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Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website (postcard.page)

140 points by philip1209 ↗ HN
Today I'm launching Postcard!

I started Postcard when I deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network.

When I worked at Webflow, it became clear to me that most website builders are way too complex for individual users. So, I drew inspiration from social media - where all you need is a couple photos and text fields to get a great site online. So, I think I’ve about achieved a site builder that even my Mom could use.

The product seems simple, but there are many under-the-hood optimizations. There's caching, CDNs, custom domain support, TLS certificate issuance + management, dynamically-generated open graph images, image optimizations, email sending, full-text RSS feed, email reputations, and more. It also uses a couple new products to make the domain connection process easy.

Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!

PS - Rumor is that Twitter is shutting down Revue. If you want help transferring content and subscribers over to Postcard, just email me!

93 comments

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fraXis
Nice work! Account signup was fast, and the interface was very easy intuitive and easy to use.

A nice feature would be for the ability to process/save the collection of email addresses to my ConvertKit account (and have the email signup confirmation sent to the user sent from ConvertKit itself).

What service do you use now to handle the email signups (and send confirmations) on our Postcard page?

Edit: Sorry I just realized, that the email signup is for sending out updates when I update my Postcard page.

philip1209
Hey, great feedback!

I plan to add a Zapier integration to Postcard so that you can connect signups to wherever you want. (And, if you want to import your Converkit account to Postcard - just email me!)

I was also using Convertkit for a personal newsletter, and got tired of using a business tool for an individual use case. So, the Postcard posts do send out via email. Posts also show up on the site - so that you can share it on any other networks you want.

Thanks for the feedback - seems like I can make these details more clear in the app, including how posts work!

recuter
I clicked the 'Make Your Website' CTA immediately hit the signup form and promptly bounced. That is not to say this thing won't be successful, just that I am clearly not the target audience.

It might be worth it to expose a way to try it out and explain why I should use it over the many other ones like it. Or not. Whatever converts better.

But if not on the website itself at least tell us these things here in the Show HN :)

My question: whom are you targeting? And how will you get at 'em?

philip1209
Hey! Yeah, some site builders don't require you to create an account to try the product. I take a different approach so that the site is mostly pre-filled by the time you see it.

I try to address this by linking to a bunch of Postcard example sites on the homepage.

For why to use Postcard - I'm setting out to build "dependable tech tools" [1]. I think we need more unitasker applications that just do a good job, and just stick around. And, personal websites are something that I think more people should have - but, that no big VC-backed startup will ever focus on because it's a small market.

Postcards themself are a great personal website that's well-designed and has a nicely integrated newsletter. The newsletter posts also get featured on the site, and there's features like full-text RSS built-in.

[1] https://www.contraption.co/news/introducing-contraption-co

recuter
> I try to address this by linking to a bunch of Postcard example sites on the homepage.

I think I've developed a sort of blindness to the social proof thing with <human head in a circle and positive text blurb> so it took me a bit to realize those are clickable examples of actual user websites and not just endorsements. Makes sense.

> but, that no big VC-backed startup will ever focus on because it's a small market.

A ton have come and gone like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous (It even starts with a P, ha, time is a flat circle)

I believe it had custom domains at some point and a built in newsletter/rss and the thing that made it popular at the time was that you could email it your posts.

You should copy that feature. :)

Cool, and good luck.

rroot
I came to say exactly this.
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fraXis
Can you talk a bit more about the tech stack you are using for this and how long it took you from the time you started working on it until you had it up and running?
philip1209
Sure!

Tech stack is Rails with Hotwire on the frontend. I'm hosting on Render.com, and using their custom domains support to issue certificates.

It looks like I had an MVP done in May [1], then spend the Summer doing lots of testing and refinement. Speed was a big focus - I wanted sites to be ultra-quick. I do this with a mix of caching in Memcached, image optimization source sets, CDN, and more. Plus, I'm dynamically generating OpenGraph images for each page using headless Chrome.

I also use a couple fun technologies for custom domains:

- If you already have a domain - I use https://entri.com to connect it, which is a new product that's like Plaid for domains

- If you don't have a domain - I use Google Domains Express Checkout API [2], which lets you directly purchase a new domain and automatically connect it to Postcard

Let me know if you have any other questions!

[1] https://www.philipithomas.com/posts/sharing-a-project-i-buil...

[2] https://developers.google.com/domains/express

EGreg
Would you be interested in upselling users to have their own community? It’s an open source solution that supports events, shows, and services (that you can pay to book). See what I mean at https://qbix.com

You can click on the example apps in there to see them on mobile/desktop.

Discourse is great forum software. And Wordpress is great publishing software. Qbix integrates with those too. I can see your site to eventually attract a lot of people who want to get paid for their products or services.

(However, I realize they can use calendly for booking events, zoom for the actual videoconferencing, youtube for videos, stripe for selling subscriptions, and maybe a Facebook/Telegram/Discord group for customers to connect… but then they also wouldn’t need Entri since they can make a Facebook or Linktree profile.)

turtlebits
The problem I have with these "easy"/low code/push button type of services is that they're extremely bloated and generally slow. The few I clicked on are all over 1 mb.

I remember seeing some others that built static sites off Notion and were even larger.

extr0pian
Agreed. Although not super normie friendly, you can make a decent one-pager with some rudimentary HTML knowledge and a few lines of CSS to make it pretty. Though I appreciate the creator's intention, encouraging people to have their own public website separate from closed social media networks like LinkedIn.
philip1209
Hmm, sites shouldn't be slow! Most Postcard pages can get a score of 100 on Google's pagespeed test. I do this through a mix of caching and image optimizations.

What are you seeing that's slow? I'd love to dig into it!

Tijdreiziger
Website is totally borked for me on iPad Safari. Looks like the CSS isn’t loading.
philip1209
Oh no! It's looking ok on my end. Can you try reloading?
Tijdreiziger
Sorry for the late reply. Just tried again and it looks fine now!
e-clinton
Looks pretty good. Congrats. You selected good examples that make it feel relatable for me.

Don’t love the price. I’m a big fan of small once/year pricing which makes it an impulse purchase… to justify this at $8/month I would need to actively be doing something with it

nonethewiser
I opened the site and poked around quickly. I thought "Hm... simple. Kinda interesting. I wonder if hackernews comments will evaluate the utility of it."

It was not until your comment that I realized it's a paid product. I never would have imagined that.

philip1209
On the checkout page, there is an $80/year option. I just didn't want to complicate the marketing page, but it seems like I should add the optional yearly pricing there.
greentea22
$8 a month is ridiculously overpriced.
flappyeagle
nothing is overpriced if someone is willing to pay
calculated
I second this but at the same time the founder has a point. Since the average user can't create a blog with GH Pages or whatever else for free, he'll be willing to pay $8 for this product. The average customer won't be from the tech space and $8 would seem like "oh just $8 and I can have a personal website? easy!" so I'd say keep the price as is.
nprateem
They're competing with WordPress which is much cheaper and more fully featured
Caduceus1
For $2 a month i would've signed up, $8 is too much for what is offered, and just not in my budget for something like this.
stolenmerch
Honest, good faith question here. One stated goal of building this is because you "deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network." How does this solve that? Keeping in touch is not about the web presence, it's about the network. How does this work differently than something like about.me?
davidbanham
This has an email newsletter built in. People can subscribe via the site and you can publish newsletters through their back end.
anthropodie
In India, the only thing people use email for is when they are applying for jobs or other official requirements. Email is never used for personal communication. Forget about general public even the IT crowd does not use email for anything personal.
philip1209
Yes, like the other comment mentions - there's a built-in newsletter that also acts like a light blog. Check out how I use it on my personal site: https://www.philipithomas.com/

I also custom-generate OpenGraph images for each page and post, which makes them look great when shared on social networks. My philosophy is that you should be able to write once, then share everywhere - which I chat more about in the launch post here:

https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-postcard

0xbadcafebee
Personal websites should be personalized tho. It's like Facebook vs Myspace. Myspace allowed you to easily personalize your page, and there were tons of really cool unique pages. Facebook killed personal expression; you get to pick a cover photo, a personal photo, make posts, and that's it. Then they dominated the world, and an entire generation grew up never knowing that the internet used to be fun.
philip1209
I would like to see more personal websites in the world! And, the reality is that most site builders are not accessible. Single-digit activation rates are pretty common. And, most people won't spend thousands of dollars worth of money or time to build a personal site.

So - I don't intend for Postcard to be used by everybody. But, for people who want a personal site but don't have the time or skills to customize a site - I made Postcard!

katsura
I think mmm.page [0] is supposed to take care of the fun and customization loving niche. It's been on HN before [1], and you can even try it without sign up.

[0] https://mmm.page/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424

xhfloz
Creator of mmm.page here. Thank you for mentioning the project. Imo we need better, more expressive/accessible creation tools, before we can have an interesting internet filled with true variety (meaning content that isn't gate-kept by those who can code, or forced into templates). I've spent the past two years on the creation tool side, and it's nearing completion, with a beta rolling out soon. (Currently it's in alpha.) If you're interested in any part of this, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@xhfloz).

A thread with some updates here: https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1590113525015674880

Separately, it's great to see more projects in this space. Congrats on the launch, philip1209.

philip1209
Thanks, xhfloz! I hadn't seen mmm.page before, but it looks powerful.
s3000
>more expressive/accessible creation tools, before we can have an interesting internet filled with true variety

Is it the tools or is it the networks? Instagram is filled with pictures of text because that's where the audience is.

Have you considered adding ActivityPub to mmm.page? The audience could interact without having to create a new account. There could be a network effect to spread the content and the platform.

101008
I'd love something in between MySpace and Twitter. Which would be like MySpace but with only text updated and without that much personalization.
ddm379
I don't miss Myspace, but it would be nice to force my visitors to hear a ska song on autoplay.
cercatrova
Interesting that I can immediately tell it's a Tailwind website, with the colors, Inter font, dot grid background etc.

Regarding the content itself, looks good. Looks like it's following the classic $8/m model for hooking up a custom domain, like every other site builder.

tshaddox
I mean it's a lot more Tailwind than the colors, font, and background. Some of the site is almost byte-for-byte HTML straight from Tailwind UI components such as:

https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/sections/feature...

Which is the whole point of Tailwind UI, of course! It's a great product, but like Twitter Bootstrap before it is at risk of becoming a victim of its own ubiquity.

philip1209
Totally fair! I also haven't spent much time polishing the marketing page - as you start to use the app, you'll see that a lot of the dashboard components are more custom.
shahahmed
this is cool! i've always struggled supporting custom domains. what dns wizardry does one need to do to support custom domains?
philip1209
I'm using Render.com's custom domain features, which issues TLS certificates and manages them using LetsEncrypt!

Two other things that have been nifty are:

I also use a couple fun technologies for custom domains:

- Entri [1] a new product that's like Plaid for domains. So, you can normally get the domain set up without copying records into the registrar.

- If you don't have a domain - I use Google Domains Express Checkout API [2], which lets you directly purchase a new domain and automatically connect it to Postcard, also without copying records into the registrar.

[1] https://entri.com

[2] https://developers.google.com/domains/express

madjam002
This feels like a modern version of Matmice, anyone here remember that? :-)
qiller
More like a-bit-more-recent Forrst
vehemenz
- I can tell immediately what the product is and how much it costs.

- The profile photo as the favicon is a nice touch.

- Price point looks about right.

How about a dark mode?

jaredcwhite
Far be it for me to criticize solo startup products—any achievement in this space is immense!

But in general…something that routinely irks me is the lack of truly outstanding design/typography in a lot of "start a website/blog/whatever in 5 minutes" stuff I see pop up. At least this isn't using some crappy monospaced font (that trend is so cringe), but…just a basic Tailwind theme isn't all that appealing IMHO. I think any indie project to help folks get a website online should offer something truly exciting/quirky/artistic on the design side so it's not just a clone of bland corporate media.

All that aside, congrats on the launch and I hope it's the start of good things to come!

philip1209
Thanks for the feedback! I plan to offer some alternative themes. I chose to spend my time making custom color support robust. For instance, there's dynamic code that determines which label colors have highest contrast on buttons depending on the theme color. So, there's some abstracted complexity there.

While the Postcard marketing page looks a little tailwind-y, I hope that the individual homepages look more polished and distinct. I've been working with a designer to tune everything, and I'll continue to make improvements.

jaredcwhite
Awesome to hear that, and again I don't wish to sound like I'm criticizing Postcard specifically, more just generically shouting into the interwebs. I look forward to seeing more themes down the road!
tr1ll10nb1ll
It doesn’t look just a little Tailwind-y. It IS in fact a made of unmodified (in terms of design) components from TailwindUI stacked on a Hotwire+Rails website.

  An example (the hero section)

  - https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/sections/heroes
  - https://tailwindui.com/components/application-ui/lists/grid-lists
Since I’m guessing what the OP posted is an MVP, it’s perfectly acceptable and the product seems alright, just hope they do make homepages more distinct and polished like you said starting with their own.

On a more serious note, the OP might want to radically modify the design of these asap (I’m not sure if even that would make this project fall under TailwindUI’s license).

The License that TailwindUI provides (https://tailwindui.com/license) states:

  Examples of usage not allowed by the license:

  - Creating a "website builder" project where end users can build their own websites using components or templates included with or derived from Tailwind UI.
rambambram
I personally like the sites/blogs with a crappy monospace font, as long as they have something interesting to share with the world, preferably by RSS feed.

But I do agree that websites with an artistic touch in the interface are more than welcome. For my own website project it was a constant battle choosing between some artistic freedom and expression on one hand, and making it useful and easy on the other.

In the past, I made what I call the Quick Design module (https://try.hellowebsite.online/quickdesign/) where users could easily click together a goodlooking website design. They layout is always the same, but a preselected or random combination of colors and other settings gives some very nice results. I definitely would love to explore this even more in the future.

suprjami
Idea for improvement: show the webpage creation interface without needing signup. I want to see what it's like to use without making an account. I won't bother with sites which immediately ask for login. This doesn't have to be an interactive demo, just screenshots are fine.

I suspect I'm not the target audience anyway. I'd rather write a custom Jekyll theme and use git to publish with the GitHub Pages push hook. This sounds like it's much simpler, maybe something like the Blogger interface.

philip1209
Yes, that's fair feedback! A better site editor is on my queue. Thanks for the suggestion.
suprjami
Good luck! Congrats on getting a product to market. This must feel pretty huge and exciting for you :)
ddm379
I second this noting that folks reading here, specifically, probably wouldn't benefit the most from it. What I'm thinking is it'd be nice to see before referring it to a non-technical relative or friend who doesn't even know what git is.
last_responder
Just signed up. I like the simplicity. I currently use Cloudflare pages for my personal site and I like the idea of using this in stead since I can fire up anything I have a make a quick post. Price is in a good spot for my taste. Quick question -

- Do you have any plans for sub-pages? I like to keep my resume / CV handy on my personal site and don't really see a way to do this cleanly.

- I don't see a way to edit or delete a post.

- Posts with images see to show the raw filename like [[img111.jpg]] . Will there ever be thumbnail previews?

philip1209
That's great!

Sub-pages are something I'm considering. Some users have linked out to a Notion. Also, the site supports embedded files - so you could even embed a PDF on the homepage.

Would you mind emailing me the formatting of the page you expect? Resumes formatting can get complex, so I want to make sure I support what you're envisioning.

last_responder
Will do ! Thank you . Wanted to let you know I am now a paying customer. Cloudflare auth worked perfectly.
philip1209
Excellent, thanks so much!

The DNS integration tool is is https://entri.com - they're doing a great job.

ilrwbwrkhv
Where is there pricing?
philip1209
It's "Call me" pricing :-(
entriteam
Thanks so much for the Entri shoutouts Philip! We're working on improving our pricing page to make it more transparent. In the meantime, @ilrwbwrkhv feel free to get in touch with us via the inquiry form and we can set you up with a free trial!
creeble
Weird -- I signed up a few months ago, from what I thought was an HN announcement. But search doesn't show anything else here.

Anyway, great little website-maker!

laurex
How does it compare to Ghost, which also has an awesome nonprofit business model?
philip1209
It's a little simpler and less expensive.

Ghost is made for subscription businesses. Postcard is more for personal/hobbyist use, and is optimized for non-technical folks to get a custom domain online in just a few minutes!

dankwizard
All examples linking off the home page are down, such as yours Phillip. Error code 520.
philip1209
Oh no! I have error and uptime monitoring, and it hasn't reported anything. As I'm clicking through, everything seems to be online.

So, hopefully it was just an intermittent failure! Would you mind trying again?

jlawlz
Hey! From a technical and product polish standpoint this looks great. That being said I have never really dived into making a personal website partly because I'm not sure what I'd do with it (looks like you've lowered the barrier to entry though). What do you see as the main use cases are for a personal website generally, and postcard specifically?
nprateem
You're supposed to talk about your kids and pets and other random crap no one cares about. At least that's what we did in the 90s :D
tr1ll10nb1ll
Hey OP, you’ve got a great project going! But have you considered that you might be violating TailwindUI’s license?

I’m not sure either but bringing it your attention, just in case you might be.

The License that TailwindUI provides (https://tailwindui.com/license) states:

  Examples of usage not allowed by the license:

  - Creating a "website builder" project where end users can build their own websites using components or templates included with or derived from Tailwind UI.
A way to circumvent this would be to create a branding and a design system for Postcard that looks distinct [as much as possible from TailwindUI components] and adhere to that design system for everything. Just use TailwindUI for the primitive blocks, not the design.
d1sxeyes
Hmm, I'm not sure. Seems as though users just provide the content, rather than being allowed to actually 'build' a site from TailwindUI components.
tr1ll10nb1ll
The way I understand it, Postcard.page is letting users publish a personal website.

One of the premium features is the custom domain which lets users have a website. Hence, the product is generating money on the premise of building a website for you that’s a completely new entity which makes me think this does in fact qualify as a website builder.

d1sxeyes
You might be right. I think it's difficult to determine.

From the licence:

  You can:
  [snip]
  - Use the Components and Templates to create unlimited End Products for unlimited Clients.
  - Use the Components and Templates to create End Products where the End Product is sold to End Users.
Personally I think this would be OK, but I'm not a lawyer, and probably worth getting one to review this.
philip1209
My read of the terms is that I'm inline with the TailwindUI license. If you look at the pages generated by Postcard, they are a far more custom implementation. I rely on Tailwind UI more for the marketing site and the application.

To be safe, I just emailed Tailwind Labs and Adam directly. If they think there are any issues, I'll absolutely address them.

ryandetzel
It shouldn't instantly publish a page for signing up, I wanted to check it out not have my name and profile scraped and published.

I don't see an unpublish? Can can I undo this ?

philip1209
Email me and I'm happy to delete it! (Support email is in the in-app menu, too)