

Tell HN: I ripped off Dustin Curtis' snail and got slightly different results - paulsingh

First off, Dustin -- sorry!
Second, I'm still relatively new to RoR and design stuff -- so, yes, I ripped off stuff that I liked from common sites I visit. :)<p>Anyways, I saw Dustin's post the other day about Snail, his new webapp and thought it was a pretty sweet idea. A couple days later, I saw that he tweeted about it not being too profitable at all. Bummer.<p>Then, last weekend, my dad happened to complain about having to find "damn stamps" every time he needed to mail a customer a invoice or receipt. (He's in construction, an industry that really doesn't use email for anything...)<p>Anyways, I threw this together and launched it on Monday and now mail off 20-30 letters a day. It's barely profitable but most of that is because I haven't automated some of the key steps... stuff I'll be doing over the next few days.<p>Today I threw some ghetto code together for another guy that wanted to be able to email stuff to me that gets automagically mailed off to his clients. I think I just doubled the amount of letters I send every day...<p>Anyways, I'd love some feedback: http://www.snailpad.com
======
bravura
Here is a variation on an application that involves mailing physical letters.
It reconciles two salient facts:

1) people love to complain and be activists, but are also lazy and would
rather click a button on the web than lick an envelope

2) most businesses respond better to a printed complaint than a digital one.

Anyone can start a petition. e.g. "You, the cafe at the corner of Fifth and
Main, charge too much for their coffee and we would probably come their more
if it cost $.25 less." You provide the address of the recipient: Expensive
Coffeeshop, Fifth and Main, Smallville, NY

The application is integrated to facebook, so each time someone signs the
petition it is posted to their wall for people to see. Once a critical mass of
signatures has been reached, and the numbers of signees starts to level off,
the petition is printed and automatically mailed.

(I have copied this idea onto idea-ne.ws: <http://idea-ne.ws/item?id=155>)

~~~
tedunangst
Companies respond to _lots_ of printed letters. One letter with a thousand
[forged] names on it is no different than one letter: the return address gets
a coupon for a free coffee.

------
ars
Change:

    
    
      Just address your envelope, write your letter, verify
      its appearance, then pay using your Paypal account.
    

Add the words "electronically", or "via this website" or something like that.

You have a bunch of '2' showing up all over the place.

Mention that you don't retain the contents of the letter once printed (if you
don't, and I hope you don't).

Include a photo of a sample letter so people can see if the paper really looks
greenish (joke). But really, people want to see if the printout will look
professional. And a photo of the envelope too - with stamp.

Mention where you are physically located, so people have an idea of how long
delivery will take.

What happens if the letter is so long it takes many sheets of paper (i.e. more
stamps) - is there an additional charge? Can I download a book, paste it in
and you'll print and mail it to me? Just mention "up to 5 sheets of paper" or
something like that, in the pricing page, but don't bother programming it,
handle it manually.

~~~
paulsingh
Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to nail these down soon.

As for the sheets of paper, for now I'm betting that the average letter won't
be more than 4 pages (since that's when the postage costs rise).

~~~
symptic
That's not very sound basis for your bet. Though you'll be able to study this
with the more letters you send. I just wanted to point out that you need to
test this rather than assume.

------
vaksel
the problem with this is scale.

Just look at what you need to do: print out the letter, print out the
envelope, stuff the letter, apply stamp, seal the envelope. Double check the
data.

That's 3-5 minutes per letter.

    
    
       @3 minutes that's 20 letters per hour. 
       @4 minutes that's 15 letters per hour,
       @5 minutes that's 12 letters per hour.
    

So your potential income is $12-20 an hour.

Let's add up all your variable costs: stamp: 44 cents ink: 22 cents (sample
laser cartridge is $35 for 470 pages, count 3 to print envelope+2 pages)

So based on this, you are making 33 cents off each letter. That means your
current profit margin per hour is:

    
    
       @3 minutes: $6.66 per hour
       @4 minutes: $4.95 per hour
       @5 minutes: $3.96 per hour
    

At those rates, you can't even legally hire anyone, since the minimum wage is
$7.25 per hour.

Even if you get super efficient and cut that down to 1 letter every 2 minutes.
(simply can't do it faster than that on consistent basis), that's only 30
letters mailed. Or $9.90 an hour.

At $1 a letter you simply aren't making enough money. You need to pretty much
double your rates, to make this workable.

~~~
shimon
At scale, all of these things can be automated. The challenge is getting to
scale but not getting destroyed by someone who already has the infrastructure
to do this at far lower cost. (Vistaprint, for example, could probably offer
this service with just a little bit of programming work.)

To avoid that, you'll want to offer users whatever you can to make your
service a more efficient option: address book integration, built-in
letterhead, quickbooks integration, who knows.

You might also expand to adjacent markets. I once heard of an online greeting
card company that lets you enter in the addresses and birthdays of everyone
you want to send cards to. Then a couple weeks before each birthday, they mail
you an envelope containing a pre-addressed, stamped envelope with your choice
of card. You just write a note and drop it in the mail.

You could do the same sort of thing, maybe even including the handwritten
part!

~~~
paulsingh
+1 for "At scale, all of these things can be automated."

------
qeorge
I like this a lot. Nice job taking an idea and running with it. At $1/letter
this doesn't work, at $3/letter its an enviable opportunity.

I find most of the comments here to be quite pessimistic, so here's a few
things to consider:

There are proven economies of scale here. With any volume, a bulk postage rate
will start saving you money. There's no reason to think Paul will continue to
pay 44 cents a letter. Furthermore, the cost of printing is being grossly
exaggerated: I picked up a laser printer from Dell that included a 1500 page
toner cartridge. That's .08 cents a page, with a free printer. Its easy to do
get cheaper than that per page with a more expensive printer.

Also, all of this can be automated. I share an office with an attorney who
sends out hundreds of letters per day, and it takes about 2 hours of his
assistant's time to setup the Mail Merge in Word and start the machines. All
stuffing, labeling, stamping, etc. is done by the machines.

Here's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of
every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24
hour turnaround now, but something to consider.

Paul's found customers and profitability from day 1, and he can just work hard
until he generates enough cash to buy machines to handle it for him. It
wouldn't be hard to completely automate the entire thing. I like it.

Feedback on your website: you knocked it out of the park. The domain is
obvious and makes sense, the website is to the point and immediately conveys
the benefit. There's no loose ends, from the privacy policy to the API. I'm
seriously impressed.

~~~
nico
_Here's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of
every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24
hour turnaround now, but something to consider._

That should be considered into the business model, example: 24-hour
guaranteed: $3, 2-3 day delivery: $2, 3-5 days delivery: $1. Then you could
have different queues/printers for each option.

If you start growing, you could set up different locations to print closer to
the destination and you could have a really cool service like: 2-3 hrs
delivery guaranteed!

Also, you could outsource the printing and delivery, say high school/college
kids who want to make some extra money, they sign up at your website and start
receiving correspondence to print and deliver close to where they live. For
each delivery they accumulate a certain amount of money and you send them a
check at the end of the month if they have achieved a certain threshold.

Btw, congrats and keep at it, try your best and you'll do great!

~~~
paulsingh
I like this idea of "tiered" mailing times... I'm going to try to A/B test
this sometime this week and see how it affects account signups.

------
jacquesm
You should add a 'skypeout' like option to this where it works
internationally.

People in the country of destination would print out the items and mail them
for the cost of a local stamp and get some compensation for their efforts.

That way you can offer international 'real' snailmail for a tiny bit over the
price of a local stamp.

~~~
superkarn
You could do that domestically also. This could be a way to scale it. Allow
people to sign up for "mailer" accounts, where they can print out the letters
and mail them for a small compensation.

You'll have to work out the privacy issue though.

------
mojonixon
If you're interested in how the pros do it, about 5 years ago I temped at a
bulk mailer--mostly medicare checks to doctors--using pitney bowes(IIRC)
equipment. The machine I was running was organized in an L shape 20'x20'. One
side would strip the letter off the continuous paper stack, collate it, fold
it, and seal it in an envelope. The second side would stamp it and stack it in
postal bins. A bad day I would do about 20,000 but if I had everything
calibrated and the guy on the shift before didn't muck things up too bad I
could get close to 50000 in an 8 hour shift. The system I was using rather old
and temperamental, so I wouldn't be surprised if modern equipment is an order
of magnitude faster.

Once the machine was running I didn't have to do much besides put envelopes in
the hopper, but the noise, paper cuts, and opportunity to lose a finger while
clearing a jam made it a horrible job.

------
fendale
You know, I came up with this idea ages ago, and did exactly nothing about it.
I think it came about because I needed to mail a single letter and had no
printer, no envelopes and no stamps ... surely there must be many more like
me!

Would I pay £1 ($1.60) to send a letter - probably - beats needing to buy a
printer (ok, I can use the printer in work) find a stamp, take it to the post
box etc.

What about recorded delivery letters? I would need to queue up in the post
office for those - maybe there is some why that could be handled in batches.

Also, I think companies who send lots of letters get a discount on the
standard stamp price.

You could also have 'printing centers' in various countries around the world
for cheaper and faster 'air mail'.

I think this idea has a lot of potential, but it would probably require TV
commercials to get it to the masses!

~~~
paulsingh
Question: If I let you pay $1.60/letter, how many would you _actually_ send?
:)

~~~
fendale
I don't need to send many letters ... I haven't sent one for about a year now.
So for my annual letter sending needs I'd easily pay above the odds, being
that I still don't own a printer or stamps! I bet there are many people like
me, but I've no real data on that!

~~~
paulsingh
I don't have any hard data either though, anecdotally, it seems that people
_are_ willing to pay $3 for their one-off letters.

------
nym
Sometimes it's all about finding a market.

------
grippy
Here's how you can lower your overhead on postage:

Flip the sender and recipient addresses around and don't place a stamp on it.
The mailman has to send it back to the sender, who, in this case is actually
the recipient, because of the missing postage. HA!

~~~
vaksel
probably a good way to end up in jail

------
kirpekar
1\. Do you do international? I see a lot of need for letters to Mexico, China
and India.

2\. You could charge a lot of money for handwritten notes. In fact, I would
pay $20 for someone to hand write a letter to my grandma, once a year, or so.

3\. CC from email. It would be great if I could simply cc xxxx@snailpad.com
which you would print and physically mail out.

4\. It would also be useful if you could print and snail mail some documents I
email you (receipts, hotel reservations, maps, etc).

Edit ... oops I see you have a lot of these features already. Maybe you can
work on #2. Cheers!

~~~
BenS
On #2: you have missed the point of why a hand written letter to a loved one
is special.

~~~
kirpekar
I certainly understand the value of a hand written letters. I am only
suggesting a market opportunity.

------
balakk
I like this.

A bit of feedback:

\- Sometimes, registration makes sense. In this case, it does. if I'm going to
be a regular customer, why should I need to enter my address every time? (Not
sure if you have an option - I looked around but couldn't find any).

\- Letter templates would be nice. Just basic business letters, personal
letters, even 2 or 3 options would be great.

\- You can offer a selection of greeting cards. Season's around the corner -
you could make a lot of money.

~~~
paulsingh
RE: Easier Registration... Definitely, I'm thinking the same thing actually
(especially after watching how some of my repeat users have been using the
system this week).

------
gcheong
Where do your customers come from?

~~~
paulsingh
For now, they're coming from word of mouth within my dad's circle of friends.

Probably not enough word of mouth for this thing to scale dramatically (yet)
but enough to help me cover my costs and then have some serious beer money on
top.

------
rbritton
If you can validate the addresses and generate Zip+4s, you may want to look
into this if your volume reaches the minimum:
[http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/senditwithintheus/pr...](http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/senditwithintheus/presortedfirstclassmail.htm)

~~~
paulsingh
Definitely, I actually spoke to the USPS folks today. This shouldn't be too
hard at all, though I may defer this for a little bit -- you actually don't
save all that much so I may not spend the time setting this up until I've got
a little more volume.

EDIT: Also, when you send via bulk mail, you have to take it to specialized
bulk mail facilities... unfortunately, I'm ~50 miles from the nearest one. So,
unless I can fill a truck full of mail, I'm not sure how I'd make the numbers
work.

------
khangtoh
Just curious, who is hosting this?

Also, lots if good feedback given by others but I especially liked using your
service to send invoices, etc. So here's my suggestion, create a developer API
and other web applications can use your service to send out snail mail.

~~~
paulsingh
It's on Heroku at the moment.

Yes, definitely. I actually have one customer that's beta testing an "email to
snail mail" system that I've built. I need to clean up a few things but should
have that available to everyone sometime next week.

If you're serious about using the service to send invoices (or anything else),
feel free to ping me -- my contact info is in my profile. I'll trade you a
reduced rate for solid feedback. :)

------
aarongough
I actually think it looks really good! I'm assuming that you're not new to
web-development, just to RoR, because if this was a first (or even second, or
third) app I would decry it as impossible :-p

Good work!

~~~
paulsingh
Thanks for the complement, I appreciate it! This is my second semi-serious app
with RoR.

------
brandnewlow
Wait, so what are you doing differently than Dustin on your end?

~~~
paulsingh
Technically, probably nothing. Fundamentally, I'm trying to go after solo
entrepreneurs and SMBs that need to send stuff out to clients, prospects, etc.

Unless I'm mistaken, Dustin's service is better for people that have a "one-
off" need to mail stuff. I'm setup for that use case too, but am trying to
build stuff to cater to a group of people that have already budgeted money for
this expense.

~~~
brandnewlow
Ok, so nothing. Just leveraging your contacts better. Cool.

------
tsally
Perhaps you should allow people to upload a company logo? If your dad is
mailing customers for his business, how much better would it be if you did the
letterhead for him?

~~~
paulsingh
Definitely worth looking into... for now, I've just asked them to send me a
PDF with the letter content so that the letter looks exactly like they expect
it to.

The letter input screen you see on the site today is pretty new and intended
for new users that just want to send a one-off letter or something.

------
mikeryan
I'd add a way to upload pdf's or docs so people could send things like
invoices/contracts etc.

But well done.

~~~
paulsingh
Definitely, I'm working on that as we speak. I'm planning to offer the PDF
upload capability on the letter input form that you see on the site.

Additionally, I'm thinking about creating the ability for people to just email
something like "letters [at] snailpad.com" with the recipient's address in the
subject line and either (1) the letter's content in the email body or (2) a
PDF attachment of the letter content.

If they're a recognized user and have available credits in their balance, I'd
shoot off a confirmation and queue it for physical mailing on the next day.
Otherwise, I'd reply with an email containing a PDF preview of the letter and
some text encouraging them to signup or reload their account.

------
russ
You also ripped off github's desgin ;-)

~~~
techiferous
github should take that as a compliment. :) github's design is okay, but it's
too cluttered for my tastes. It feels like a messy desk.

------
agbell
To quote your blog :" Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Good execution is rare."
Nicely done.

~~~
paulsingh
Thanks dude. :)

------
csmeder
very nice: simple but has enough features to be valuable to people.

