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.
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.
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.
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.... 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...
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
Hey I think that as far as prisons are concerned this is a great idea. I am recently returning into my community from a three and a half year sentence. While I was inside however a friend of mine that still has to serve an additional seven years stopped me before I went home and told me about his idea for an app that would act as this link between prisoners and families he was aware of jpay but not the others. I told him that when I got home I would look into it for him and try to set something up. It would be easy for us to promote the idea from within the prison system, we know plenty of people incarcerated all over New York State. Speaking on behalf of Mr. Hugo Nunez and myself we would greatly appreciate any guidance you can offer. Please email me at: g.t.turbeville@gmail.com thank you
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.
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.
We have commercial printers in edge locations fulfilling our backend.
Infraprint is a Printing API not a client application. The direct mail application was built to demonstrate the power of the API and what you can build with it. With the API you can integrate printing into any application. You can print documents, photos, books, flyers, postcards, etc without owning the actual infrastructure. All printing is done through REST
Totally agree. This left an extremely bad first impression. I don't know why startups ask for money without a single founder or member disclosing their identity, it just boils my blood. I mean it really pisses me off. It like someone's trying to trick or scam me. The about page is the first one that should go up.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Aren't there already remailing services at cities with interesting names? I wouldn't think this could be worse.
I also wouldn't think it would be worse than the drop-off boxes at post offices. Sure those have a known physical location, but that just means you go slightly out of your way next time you leave town for a big football game or whatever.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://gigaom.com/2009/11/17/snailmailr-send-mail-from-the-w...
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!