
Show HN: Send snail mail from the web - bavidar
http://infraprint.com/services/directmail
======
kmtrowbr
I spent about 2 years creating Snailmailr.com (not online anymore) which
ultimately sent about 15,000 letters, several hundred regular users at one
point, had a nascent affiliate program, and appeared on the NYTimes,
Lifehacker, and 50+ other blogs and online newspapers.

[http://gigaom.com/2009/11/17/snailmailr-send-mail-from-
the-w...](http://gigaom.com/2009/11/17/snailmailr-send-mail-from-the-web/)

Further proof -- to give you an idea of the flavor of Snailmailr, I put a ZIP
of Snailmailr marketing materials online here:
<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37621685/snailmailr.zip>

I made many mistakes along the way, but ultimately it was super educational.
If you want to pick my brain, I know a great deal about this market and I
would LOVE to put this knowledge to some good use. Send me a DM and we can
setup a phone call.

Good luck!

~~~
highace
Why did you take it offline? It sounds like it was quite successful... was
that not the case?

~~~
Pyramids
I'm curious about this as well, I was definitely 2-3 of those 15,000 letters.

If I were to guess I can imagine the amount of effort it required probably
outweighed any profits, especially if he was doing the letters manually. It
must of been a cool experience, regardless.

I've also used EZGram, L-Mail (for individual letters) and DirectMailManager,
PostalMethods and Click2Mail for business letters, so competition may be a
factor as well.

~~~
kmtrowbr
Hi guys,

Thanks for your curiosity. Well -- I don't want to discourage bavidar from his
project.

However, here's a sampling of what I learned:

Snailmailr was focused on consumers. This was a mistake. Folks who still send
paper mail are generally at the tail end of the curve (poorer, very late
adopters). For example, one of my largest types of users were the friends and
family of people in jail. There are quite a few 'prison pen pal' websites:
[http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-524356....](http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-524356.html)
These types of people don't have lots of money to spend. Additionally,
technical innovation is coming even to this part of the postal mailing system
and whittling down even this demographic: <http://jpay.com/PEmessages.aspx>

I was very focused on low price. My base price was $0.99 / 2 page domestic
letter. I simply felt that this service should not be expensive. This worked
for my target market but it's not a good idea for a new business to be
competing on price. I soon added higher prices for color and for additional
pages / international, I was surprised at the high costs that folks were
willing to spend (> $20 on many occasions).

I printed and mailed the letters myself. (It was a bit of a white lie, I think
people need to hear that 'it is automated' ... and they can easily imagine
that this is so ... and it was to a degree ... but there were definitely
manual parts of the process.) I spent a good deal of time on this setup: at
one point I had 5 huge laser printers in my bedroom: two monochrome, two
color, and one for envelopes. I automated as much as I could by printing the
letters and envelopes in a certain order, but in the end I had to fold, stuff,
and apply postage to each letter myself. It took me about an hour to do 100
letters. I always planned on further automating the system once I had the
money to purchase more sophisticated equipment, but it was too much of a leap.
An hour per day sapped a lot of the energy I could have used on improving the
software. I should have integrated with a postal mailing API right away:
<http://www.postalmethods.com/postal-api>

Direct Mail advertising would have been a better route for me to take. A
solution focused on small advertisers with postcards (simpler mailing process,
cheaper postage) and a slick UI could perhaps succeed.

I tried to do it all myself. It just wasn't very robust and I think had I gone
the route of trying to raise money, even a slight amount, that process would
have provoked some discussions that might have helped me.

I do like how bavidar is focusing on an API -- it was simply a brain-dead move
that I didn't build this first. APIs are sticky, could bring large volumes of
business.

So the lessons were basically: * Overall: probably not the best idea to try to
break into a very mature market that's imploding (postal mail). * Choose your
customers wisely: for a new business, better to target upmarket, early adopter
customers who have more money to spend. * Don't try to compete on price in the
beginning, charge a premium for your product. * Value your time immensely, use
the premium price that you charge to save yourself labor. * For god's sake
build the API, preferably first, it's sticky and can bring loads of business.

In the end I just got very tired. I was running out of money, my health was
going downhill (problems with my teeth, weight gain, depression) -- I was very
young (28), but still I found this alarming ... I couldn't really see any
light at the end of tunnel ... if I ever had problems sleeping, all I had to
do was think of Snailmailr and I would fall immediately asleep ;)

Additionally when thinking of the medium-to-distant future I had a hard time
imagining where Snailmailr would fit in. In the years that have passed since
(5 years: 2008-2013) this is even more clear and the Snailmailr idea seems
even more silly. Here's another cute piece of history:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9busz/well_here_it_is_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9busz/well_here_it_is_the_dumbest_thing_on_the_internet/)

It was quite easy to find a new job however and the software knowledge I
gained was enormous. Even though it was difficult and painful, building
Snailmailr gave my career a huge upwards kick.

I hope to try again and have ideas all the time ... however, the next time
I'll do many things differently.

Thanks again for asking! Best of luck to this new attempt, Kevin Trowbridge

~~~
VuongN
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights. Good read.

------
jawns
I would feel more comfortable using a service like this if there were some
sort of "About" page, describing who's running the show and why we should
trust you. (Maybe there is, but it's not easily found?)

Also: More information about process.

For instance, where will these letters be postmarked from? For many
developers, that's kind of important. Some might want the cache of a large
city. Others may simply be concerned about the time it will take to reach the
recipient.

~~~
bavidar
You can choose the address from which it is sent from. Time to recipient (TTR)
is actually faster as we print the collateral closest to the destination city.
Think edge print centers very similar to how CDN works.

~~~
wcfields
How specific can one get with postmarks?

For instance, it would be nice to send from Santa Claus, Indiana during the
holidays.

~~~
duck
I think North Pole, Alaska would be better -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska> :)

------
jspaur
At the risk of hijacking the thread, we've been doing this for about 7 months
now (out of beta for 4+) @ <https://www.trypaper.com>, we wish you guys the
best of luck!

edit: the big differentiator here is that we print and mail documents
ourselves in one of our two print facilities (Seattle WA and Jacksonville FL)

------
ConceitedCode
I spent about a year creating something similar before shutting it down.

One feature that I had that I really liked was the ability to get a special
email address that I can send an email to and it would be mailed. You could
set the from address in your profile so that it is filled in automatically and
charged my credit card on file.

The email was formatted like this. <https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5709486>

~~~
bavidar
our current goal is to create a platform and allow other developers to create
consumer applications. We want to be the AWS of printing services. There are
so many ways to use this API and we want to provide the tools to developers.

------
mike-cardwell
I remember using a similar service a few years back. Except it worked by you
installing a special printer driver. Printing to the virtual printer that the
driver supplied caused the image to be uploaded to their servers. It worked
really well.

~~~
pud
I believe you're referring to Mimeo.com.

Mimeo's printer driver also let's you preview the finished product and choose
options like binding, tabs, opaque covers, etc. it's really neat.

<http://mimeo.com>

------
DougN7
There have been quite a few entries into the market like this over the years
(I remember interviewing for one during the great dot com bubble in the late
90's). Normally competition is a good thing - it proves there is a viable
market. But in this case, it seems none of the competitors survived. That
should give one pause...

------
ninjakeyboard
Brutal security. Plaintext passwords sent over http. I would never enter any
secure info in there.

------
pjnewton
What kind of postage is used?

For small businesses using direct mail (well written sales letters) real first
class stamps convert at a much much higher rate than bulk mail postage in many
cases.

------
aarondf
This is one of those services that makes me sit down and think: "what can I
build on top of this?", kind of like how patio11 said he wrote down everything
he could think of to build on top of Twilio when he first heard of it. [1]

I'll have to brainstorm with my notebook tonight.

[1] not the exact quote, but close
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112615>

------
marcamillion
This seems interesting.

The central question in my mind is about security of my data. E.g. from time
to time I have to send legal documents or tax returns or w/e to some US
address - even though I don't live up there.

What type of security is in place to make sure my documents are not abused?

Also...can I get a return receipt that can be tracked - so I can make sure
that it is delivered on-time?

------
conductr
This appears a MVP, I think it looks quite nice at this stage and it seems to
be an easy API to utilize.

So the product side looks great for a MVP, if you are lacking anything at this
point it is the information about your company, I suppose trust is involved
since 1) I am giving you access to my communications and 2) I expect my
letters to reach their destination.

If you take anything away from these HN comments, I think you should create
dialog with your customers. Tell them about your service. Tell them what makes
it safe. Tell them what makes you trust worthy. Tell them about your
technology.

~~~
harryzhang
Thanks for the feedback! While we're still private alpha right now - the next
step will be to provide additional information like the type you just
described. Stay tuned.

------
c4m3lo
I would use this service, but the 10 millibit limit might be quite
restrictive. At two bucks a letter, that is going to cost me $1,400 to send an
ASCII character.

------
Makkhdyn
That's nice. La Poste (the french mail service) has a similar service:
<https://boutiqueducourrier.laposte.fr/lettre-en-ligne> (in french obviously)
and it's relatively cheap too. They have quite a lot of options such as
recorded delivery and high priority mail.

I'm too lazy to search but I wouldn't be surprised if royal mail did the same
thing in the UK

------
jaxbot
A few design related nags: The page has a 1px scroll for me, using Chrome on a
1920x1080 screen, no bookmark bar. Might want to make the site itself 20px
smaller, give it some breathing room.

#2, the about page is serving full size photos, and PNGs at that. PNG is awful
for photographs size-wise, and it would probably be wise to shrink the served
images down to their rendered sizes.

Just some 2 cents that might help, otherwise disregard

------
iso8859-1
This is called hybrid mail: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_mail>

In Germany, this has been available for some time now: <http://epost.de/>
(<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Postbrief>)

------
bavidar
This is an example app that can be created via our Printing API. Thanks you
all for the feedback. Any type of input is helpful.

------
labpdx
Would you read / inspect each letter going out? What would stop a bad guy from
sending a threatening letter to the President using a fake name and return
address? It'd be postmarked outside of their actual city, with no link back to
them unless you're logging IPs.

~~~
bavidar
We value security and privacy and no letter is read. We can track payments
through credit cards so the sender is not anonymous.

~~~
rrouse
Prepaid cards are rejected?

------
kposehn
Very nice.

More documentation about payment processes, some discussion of bulk rates,
etc. would be good.

Seeing photos of samples would also be great. I'd love to make a job request
for some sort of template, get photos to verify that it looks like what I
want, then execute orders in bulk.

~~~
bavidar
All in the works. Would love your input send me a DM.

------
crimsonzagar
The question is why would I want to print a mail or even do this? Printing on
physical paper at destination is similar to printing on a printer on the
network, right ... is there something else to it that I am missing?

Why can't it all be done purely on the web itself?

~~~
chris_mahan
A lot of people in the world don't have/don't want computers. A lot of people
like stuff printed and prefer printed stuff over emailed stuff (for example, I
request my Wells Fargo Brokerage monthly statements on paper, because I want
to keep them in print, and I have the computers, printers, and the money to do
it myself but prefer not to).

Email gets eaten by spam filters, but snail-mail does not.

Physical mail does provide for a better level of privacy than email, although
that is somewhat lessened by using a third-party to do the sending.

The IRS does not read physical mail not addressed to them without a warrant
(that we know of).

------
bryanh
Interesting! I can imagine some really cool uses, especially if it could do
"Hallmark" style thank you cards. Otherwise, bulk mailer type letters seems
like the first (and limited to me at least) use.

------
codegeek
Can you explain the workflow a little ?

\- How does the document get stuffed in an envelope

\- How does the envelope get stamped along with the From/To addresses ?

\- Who drops it at the Post office/USPS box etc ?

~~~
bavidar
Huge commercial machines. They print, pack documents in envelopes, pre-stamp,
and then put in a container which USPS picks up. All automated.

------
t0
Any chance the idea was found here? <http://willgrant.org/category/idea-dump>

~~~
bavidar
No. but glad other people are thinking about this too. Curious to hear what
other thoughts you have about this topic.

~~~
encoderer
I've had the idea on my list for years, and a couple years ago spent a few
months really digging into it, talking with advisors, etc.

It grew from a need in a web app I was creating to send off a post card to
verify a users postal address. I wished it was as easy as using an API.

Ultimately I decided this wasn't the best use of my talents, but I think
there's utility to a service like this. I rejected it partly because I didn't
want to be part of the problem of paper waste, but mostly because I had spent
a month on the phone and email reaching out to various parts of this potential
market and I just didn't find encouraging signs. Smaller users indicated
they'd use it infrequently and were more concerned about quality of the sent
articles than anything else. But these customers dealt in volume so low that
ANY real acquisition cost would take ages to recoup.

Larger users indicated very low willingness to pay. Basically a business has
some rough sense of how much the "materials" cost -- printing and mailing
costs are often and easily tracked -- and they didn't seem to have any
tolerance for margin on top of that. Even though there's a labor factor in
there that isn't calculated when you look just at printing and mailing costs,
I learned that to the customers I talked to, they saw this as irrelevant
because they weren't going to let somebody go or reduce their pay just because
they can outsource this task. I figured that if I was running at a very high
volume and ran my own high volume printing and mailing operations, there would
be acceptable margin on large direct-mail-style printing campaigns.

I'm not at all trying to be a pessimist on the idea. I'm just sharing what I
learned when i took this concept out for a spin circa 2011.

------
toomuchtodo
How are you any different then Postal Methods
[<http://www.postalmethods.com/>]?

~~~
bavidar
We offer a full variety of print services via an API. Think of us an an AWS
for printing not just sending letters. Postal Methods also require you to
prepay usage while we require you only to pay for what you consume.

------
tensafefrogs
So... this is basically a really slow Fax service.

------
Sealy
For growth, you should consider opening up an API

Besides the other recommendations to write more about yourself, have you
considered accepting Bitcoin?

------
kashnikov
I would definitely use such a service but $2 per letter is pretty steep,
considering USPS will do direct mailings for cents.

~~~
yogo
I think you might be ignoring many of the costs associated with printing and
sending a letter. Ink, paper, use of time, etc.? Actually just the savings
from having to go to Fedex office this can be worth it. As for bulk
operations, that's a different story.

I can see myself using this once in a while for something that cannot be sent
electronically (as I normally would) but must be printed and mailed.

------
cvanderlinden
Please at international addresses! I have been looking for a service like
this!

------
michaelmior
Any particular reason that from addresses outside the US aren't supported?

~~~
bavidar
still working out on the best method to do international postage. Its in the
works.

~~~
michaelmior
My question was about _from_ addresses, still going to addresses in the US.

------
chris_mahan
found broken link in API doc:

Creates a new object. The settings determine the size,color,and paper type. To
see a list of paper settings please visit the SPS page

The SPS page link 404s.

~~~
chris_mahan
Also, I assumes it might be /services/sps, but that page redirects to a login
prompt. Do I have to log in to see available sizes?

------
cpursley
I was just wondering if this sort of service existed.

------
tehwebguy
This is really cool. How automated is it?

~~~
thebranman
I'm wondering about the automation as well -- this is something I would use,
between buying/finding stamps, envelopes, etc...I rather pay a premium for the
few times I need to snail mail something.

~~~
bavidar
It is fully automated. Sign up for the alpha if you are interested. You can
print: letter, postcards, etc on various paper types, colors, and sizes.

~~~
t0
You have robotic parts that will physically stuff a piece of paper into an
envelope?

~~~
harryzhang
Our commercial printers actually do just that: print the document, stuff/fold
it into an envelope, and drop it off to be picked up by USPS/Fedex/etc.

~~~
e1ven
I'm interested in acquiring a printer to do exactly that. I'd love to hear
more about your solution. Is there a webpage?

~~~
kondro
This type of stuff is quite expensive.

Envelope inserters of any decent quality start at about $40k and work their
way up. And those small ones will do DLX only.

The biggest issue with inserters though is volume. Unless you are running them
pretty much every day, they tend to break down. It sounds a bit counter-
intuitive, but a lot of the rollers, etc all push down on each other and
unless they are moved regularly, the develop square spots and then have
difficulty picking up/moving paper.

As far as I'm aware, there is no integrated printer/inserter available. The
best you can find is printers with inline z-folders (fold A4 in 3 to DL).

You wouldn't really want an inline solution anyway because a commercial
folder/inserter can process much faster than most sub-$1m printers can print.

------
cheshire137
Dat Bootstrap.

~~~
cvanderlinden
How could you tell?

