This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Priscilla Tina, a 28-year-old product manager based in San Francisco. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m a tech product manager in San Francisco by day, and a content creator by night. I make videos to inspire people to rediscover their creativity.
I’ve been doing creative side hustles and experiments my whole life, and I’m a lover of all things analog.
Last November, I sat down and built an app with Claude Code that sends postcards without dealing with stamps or delivery.
Analog is back in
A lot of people, including myself, grew up surrounded by technology. But I also had analog products in my life when I was growing up, and I didn’t have a phone.
Cut to now, I’ve started living on my phone.
We’re spending a lot of time brainrotting, looking at a lot of AI slop. We’re realizing that spending all our time on our phones isn’t very meaningful.
We’re also finding out that you can connect a lot better when socializing in person, and that there is value in going back to the old joys of life.
I wanted to bridge the divide between the digital and the physical world and help connect people.
I’ve been sending postcards with my friends for years; it’s a really fun way to stay in touch while traveling. I also started to realize that I had purchased so many postcards. I had a huge stack, and it was super inconvenient to write them.
Then you have to buy stamps at the post office and walk to one of those mailboxes to mail them. I wondered if there’s an easier way to do this.
Using Claude to build an app in four hours
Priscilla Tina
I’d signed up for ProductCon in San Francisco, and I wanted a prototype of an app I could showcase at the event. So I came up with the idea for Postcard Press, an app that lets users upload pictures and type messages, which connects to a service called Postgrid that handles printing and delivery.
The night before, I built the bare bones of the app in four hours and got it working on my phone.
When I shared it with other product managers at the conference, they asked me when it was ready to go, saying they wanted to send their friends postcards for Christmas. That gave me intel that people were excited about it.
I tested the waters on social media too, posting a video about it that got 20,000 views.
Because there was interest in it, I decided to challenge myself to finish the app before the end of the year. Over the next two months before the end of 2025, I figured out how to monetize it, integrate payment processing, and launch it.
Since I launched it in December, more than 100 postcards have been sent through Postcard Press, each costing about $2. Postgrid’s services cost $0.82, and Stripe charges $0.30 per card, so I’m honestly not making much profit per card.
I know I could move to a subscription model if revenue were the goal, but it’s really not why I built this app to begin with.
Some tech hiccups along the way
I have an engineering background, but not necessarily coding, so I needed some help from my techie friends.
Before I launched the app, I shared it with some of my friends, and they sat down with their laptops to try to hack the website.
One of my friends found a security error that let him send 10 postcards without paying me anything, and he said, “You need to fix this before you launch it publicly.” The experience helped me shore up the app’s security features.
Payments were also a big hurdle for me, because I didn’t know how to set up a Stripe payment system or how much it would cost.
But my friends challenged me. One of them said, “I think you can integrate Stripe to do payments and credit card payments in 30 minutes,” and another bet against it. So I sat down and got it working in 30 minutes.
Normally, I would’ve needed a developer to do that, but I just asked Claude to read through all of Stripe’s API documentation, and it was able to integrate a payment step in the checkout process.
The first of many analog apps
Priscilla Tina
Even if it may not be that successful in the long run, I believe that what you take away from each experiment is all the learning. Building this app has been a really valuable learning lesson for me and has made some fun cash on the side.
I have been turning my attention to making new products. For example, I built a new app called Mini Print, inspired by the Polaroid walls I’ve noticed in friends’ homes and local businesses.
I built an app that lets you turn photos into little digital Polaroids and arrange them into a custom wall on your phone to use as phone backgrounds.
I built it with Claude Code, and it’s now reached around 2,000 users. I’ve loved seeing friends share their walls with me.
So many of my favorite analog experiences are just waiting to be reimagined digitally, and I’ve been having fun incorporating nostalgic interfaces. Nature and plants are next on my list.
