Social iOS app/Product/2026
Lost Post
The Internet Used to Be Weird.
Overview
Lost Post asks the whole world one question a day. You answer it, your answer goes out anonymously as a postcard stamped with your country, and the next day a postcard from a stranger somewhere else shows up for you.
I built it because I miss the old internet. Logging on used to feel like walking into a room you'd never been in, where you might stumble onto a strange Flash game or a forum full of people 4,000 miles away. Now it mostly feels like a slot machine tuned to keep you scrolling. I wanted something I'd look forward to every day without feeling like I owed it anything. A small moment of writing, and a real person on the other end.
So there's no feed. No followers, no likes, no replies. Just one question and one stranger. People vs. the algorithm, and this time the people win.
Design thinking
Everything runs on four motivators that feed each other: creativity, collection, customization and community. A feature only got in if it fed at least one of them.
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Nobody to perform for.
With no follower count there's nobody to perform for, so people actually think about what they write. Reviewers keep saying the anonymity is exactly what lets them open up.
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One clock for the whole world.
The day resets at midnight GMT, everywhere. It's not perfectly fair to every time zone, but getting a postcard back fast mattered way more than regional fairness.
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Just long enough.
Every prompt has a minimum word count (40 by default). It's just enough to push you past your first thought.
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A passport you fill slowly.
Each postcard carries a stamp from the sender's country, and you collect them in a stamp book. Streaks and achievements unlock little easter eggs along the way (write after 11pm and you get a moon sticker).
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Constraints make everyone a designer.
Your postcard is your only sense of self, so I wanted everyone to make something nice, including people who swear they aren't creative. RGB sliders aren't for everyone. Instead you get a limited palette of colors, patterns and stamps, plus a shuffle that picks a primary color, a weighted color scope and a color harmony. Random, but it always looks on purpose.
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Kind by default.
Reactions are pre-made and positive (like, funny, heartfelt, insightful), borrowed from how Overwatch keeps a competitive community from eating itself. It's enough to tell a writer their words landed somewhere. A two-part check, in the app and on the backend, catches addresses, phone numbers and abuse before anything goes out.
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Ephemera over interface.
The visuals borrow from old paper ephemera, with light textures, postmarks and a few nods to skeuomorphism, so opening a card feels a bit like checking the mailbox.
Impact
Lost Post launched at #7 on Product Hunt with 550 downloads in week one. Six months in it has 1,500+ weekly active users, 25% Day-30 retention and a 4.9 rating on the App Store. My favorite review said it reminded them of the early internet. Honestly, that's the whole point.
Since launch I've kept shipping based on what people tell me (through sentiment clustering and onboarding audits), including postcard translation, a home screen widget, a flag-matching game, Apple Health mindful minutes, and a bunch more. It makes money through customization, not ads.
I did all of it, from concept and visual design to SwiftUI and the backend. I sketched the core screens in Figma, wrote a lot of design docs, had Claude Code scaffold the Swift, then refined by hand, bouncing between design, writing and code depending on the feature. Half the job with AI is staying organized, because it can spin out of control fast.
