
Show HN: Create and mail a free postcard - derwiki
https://postcardmailer.herokuapp.com/
======
pimlottc
Hmm, for some reason when I click the link, it opens with the page scrolled
halfway down. It might have sometime to do with my 1Password extension, as it
has the "email" field focused.

[https://imgur.com/X3TkUSa](https://imgur.com/X3TkUSa)

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derwiki
Yea, same on mine with 1Password -- I suspect it's that. Nonetheless, thanks
for reporting the issue!

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astura
No, nothing to do with 1Password, I don't have it installed and I see the same
thing. I'm also on mobile.

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derwiki
Curious-- without 1Password, I don't get a scroll. If you don't mind, which
mobile platform and which browser?

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astura
Both Chrome and Firefox on Android.

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theveloped
Awesome seeing this here! I hope this will get you the traction you need to
keep it up and running! Happy New Year by the way!

I made a WhatsApp chatbot[1] a while back that helps you customize and send
postcards from within WhatsApp.

1: [https://melonpost.com](https://melonpost.com)

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rammy1234
This is a great idea , it all comes to privacy on the address that is shared.
How are those preserved

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theveloped
It’s definitely important! The addresses are stored for generating the
postcard designs and shipping them to the recipient only.

The card is however printed by a third-party with whom we thus have to share
the address details for shipping. From there on the is no additional privacy
concernes compared to sending a postcard by hand.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Love the idea. I hope it sticks.

I think you should add a statement addressing the privacy issue. Will you or
won't you sell data? Is the data encrypted? Will the vendor not sell the data?

I can see this product being a lot of fun. But not at the expense of loss of
privacy.

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theveloped
There is a privacy statement on the bottom of the page that covers this. Let
me know if you feel this is not thorough enough or not prominent enough.

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turrican
I would happily pay for this service and know others that would as well. Lots
of people have kids and grandparents that would get a kick out something like
this.

Good luck!

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gfodor
I went down this road — the economics don’t work unless you can get your
acquisition costs very very low. Good conversion rates and margins but we are
talking small numbers, and large capex per user to print cards, esp if you
give some away for free (which is a great acquisition channel)

~~~
daliusd
Have you actually tried creating postcard sending service? Could you share
what you have tried to acquire new users?

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gfodor
Yup, I spent 6 months or so trying to find product-market fit for two
different postcard apps, one focused on creating memes and the other focused
on sending baby/kid photos to grandparents and family. The latter had much
more potential, but the economics were tough due to user acquisition costs. I
suspect you could make it work if you had a better marketing strategy that I
did. I was trying to get traction through display ads by doing highly targeted
social networking campaigns, which seemed like it should be fruitful, and was
getting low CPIs ($1-$2) -- however even at that level, and with significant
viral loops, growth hacking, and a recurring revenue subscription based model,
I just couldn't get the numbers to work.

Ultimately, users seemed to need to see the product before they spend money,
so having a trial period of one or two cards seemed essential. Without it,
conversions flatlined I suspect since you were asking people to pay for
something they couldn't even see the quality of first. These one or two free
cards greatly added to acquisition costs, and led to a long, complex
acquisition funnel, and so you had to more than make up for sending a lot of
free cards with your paying customers while the new leads converted. When you
consider the free cards, you were now talking about $3-4 per _lead_ , and with
a generous conversion rate of 3% that is approx a $100 cost per customer to
acquire them. Surprisingly, over the course of a year or so of a subscription
this could actually work if churn was low.

But it was very risky and cost intensive to subsidize the acquisition costs
for me personally, so I stopped working on it after sending approx 9k
postcards and getting approx 250 customers, who almost entirely churned out
after a few months.

I learned a lot from this exercise, one thing was anytime you hear anyone
doing this idea, especially if they are VC funded, it's a good idea to bet
against them surviving unless you see they have some kind of cheap, high
volume, high quality marketing channel.

~~~
daliusd
Wow. Thank you for such long, detailed and insightful comment. I look at this
now as marketing challenge as well and I am trying some alternatives ideas.

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hnbreak
IDK. While this idea is as old as the Internet, does it make any sense? The
key point of a postcard is _not_ to communicate (limited space, not secure,
slow) but being a gesture. Buying a postcard, writing something on it and
bringing it yourself to the post office is a huge gesture and signals many
things--in contrast to postcard gateways like this one. Any receiver who will
get this machine printed postcard will think, 'why didn't she/he just text
me?' and throws it in the trash bin.

But maybe OP can give us a hint about the real use case or he is hand-writing
the cards himself.

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xnzakg
OP's reason for making this is mentioned in the "about" section of the page -
sending physical photos to people who prefer those over something like
Instagram.

~~~
hnbreak
Still doesn't make sense. Instagram and postcards have different use cases and
latter is not about sending someone a physical photo or showing a any photo
(hint again: it's a gesture).

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rammy1234
What Happens to the addresses that are entered ? Privacy ? Any info about that

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derwiki
Very good question. As alluded to under "About", this is very much in side-
project phase and absent ToS, Privacy Policy, payment, etc. I considered
slapping a generic privacy policy up there before launch, but convinced myself
I was coming up with excuses for not launching.

So that said: nothing will happen with addresses entered. If this project
grows to the point of a ToS/Privacy Policy, those documents will reflect that.
At this point you've got to trust me: I've been active in this community for a
decade and have an easily-Googleable reputation. If that's not good enough for
you, I completely understand, and this service is a little too alpha for you.

But seriously, it's a great question and thanks for asking it!

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trwhite
Funnily enough, I had this exact idea ~6 months ago. Whether this becomes a
paid service or not, people will always appreciate a little goodwill.

~~~
derwiki
Launching this as "free" is similar to another project I had a few years back:

[https://anotherphotoproject.herokuapp.com/](https://anotherphotoproject.herokuapp.com/)

Over the course of about a year, I gave away ~2500 photos at the coffee shop I
used to work out of (and gave all the donations to the coffee shop staff as
tips).

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netsharc
Swiss Post has an Android app that has the same idea, and they even let you
send 1 free postcard per day to Switzerland and Liechtenstein:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.post.it.pcc](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.post.it.pcc)

~~~
daliusd
Overall it is not new idea. Main players in the market currently are
mypostcard (Germany) and touchnote (UK). One of them is in US as well (or
maybe both). I personally identified at least 10 more.

Lastly, I have written my own service
([https://www.atvirukas.com](https://www.atvirukas.com)) as well despite
knowing that there are a lot of players in the market.

Swiss Post basically prevented other players entering Swiss market :)

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canadaduane
If I click "Choose a Photo" before filling anything out, it says "Validation
failed: Email can't be blank, Password can't be blank." Maybe I'm unusual, but
I want to see the picture I'll be sending, before I commit! :)

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imglorp
That was the first thing I tried, also.

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derwiki
Great feedback, thank you!

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djbeadle
I have been a big fan of
[https://www.thesimplepostcard.com/](https://www.thesimplepostcard.com/) which
lets you text photos to them.

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flamey
Very brave for you to offer 5 free cards (or any for that matter) -- when
postcrossers find out you may run out of money quickly :) postcard exchange if
a fairly popular hobby.

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kohanz
Great start! Reminds me a bit of [https://nanagram.co/](https://nanagram.co/),
the creator of which I believe posts here.

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hbcondo714
Good time to have this but how is this different from services like Postable?
We just used it to mail out 100 postcards for the holidays.

~~~
derwiki
Right now, it's not much different than Postable or any number of similar
services. Except they can send internationally and this service cannot :)
Based on the number of similar services, this doesn't seem like a winner-take-
all market. But I would be very interested to hear your thoughts: how you
chose Postable from competitors, what you like about them, don't like, etc.

A little extra context: when I first built this, it used the Instagram API to
automatically mail postcards to my mother when I uploaded a new photo. Shortly
after building it, Instagram changed their API and I was unable to get high
enough resolution photos for postcards, so I "pivoted" it to the current
product.

How is it different in the future? I think I can win on price-- it looks like
Postable is $2.49 low volume and $1.00 at volume. Based on my costs, I can do
$1.00 or lower with low volume.

~~~
hbcondo714
I think it would be nice to have an address book feature. This is what led us
back to Postable, we had used them a couple years ago for mailing thank you
cards which involved uploading our addresses to their address book. Overall,
their post card design templates appealed most to us.

~~~
derwiki
Thanks for the feedback! If you'd be willing to chat a little more, I'd love
to connect: adam@der.wiki

~~~
hbcondo714
Another nice to have may be the ability to track the card. When we purchased
our order on Postable, the order status displayed as "Sent" which is kind of
generic. We don't know which of our recipients actually received the card.

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ed
Neat! It's like a free [https://sincerely.com/](https://sincerely.com/)

~~~
reaperducer
I just looked at sincerely, and that looks like it only prints 5x7 photos and
mails them, not actual postcards. Maybe that's why it starts at $2 each.

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davchana
Experience: clicked the above link with herokuapp.com; signed up (saved Chrome
auto generated password in Chrome) & sent postcard. But the signup email sent
the link with .us ending; & had to copy password again from herokuapp entry.
Maybe the email should send herokuapp link; or herokuapp can be auto forwarded
to .us?

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OrgNet
"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."

~~~
4d66ba06
I am also getting this error when clicking "Preview"

Another thing worth looking into is the "confirm my account" link in email
leads to a non HTTPS link

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derwiki
Is this with one recipient?

HN is definitely sending more traffic than the service is used to so I've
temporarily increased the number of Heroku dynos-- hopefully trying again
should yield better results!

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4d66ba06
Yes, one recipient, thanks and no worries, I may try back in a few days :)

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bbody
I created a similar (non-free) service for sending emojis via postcards
[https://www.emojimailer.com/](https://www.emojimailer.com/)

What service do you use for sending postcards?

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bones151
Nice work. How are you printing them? What kind of printer / paper? Is it
automatic or do you have to do some work for every order?

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daliusd
As I have created similar service (EU based) I wish you good luck with it. Is
there a way to track your progress? Do you share your findings anywhere?

I hope you are aware that competition in quite serious in the market. E.g.
mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day. What's
your plan about that?

~~~
flamey
> mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day

I wanna call bs of this claim. Postcrossing -- largest postcard exchange
community, almost 800k registered users worldwide, not all active of course,
but a large portion of them sending daily and are really hooked on the hobby..
The hottest month in 2016 was March, 17k/day. These are people who love
sending cards. Just hard to believe another single service not oriented on
hardcore regular senders would be doing even half that. I can be wrong, of
course, but just hard to believe.

~~~
daliusd
Let me give you another number: Germany's most widely-used postal service,
Deutsche Post, delivers more than 61 million letters every day! (source:
[https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/communication/post-
mail-g...](https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/communication/post-mail-
germany))

10000 postcards in Germany alone would be 0.01% of that and mypostcard works
in multiple EU countries.

~~~
flamey
how many of those "letters" are postcards? thing is postcards are not cool
anymore (sad), and I think postcards share of the whole volume is pretty
small.

~~~
daliusd
I have no idea how many of these are postcards.

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douglaswlance
Are you selling the addresses?

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derwiki
Nope. More details in another thread on this post, but tl;dr: 1\. This is a
side project and I'm eating all the sending costs while iterating on the
product 2\. Selling addresses is shitty and if I monetize, it will just be
mark-up on the selling costs 3\. If this project continues to grow, I will
make the ToS/Privacy Policy clearly state that we will never sell addresses

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ta999999171
Who would you even sell them to? Sharper Image?

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bdibs
Looks pretty neat, what are your costs?

