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I remember seeing some others that built static sites off Notion and were even larger.
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?
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...
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 Sho…
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 j…
I think I've developed a sort of blindness to the social proof thing with 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.
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.
Website is totally borked for me on iPad Safari. Looks like the CSS isn’t loading.
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
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 Sho…
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
It was not until your comment that I realized it's a paid product. I never would have imagined that.
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 Sho…