

Ask HN: Comment on my pivot, postalshout.com - faxman

PostalShout is a web-to-post service geared towards businesses.  It allows them to send letters from any word processor with no installations.<p>www.postalshout.com<p>Our previous startup is a developer-targeted, API-accessible web-to-post service called PostalMethods. We noticed that it was attracting quite a bit of "unqualified" traffic, in the sense that it wasn't just developers signing up, but also end-users needing to send business correspondence from their desktops.  End-users aren't really well-served by that site because it quickly deteriorates into geek-speak, so we decided to try and give them a better home.<p>We researched end-users' use of the site and found a lot of them were sending plain MS Word or PDF files via email.  Hoping to ride on that trend, we've come out with PostalShout which targets business users who need to post mid-size quantities (hundreds to low thousands of letters per month) of postal mail.  The service lets them post transactional letters - invoices, reminders, simple marketing material, collections letters, etc. - directly from their word processor.<p>Does our targeting come across?  Is it clear what we're selling?  Are the benefits clear and compelling?  Does it appear easy enough to register?  Would any element in the site keep a person from registering? Are we missing anything?<p>Gloves off; let's hear it!<p>P.S. If you'd like to test the service for real, drop me an email at the address in my profile and I'll send you a $10 coupon.
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codeslush
Hey - congrats! I wrote an entire business plan around a very similar concept
10 years ago! Never executed on it, but still think about it all the time.
Since I know this is too big of a thing for me to tackle, let me share some of
my features with you that I think (hope) can help.

1\. Assuming you've purchased the equipment to do mass production (i.e.
automated print fulfillment center with
folding/cutting/licking/stamping/etc... features then make sure you're doing
address cleansing for the extra postage discounts.

2\. Make a utility print driver so I can "Print To Postal Shout" -- this is
VERY easy to do, at least on windows. You can get freeware, or near freeware,
to act as the actual postscript or pdf driver and it will alert your
application when the file is done printing - you can then kick in and do
something meaningful with it (i.e. submit to your service). I've written such
print wizards in the past and would be happy to elaborate if you're
interested.

3\. In combination with number two above, this is where you can expand your
reach considerably. Forget about that template that I have to download.
Through the print wizard, you pick your addresses and contacts from a list of
contacts, or start adding them. Since your program is controlling the wizard,
you can get the addresses in the format you want. Upon completion, create an
XML doc (or similar) and call a web service or ftp service to submit the
document(s) to. You can either encode the actual document into the metadata of
the xml file (slower) or give it a GUID and point to it from the XML metadata.
I highly recommend an FTP based approach for file transfer as it is fast and
you can give your customer progress feedback or even sync in the background.

4\. When using the driver, ask the user HOW the document/message should be
delivered. They will build an address book over time (maybe you can even tap
into an existing CRM if they have it) and offer email/fax/postal/premium).
Think of this from people who want to send an email to 100 people, but only 95
of them have email addresses (hard to imagine these days, but used to be very
common). Hope this makes sense. Further, it's a way of offering MULTIPLE
delivery methods in one easy wizard. You get to charge for the fax and postal
and maybe offer the email free. For example, I want my lawyer to see the
document I need reviewed right away, but I also want to send hard copy to him
and cc myself.

5\. If you could somehow incorporate electronic signature / notary / SOMETHING
into the documents and build up a crowdsourced delivery mechanism that would
be completely disruptive. Meaning, I'm in California and I want to overnight
this signed document to New York. I could send it to your service and have its
authenticity verified, then you can reach out to your New York based
notary/courier and have it delivered within a few hours to the New York
address. Way cheaper than FedEx and if you can somehow get this implemented it
would cause your service to absolutely explode in usage. Plus, it would be
more environmentally friendly! :-)

6\. Offer stationary / letterhead for the customers to design and use. This
could be a real problem for mass printing though. At minimum, you should offer
different qualities of paper for it to be printed upon. This is a "nice to
have" and nothing I would focus on right away (IMHO).

7\. You could offer discounts on the actual costs if the user was willing to
have ads printed at the bottom or top (or inline) in the document. This
wouldn't be for official correspondence, but more for the casual messages you
might not otherwise mail, but since it's free, or near free, why not. The
beauty of this: It WILL get opened and read by the recipient. Here you have a
personalized letter sent to someone with local adverts printed directly on it.
The recipient is almost guaranteed to read it and see the advert.

These are off the top of my head. I could drum up that old business plan /
feature spec and give you more details if you want.

Hope these ideas are useful to you. As proven: Ideas are useless w/o execution
- bad on me for not doing this myself.

EDIT: P.S. - target Salesforce.com as a market because this is especially
useful for mobile sales reps who have to fax and mail from hotels all the
time.

~~~
faxman
Wow, that's a lot of material to digest, thanks!

Let me start at the end - the idea isn't actually original. I remember
Compuserve offering a similar service around the late 80's! I agree this all
succeeds or fails based on execution.

> ... make sure you're doing address cleansing for the extra postage
> discounts.

Yes, this is actually addressed in our FAQ - we do address validation.

> Make a utility print driver so I can "Print To Postal Shout" -- this is VERY
> easy to do, at least on windows...

Could you please elaborate on this? I was always under the impression that
building print drivers was a very expensive undertaking.

> ...Upon completion, create an XML doc (or similar) and call a web service
> ...

We actually do this now with our Word add-in which makes it easy to submit
letters to distribution lists. Instead of running a mail merge in Word, the
document and list are uploaded via Web Service.

> ...If you could somehow incorporate electronic signature / notary /
> SOMETHING into the documents...

This is very forward-looking at this stage of our project. I'll keep this in
mind for later.

> Offer stationary / letterhead for the customers to design and use...

Great idea! With digital printing it's possible to print letterhead on the
fly.

> You could offer discounts on the actual costs if the user was willing to
> have ads printed...

We haven't been successful in generating additional sales from similar
initiatives in the past. I'll need to revisit this option.

> target Salesforce.com...

We do this with our postalmethods product, but haven't been diligent enough in
execution. Will need to put more energy into this.

Thanks for all the suggestions! It would be great if you could clarify on the
printer driver question above.

~~~
codeslush
Building a print driver is a very daunting task - so let me clarify. Don't
build it yourself! There are programs out there that will serve as the
underlying driver and you can hook into it to launch your program upon pdf
creation. I believe I used print2pdf in the past to launch my own wizard.

You can modify the registry entries to have the print driver called "Postal
Shout Printer" -- upon user selection, it prints the document to your desired
format and then launches your executable. From this, you get the filename and
start all the processing. Step One: Who would you like to send this to, Step
Two: starts the upload, etc... I built this wizard functionality over 10 years
ago for a client and that's what triggered my idea that you've started to
execute on. Back then, it was VB6 exe that was being launched and it was
incredibly stable. I wrote some winapi hooks to get byte transfer speeds and
calculate remaining upload time, etc... Also, hooked it into a CRM system so
that the document could be linked to the CRM. Slightly different use case, but
same net result.

I'm sure that driver isn't the only one capable of launching your own
executable. I did a lot of research back then (including writing my own
driver) and had many options - the pool of options must be much greater now.

I had the ability to create everything on my own back in the day, but I didn't
have the capital to purchase the equipment necessary to make it all happen.
That would have ran into the millions of dollars and I was never able to push
it through (didn't really try that hard I guess). I should have just done the
printing manually to build up a user base - but I didn't know much about
business or even how to do it then. Heck, I still don't! :-)

My email is in my profile if you want more info. Or, feel free to ask here -
your choice.

~~~
faxman
This is definitely interesting - "printing" the active document, selecting the
recipient from an address book, then selecting the job type is a very natural
work flow. I'll definitely research the availability of printer driver SDK's
that can reduce implementation complexity.

Thanks!

------
Swannie
I watched the video. It's too long: I got the point quickly, I wanted to know
how much it would cost after 25s, and had to wait until 1:09 to hear that.
Then 1:40 to find out my minimum investment.

That info isn't "above the fold". Stuff like: "Start now with as little as
$10!" "From only 75c per letter: save on postage, envelopes, stationary &
time".

And I think even the most detached exec doesn't need to be told how a letter
is sent. Sure they may not know what scale their post room is (franking
machines/folding etc).

Basically: get to the bottom line first - hook me in, then explain it.

~~~
faxman
> That info isn't "above the fold". Stuff like: "Start now with as little as
> $10!" "From only 75c per letter...

Thanks, excellent point!

------
sagacity
Clickable:

<http://www.postalshout.com>

Edit: One suggestion: the blue(ihs) portions of the logo are not _very_
readable against the black background of the header so the word 'Postal' (in
logo) does not register immediately, nor does the tag line 'You mail it, we
post it'.

IMO, this might affect the engagement level of (at least a small percentage
of) visitors.

HTH

~~~
faxman
Zowie, that was fast! Thanks, the logo is indeed being looked into to make it
stand out more on the page.

------
fname
Great idea and a good pivot.

My recommendations:

\- No autoplay on the video with audio. Either let me click play or remove the
audio in favor of subtitles

\- The logo seems small compared to the rest of the site

\- May need to reword some of the taglines in the body... I should understand
exactly what the site does without having to watch the video. If it piques my
interest, then I can watch the video for more information.

~~~
faxman
> No autoplay on the video with audio

We tried several approaches with video, and unfortunately no one ever clicked
'play'. Since the entire motivation for the service is given in that video we
really wanted it to be seen. I was worried about getting your kind of
feedback, so I guess we'll have to rethink this.

> I should understand exactly what the site does without having to watch the
> video

This feeds into what's discussed above.

Thanks!

