
Show & Thank HN: my friday night project turns into a venture - scottmotte
https://postcongress.io
======
scottmotte
Last friday night I hacked together FJunkMail.com and the following day posted
it up on Hacker News - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4402220>.

The response from the Hacker News community was really encouraging. I want to
thank you all for that. I especially want to thank ChuckMcM for his idea to
turn it into a way to send a postcard to your congressperson (and his helpful
feedback over an email thread), and prasincs for his additional re-enforcement
of that idea.

From all that I built <https://postcongress.io> over the course of this past
week. And already it is turning into a venture. A colleague of mine
recommended I contact advocacy groups. I've started doing so and have some
strong leads and a meeting on Monday.

So, thank you HN.

And there is still tweaks to be done so I'd appreciate any feedback.

~~~
tansey
I would think a letter is a more effective form of mailing congress. Postcards
don't convey the same weight as a full letter.

~~~
scottmotte
I am actually already working on this possibility with a printer.

~~~
chlee
Quick question. Lets assume the best and this idea takes off. How do you plan
to scale?

Seems like you have to put a lot of effort into printing and mailing the
postcards for $1.99.

------
TimPC
Your business model may eventually morph into an advocacy site. Have a bunch
of campaigns running with postcard size messages and a pay to send mode. Let
users sign-up with data to verify their riding and send to appropriate
representatives. Lower cost as much as you can by being able to bulk send. Try
and figure out what your best services and business model will be. Building a
user-based site with social network plug-ins to drive viral growth will
probably be key. Enable posting about sending the post-card and an in-site
functionality to track campaigns and whether you inspire others is probably a
promising way to go after end users.

------
zackzackzack
Some comments:

Good turn around time.

Try putting black edges around your title text. Right now, they are just
blending in with the background. The political background is a neat idea.
Designing for it dynamically will be hard though. Set up A/B testing and test
the various backgrounds you have, as well as backgrounds from
subtlepatterns.com (just in case).

Rotate the bottom info bar so that it is horizontal instead of vertical.
Nobody cares about the IO name I don't think. At this point the total message
should be simple: "Send a postcard to your congressperson, PERIOD".

Use javascript to encode the message and congressperson into the url. Backbone
has a way to do this. That way people can tweet out "Send THIS GUY a piece of
your mind. I did! Here's my message! postcongress.com?senator='Dick
Durbin'&message='Bro, come on. Taxes?'"

Not enough social buttons. Seriously, you need more buttons. Tweets and likes
from political active people will garner attention from like minds.

Why don't I see any adwords from you here yet?
<http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mail+your+congressman> (no sacarsm intended, mostly this
link was shorter).

Change the font that the message naturally displays with. Times New Roman
doesn't look right to me. Also, include a picture of a real, finished card on
the site.

Good luck!

~~~
afeezaziz
Yeah i really concur with the idea that the website needs more social buttons.
I want to tweet about this website!

~~~
scottmotte
You can definitely do it of your own accord for now. :) There is a tweet
button after purchase.

------
bcardarella
I created a very similar app a year and a half ago: mailcongress.org

<https://github.com/dockyard/mail_congress>

It's since come down. Here are some things you need to consider

1.) Progressives won't respond well to this. I have some experience here, I
spent a year working at the Democratic National Committee in DC on their Labs
team. My observation is that unless you're "a name" in the progressive tech
sector or have a name attached to the product it is going to be difficult
getting notice. I actually respect the Republicans on how they adopt
technology: throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. I can cite
examples of this if people are interested.

2.) Since 911 Snail mail can take weeks to arrive. Everything that is sent to
the Hill in DC is sent out for anthrax screening. It is very difficult to send
reactionary issue snail mail unless it is hand delivered.

3.) The best way to get your rep's attention is to send mail, email, or call
about a very specific issue. If you say "Support gay rights!" you'll most
likely get a very well printed form response letter a few weeks later. If you
say "I am one of your constituents and I want you to support SR 1992 up for
vote in two weeks" this goes much further. Reps want to know that you are a
vote and how you want them to vote on specific bills.

4.) Most hill staffers will actually ignore snail mail that doesn't have a
postage stamp (the ones that the post office will put on the letter to mark
its origin) from their district or state (for senators). Again, they really
only care about votes. If you can't vote for him/her then you don't matter
nearly as much as someone that can.

5.) I originally designed MailCongress because I saw a Communicating With
Congress report when I was at the DNC. I cannot find the link now but this
report comes out every 4 years (right after each mid-term). It represents the
previous 4 years after publication of data on how congress responds to
different forms of communication. The report I saw came out in 2006 which
means it covered 2002 - 2006. At the time Email was way down around 30%
efficacy and snail mail was up to 85% effective. I released MailCongress right
before the 111th Congress left at the end of 2010. The next report came out
that represented 2006 - 2010 and things changed a lot. Email went up to
mid-70s efficacy and snail mail dropped to mid-70s. For the 4 years prior to
2010 email was just as effective at communicating with congress as snail mail.
The report said the reasons for the swing was most likely because of the major
turn over on the hill in 2006. When many new congress people come in they
bring a new generation of hill staffers, younger, and more tech-savy. We had
another major turn over in 2010. Which means more shift. I wouldn't be able to
tell you what the numbers are but my guess is that email exceeds snail mail by
now. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the next report's number were very
skewed once you take Twitter and Facebook into consideration.

I applaud the effort, I really hope it works. Unfortunately you're fighting a
lot of factors here. Your pricing is much better than mine (I was charging $1
per-piece and also would notify the senders when their letters should have
arrived so they could follow up with phone calls). You should consider how the
printing is going to scale if you get serious about this. I actually built out
of mail queue backed by Redis. Scalability testing showed I could print 1000
letters per hour. Which is really not that many if it were to take off, any
crazy issue that comes up (and they always do) can be an opportunity to get
people to use this. The usage patterns in politics are _very_ spiky so you
need to be ready for immediate scale.

TL:DR; I once built something similar, best of luck! :)

~~~
bcardarella
BTW, I took down MailCongress.org because I was getting attention only from
right-wing advocacy groups. As a blue-blooded Democrat I couldn't bring myself
to do that even if they were willing to pay. It came down over a year ago.

~~~
csense
It never ceases to amaze me how often people are against free speech when they
don't agree with the speaker.

In political debate, all sides are sometimes guilty of various kinds of bad
behavior, but it's usually lefties who have this particular problem. For
example:

Think homosexuality is wrong? You're guilty of Hate Speech!

Think affirmative action isn't a good thing? You're guilty of Racism!

Approve of your town's Christmas celebration? You're Intolerant of Other
Religions!

Regardless of your politics, name calling and _ad hominem_ attacks like these
do not inspire confidence in the strength of their originators' positions.

I'm not saying you're not within your rights to close down your service if you
disagree with how it's being used, but it's interesting that your instinctive
reaction to a message you don't agree with is to suppress it.

~~~
bcardarella
This isn't a free speech issue. By taking down MailCongress I was in no way
preventing people from sending mail to their congress person. This is matter
of choosing who I was doing business with.

------
joering2
+1, BUT here is what I want to see:

I want an App that lets me join a "ring of awared" and execute an action,
leveraging the power of Web 2.0/Social.

Very simple example: recently you had something called SOPA being pushed
through. You would go to the App and create a thread "call representative X
and tell him you are against SOPA". You put Rep name, phone number, and click
"submit the project". Then everyone that feels compelled to participate, joins
the "ring". Then simple algorithm puts everyone that joined into a chain: now
A is calling rep. Once A finished his call, A press the button "done" and
focus is switched to B that is notified via email/inapp notification/ etc that
it is his time to call. If he wont do it in 10 minute timeframe, system moves
forward to C, D, E ... n.

Sorry, but nowadays I think its the only way to get some traction. If rep
staff memorize those $1.99 postcards, they will be simply throwing them
without even reading, which is the same as clicking "trash" in your gmail
judging just by subject/sender.

If you wont get the ICE/DHS ceasing your domain and servers due to "domestic
terrorism", this could go viral and grow big. Perhaps then, overloaded with
phonecalls from people that care about their future and future of their
children, those in charge would start to care.

------
klausjensen
Please write more about how you actually fulfill orders. How do you print,
send to printer, is part of the process manual, break down cost etc.

Great idea, love it. :)

------
5vforest
This is cool, but others with more experience in the field have already
figured out how to best deliver messages to congress.

See the "How it works" section: <http://heritageaction.com/grow/using-popvox-
email-congress/>

> Unlike electronic mail, which is both free to send and easy to ignore,
> receiving a postcard sends its own message. It says to the congressperson,
> "I feel strongly enough about this to go to the expense of sending an actual
> card."

No. A postcard will never make it to the congressperson. It will be read by a
staffer and most likely tossed unless it expresses support or opposition for a
current issue or bill, in which case it will be tallied and _then_ tossed in
the garbage.

~~~
meej
Plus, it will take a very long time to get to that staffer. Ever since
Congress went through the anthrax scares a decade ago, their snail-mail is
highly scrutinized, which slows down delivery.

~~~
simonw
Maybe postcards get through the process faster than letters? They should be
easier to check.

------
codesuela
Slightly OT but I just wanted to point out that this stands in strong contrast
to the "Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News.." post and that's great.
Other than that: congrats OP!

------
bcks
This is fantastic. I can imagine small advocacy organizations wanting to use
this for their members with a custom issue graphic. For instance, if Amnesty
International wanted its members to write on behalf of a prisoner of
conscience they could use a photo of that individual on the back of the card.

Otherwise, are you willing to share some of the details about the fulfillment
side of things? How did you find a printer? How are they receiving the orders?

------
adambratt
Reminds me of something I did back in jan this year. I made a twitter account
called SopaSoap and had a huge following.

We were going to allow people to send "SOPA" soap for $8 to their congressman
with the tag line "Vote no on SOPA and help keep congress clean".

Then SOPA got tabled. Luckily it was right before I setup the website and
place the order with a soap manufacturer I was working with.

------
ChuckMcM
Clearly I think this is an _excellent_ idea. Very nicely done Scott! I expect
this will have a long an prosperous life.

~~~
scottmotte
Thanks Chuck, and thanks against for all your excellent help, ideas, and
feedback!!

------
mintplant
May I suggest merging the postcard display with the input interface? It was
the first thing that drew my intention, and I actually tried to click on it to
start typing a message.

Other than that, looks like a pretty neat concept. I like the emerging trend
of producing physical output from digital actions.

~~~
gllen
Great suggestion

------
tocomment
This is a great idea!

One thing I'd suggest is to send a random assortment of postcards and don't
includ your logo or company info anywhere on it. Ie make it look like it
actually came from a citizen.

Otherwise congress people will just think they're form letters and throw them
out.

~~~
scottmotte
Yea, I need to make that clear because definitely my logo will not be on it.
And the postcard frontside is randomly chosen as well - to one of the random
background images you see when visiting the site.

------
throwaway1979
Cool project!

Are you printing/writing out the postcards yourself? Or are you
automating/outsourcing it?

------
pizza
Yet again: <http://CallRep.org>

------
LiveTheDream
Looks nice! Congratulations on moving forward with your project rather than
letting it languish.

Quick feedback: there's a typo in "sign, sealed, delivered"; should be
"signed" rather than "sign".

~~~
scottmotte
Thanks. Fixed.

------
slurgfest
Great idea. Can you make it possible to put carriage returns in the message?

I guess the idea with advocacy groups is that they can subsidize the cost of
postcards and get a bulk rate?

~~~
scottmotte
Yea, I think I should bring back carriage returns.

And yes, that is part of it.

------
thisone
just a comment about the background, though others have been made.

In chrome, at least, the background starts loading in, then goes white, then
loads in again. It's a bit odd.

Have you thought of saving the image progressive or interlaced? Don't know
what the common knowledge is on this at the moment, but watching an image that
big and busy load in slowly from top to bottom takes time away from getting to
the actual point of the site.

------
3JPLW
What's the front of the postcard like? It'd be awesome if I could choose from
a few different designs... or even upload my own image!

Great idea!

~~~
scottmotte
It will be the same photo as one of the randomized background images. That's
something I need to clarify with an adjustment to the design.

~~~
3JPLW
Ah, cool! Awesome picks. It still seems silly to need to reload the page a
bunch of times to see all the choices. Little thumbnails underneath the blank
postcard back would work perfectly, I think. And you could clearly show which
one is currently selected (and that it's the same as the background).

------
ayla
i would like to know if this is handwritten or printed? handwritten would be a
lot more effective, print looks like spam mail.

