON: Product Hunt was the main place I got traction. I also put it on LinkedIn, and a bunch of people messaged me like, “This is pretty cool that you’re doing stuff like this.” It drives me to keep building stuff.
PHONE TIME: How have you thought about building your other projects?
MENON: There’s one called Flagify, which is a flag-guessing game. My nephews, when they were 4 or 5, got really into maps. So I made them a game to guess flags and I just put it out. I’m not a designer, per se, but I do work as a front-end developer. I tried to use a Duolingo visual style.
I like the element of play when it comes to these online things. I work as a developer by day, and I make music on the side. I want to mix those things and add the fun parts. I don’t want to be that cliché software guy who turns out productivity apps.
Even Record Shuffle—it was me and one of my friends. We’re both rock and metal nerds. We always used to play this game with each other: Which album came first? Which year did it come out? I thought of making a game out of it. I think it works out in that it’s a very niche thing—I’ve selected a handful of bands that a bunch of my friends listen to.
PHONE TIME: I love The Zone, the white noise Pomodoro timer—the simplicity of it.
MENON: With The Zone, I actually have a lot of problems focusing. So I tried doing this whole white noise Pomodoro thing. It kind of worked out. But I ended up getting lost in a slew of apps. I just wanted a button, that’s it, to start. I thought “Okay, fine, I’ll just make it.”
PHONE TIME: Is there anything when it comes to your projects that is important or you’re inspired by, maybe other apps or design tools?
MENON: I stick to minimalist design—I like a lot of apps which are kind of basic and don’t have a lot of frills. At the same time, it’s not like I want to be in this completely sterile, white Apple showroom sort of thing. I like color.
The Colors of HTML website I created was an appreciation of the fact that HTML gives a set of named colors.
Because I don’t come from any conventional school of thought, I can imbibe anything that comes my way. I don’t use Pinterest much, but it’s going through the web and making a mood board, and thinking “How can I build on top of that?”
PHONE TIME: I know you make music too. Does that influence your design process, or vice versa?
MENON: To an extent. When I’m making a track, I can’t work with the goal in mind. I have to get into the process and let things unfold for a couple of hours. That aspect is something that I learned with music. With a lot of creativity-based things, you can’t force that output, right? You have to sit, let it stew, and let it wash over you.
It’s a very unforgiving process at times, because you never know when inspiration will strike. I think the whole idea is that if you surround yourself in things that you like, the inspiration will start growing.
A lot of it also comes from gaming. I like certain games where you’re not given a tutorial. You just start off and explore through play. It’s the same intention that I want to convey.
PHONE TIME: Are there other things you’re working on now or that you want to build in the future?
MENON: I’m in the process of building an app for book reading. The problem is I just can’t stick to a book. I read three or four in parallel and can’t finish one. I used to start these reading challenges with a bunch of people on Goodreads. But it gets really intimidating.
So I thought of building an app where you just say “I’m going to finish this book in 10 days” and it tells you “You can read 15 pages a day to finish it by next week.”
There are a lot of apps doing that, but I wanted to bring my design language, which is minimalism. I wanted to bring the idea of only having to press two buttons to use the app, rather than having to go into the settings and do this and that.
You can find Scroll it to me at scrollitto.me and Ajay Menon’s other projects at ajm0.dev.