I Built a Website To Show Off My Postcards. Here's What I Learned.

Most of my side projects die as ideas. They live in notes apps and on scraps of paper. They get talked about with friends and then get quietly forgotten. OncePosted.com is one of the rare ones that made it out.It's a simple premise. A curated collection of vintage postcards, each one scanned front and back, showing the image and the handwritten message on the other side. You can submit your own. You can browse the collection. That's it. No algorithm. No notifications. Just cards that were once posted, now archived.Full disclosure, I built it with AI assistance, first on Replit and then with Claude Code. I had no plan, no spec document, and no particular expertise in the stack I ended up using. What I did have was an idea I kept coming back to, it turns out that's enough to start.Why Postcards?I have always found postcards quietly fascinating.Someone picked it up. They thought of another person. They wrote something, even if just a few lines. They found a stamp. They posted it. And…