Right now, it's not much different than Postable or any number of similar services. Except they can send internationally and this service cannot :) Based on the number of similar services, this doesn't seem like a winner-take-all market. But I would be very interested to hear your thoughts: how you chose Postable from competitors, what you like about them, don't like, etc.
A little extra context: when I first built this, it used the Instagram API to automatically mail postcards to my mother when I uploaded a new photo. Shortly after building it, Instagram changed their API and I was unable to get high enough resolution photos for postcards, so I "pivoted" it to the current product.
How is it different in the future? I think I can win on price-- it looks like Postable is $2.49 low volume and $1.00 at volume. Based on my costs, I can do $1.00 or lower with low volume.
I think it would be nice to have an address book feature. This is what led us back to Postable, we had used them a couple years ago for mailing thank you cards which involved uploading our addresses to their address book. Overall, their post card design templates appealed most to us.
Another nice to have may be the ability to track the card. When we purchased our order on Postable, the order status displayed as "Sent" which is kind of generic. We don't know which of our recipients actually received the card.
Over the course of about a year, I gave away ~2500 photos at the coffee shop I used to work out of (and gave all the donations to the coffee shop staff as tips).
HN is definitely sending more traffic than the service is used to so I've temporarily increased the number of Heroku dynos-- hopefully trying again should yield better results!
Hmm, for some reason when I click the link, it opens with the page scrolled halfway down. It might have sometime to do with my 1Password extension, as it has the "email" field focused.
If I click "Choose a Photo" before filling anything out, it says "Validation failed: Email can't be blank, Password can't be blank." Maybe I'm unusual, but I want to see the picture I'll be sending, before I commit! :)
It’s definitely important! The addresses are stored for generating the postcard designs and shipping them to the recipient only.
The card is however printed by a third-party with whom we thus have to share the address details for shipping. From there on the is no additional privacy concernes compared to sending a postcard by hand.
I think you should add a statement addressing the privacy issue. Will you or won't you sell data? Is the data encrypted? Will the vendor not sell the data?
I can see this product being a lot of fun. But not at the expense of loss of privacy.
None that I know of but it should be fairly easy in telegram. It perfect for chatbots! Integration with WhatsApp was the hardest part really. I know there used to be a version for Facebook messenger[1] though.
WhatsApp has recently announced their plans for their API after a very long beta program (open to enterprise companies only). They will not be working directly with customers but have chosen 20+ partners through which their API will be available (e.g. Twilio).
At the time of building this project this was not yet available. And automating WhatsApp was somewhat of a hassle.
This is pretty cool. Do you have any metrics on how long it takes to arrive at the destination from the time of ordering? I'm curious to know how long it would take to arrive in the USA, South America (i.e Colombia) or Australia.
Not the OP, but I post postcards from USA as hobby (member of site Postcrossing); Cards to slower postal countries like Russia China or African Continent take anywhere between 15-45 days, depending on how countryside the address is. Cards to faster postal countries like Germany Denmark Sweden etc take about 6-10 days. Obviously there are exceptions.
Great idea! I considered an SMS interface but kept with web as an MVP. Good luck with your project! If you'd like to stay in touch, please connect with me: adam@der.wiki
Nope. More details in another thread on this post, but tl;dr:
1. This is a side project and I'm eating all the sending costs while iterating on the product
2. Selling addresses is shitty and if I monetize, it will just be mark-up on the selling costs
3. If this project continues to grow, I will make the ToS/Privacy Policy clearly state that we will never sell addresses
Very good question. As alluded to under "About", this is very much in side-project phase and absent ToS, Privacy Policy, payment, etc. I considered slapping a generic privacy policy up there before launch, but convinced myself I was coming up with excuses for not launching.
So that said: nothing will happen with addresses entered. If this project grows to the point of a ToS/Privacy Policy, those documents will reflect that. At this point you've got to trust me: I've been active in this community for a decade and have an easily-Googleable reputation. If that's not good enough for you, I completely understand, and this service is a little too alpha for you.
But seriously, it's a great question and thanks for asking it!
I would happily pay for this service and know others that would as well. Lots of people have kids and grandparents that would get a kick out something like this.
I have lots of non-old friends* with whom I enjoy exchanging postcards. You can't stick Instygram to the refrigerator or put it in a frame, especially since the number of households with a printer is dwindling.
I would totally use this as a paid service. Current USPS post card rate is 35¢. I'd pay up to a dollar for this service; hopefully that would cover labor and overhead.
*It's worth noting that Gen-Z ("Zoomers" ick.) is correcting some of the mistakes of the millennials and swinging back toward the habits of Boomers and Gen-X. For example, there was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago that catalog distribution and sales are up massively thanks to Gen-Z because unlike their predecessors, they don't place all of their trust in something just because it's online. I think a good number of them might also latch onto something like this.
I went down this road — the economics don’t work unless you can get your acquisition costs very very low. Good conversion rates and margins but we are talking small numbers, and large capex per user to print cards, esp if you give some away for free (which is a great acquisition channel)
Yup, I spent 6 months or so trying to find product-market fit for two different postcard apps, one focused on creating memes and the other focused on sending baby/kid photos to grandparents and family. The latter had much more potential, but the economics were tough due to user acquisition costs. I suspect you could make it work if you had a better marketing strategy that I did. I was trying to get traction through display ads by doing highly targeted social networking campaigns, which seemed like it should be fruitful, and was getting low CPIs ($1-$2) -- however even at that level, and with significant viral loops, growth hacking, and a recurring revenue subscription based model, I just couldn't get the numbers to work.
Ultimately, users seemed to need to see the product before they spend money, so having a trial period of one or two cards seemed essential. Without it, conversions flatlined I suspect since you were asking people to pay for something they couldn't even see the quality of first. These one or two free cards greatly added to acquisition costs, and led to a long, complex acquisition funnel, and so you had to more than make up for sending a lot of free cards with your paying customers while the new leads converted. When you consider the free cards, you were now talking about $3-4 per lead, and with a generous conversion rate of 3% that is approx a $100 cost per customer to acquire them. Surprisingly, over the course of a year or so of a subscription this could actually work if churn was low.
But it was very risky and cost intensive to subsidize the acquisition costs for me personally, so I stopped working on it after sending approx 9k postcards and getting approx 250 customers, who almost entirely churned out after a few months.
I learned a lot from this exercise, one thing was anytime you hear anyone doing this idea, especially if they are VC funded, it's a good idea to bet against them surviving unless you see they have some kind of cheap, high volume, high quality marketing channel.
Wow. Thank you for such long, detailed and insightful comment. I look at this now as marketing challenge as well and I am trying some alternatives ideas.
Instead of targeting end users you can target intermediates like tourist shops. Where the tourist picks a photo from his/hear camera/phone via bluetooth. Or a photo from a touch screen. So instead of buying a postcard, a stamp, writing a message, and then finding a post box, you just have to go to the service in the hotel lobby. Imagine if you are going to send five post cards, you would probably save one hour of work. And the postcards could be guaranteed to come in time due to magic (they are not actually sent from the same country. That part is faked)
It seems luck is not enough :) Competition is quite high in the market (there are at least two really big players). I have created similar service as well [1] and now I look at it more like a marketing research playground than something what will succeed. I can dream about it succeeding but realistically failure is an option as well.
Experience: clicked the above link with herokuapp.com; signed up (saved Chrome auto generated password in Chrome) & sent postcard. But the signup email sent the link with .us ending; & had to copy password again from herokuapp entry. Maybe the email should send herokuapp link; or herokuapp can be auto forwarded to .us?
Overall it is not new idea. Main players in the market currently are mypostcard (Germany) and touchnote (UK). One of them is in US as well (or maybe both). I personally identified at least 10 more.
Lastly, I have written my own service (https://www.atvirukas.com) as well despite knowing that there are a lot of players in the market.
Swiss Post basically prevented other players entering Swiss market :)
Very brave for you to offer 5 free cards (or any for that matter) -- when postcrossers find out you may run out of money quickly :) postcard exchange if a fairly popular hobby.
IDK. While this idea is as old as the Internet, does it make any sense? The key point of a postcard is not to communicate (limited space, not secure, slow) but being a gesture. Buying a postcard, writing something on it and bringing it yourself to the post office is a huge gesture and signals many things--in contrast to postcard gateways like this one. Any receiver who will get this machine printed postcard will think, 'why didn't she/he just text me?' and throws it in the trash bin.
But maybe OP can give us a hint about the real use case or he is hand-writing the cards himself.
OP's reason for making this is mentioned in the "about" section of the page - sending physical photos to people who prefer those over something like Instagram.
Still doesn't make sense. Instagram and postcards have different use cases and latter is not about sending someone a physical photo or showing a any photo (hint again: it's a gesture).
There are cases where sending real postcard is not feasible. E.g. traveling in mountains. Sometimes you are a little bit lazy but still want to make it at least a little bit personal.
As I have created similar service (EU based) I wish you good luck with it. Is there a way to track your progress? Do you share your findings anywhere?
I hope you are aware that competition in quite serious in the market. E.g. mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day. What's your plan about that?
> mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day
I wanna call bs of this claim. Postcrossing -- largest postcard exchange community, almost 800k registered users worldwide, not all active of course, but a large portion of them sending daily and are really hooked on the hobby.. The hottest month in 2016 was March, 17k/day. These are people who love sending cards. Just hard to believe another single service not oriented on hardcore regular senders would be doing even half that. I can be wrong, of course, but just hard to believe.
how many of those "letters" are postcards? thing is postcards are not cool anymore (sad), and I think postcards share of the whole volume is pretty small.
71 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadA little extra context: when I first built this, it used the Instagram API to automatically mail postcards to my mother when I uploaded a new photo. Shortly after building it, Instagram changed their API and I was unable to get high enough resolution photos for postcards, so I "pivoted" it to the current product.
How is it different in the future? I think I can win on price-- it looks like Postable is $2.49 low volume and $1.00 at volume. Based on my costs, I can do $1.00 or lower with low volume.
https://anotherphotoproject.herokuapp.com/
Over the course of about a year, I gave away ~2500 photos at the coffee shop I used to work out of (and gave all the donations to the coffee shop staff as tips).
If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."
Another thing worth looking into is the "confirm my account" link in email leads to a non HTTPS link
HN is definitely sending more traffic than the service is used to so I've temporarily increased the number of Heroku dynos-- hopefully trying again should yield better results!
https://imgur.com/X3TkUSa
I made a WhatsApp chatbot[1] a while back that helps you customize and send postcards from within WhatsApp.
1: https://melonpost.com
The card is however printed by a third-party with whom we thus have to share the address details for shipping. From there on the is no additional privacy concernes compared to sending a postcard by hand.
I think you should add a statement addressing the privacy issue. Will you or won't you sell data? Is the data encrypted? Will the vendor not sell the data?
I can see this product being a lot of fun. But not at the expense of loss of privacy.
1: https://postcard.im/
At the time of building this project this was not yet available. And automating WhatsApp was somewhat of a hassle.
So that said: nothing will happen with addresses entered. If this project grows to the point of a ToS/Privacy Policy, those documents will reflect that. At this point you've got to trust me: I've been active in this community for a decade and have an easily-Googleable reputation. If that's not good enough for you, I completely understand, and this service is a little too alpha for you.
But seriously, it's a great question and thanks for asking it!
Good luck!
I would totally use this as a paid service. Current USPS post card rate is 35¢. I'd pay up to a dollar for this service; hopefully that would cover labor and overhead.
*It's worth noting that Gen-Z ("Zoomers" ick.) is correcting some of the mistakes of the millennials and swinging back toward the habits of Boomers and Gen-X. For example, there was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago that catalog distribution and sales are up massively thanks to Gen-Z because unlike their predecessors, they don't place all of their trust in something just because it's online. I think a good number of them might also latch onto something like this.
Every marketing company and sociologist disagrees with you.
I'd also disagree with your “every”.
Ultimately, users seemed to need to see the product before they spend money, so having a trial period of one or two cards seemed essential. Without it, conversions flatlined I suspect since you were asking people to pay for something they couldn't even see the quality of first. These one or two free cards greatly added to acquisition costs, and led to a long, complex acquisition funnel, and so you had to more than make up for sending a lot of free cards with your paying customers while the new leads converted. When you consider the free cards, you were now talking about $3-4 per lead, and with a generous conversion rate of 3% that is approx a $100 cost per customer to acquire them. Surprisingly, over the course of a year or so of a subscription this could actually work if churn was low.
But it was very risky and cost intensive to subsidize the acquisition costs for me personally, so I stopped working on it after sending approx 9k postcards and getting approx 250 customers, who almost entirely churned out after a few months.
I learned a lot from this exercise, one thing was anytime you hear anyone doing this idea, especially if they are VC funded, it's a good idea to bet against them surviving unless you see they have some kind of cheap, high volume, high quality marketing channel.
[1] Check out my profile for link.
Lastly, I have written my own service (https://www.atvirukas.com) as well despite knowing that there are a lot of players in the market.
Swiss Post basically prevented other players entering Swiss market :)
But maybe OP can give us a hint about the real use case or he is hand-writing the cards himself.
I hope you are aware that competition in quite serious in the market. E.g. mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day. What's your plan about that?
I wanna call bs of this claim. Postcrossing -- largest postcard exchange community, almost 800k registered users worldwide, not all active of course, but a large portion of them sending daily and are really hooked on the hobby.. The hottest month in 2016 was March, 17k/day. These are people who love sending cards. Just hard to believe another single service not oriented on hardcore regular senders would be doing even half that. I can be wrong, of course, but just hard to believe.
10000 postcards in Germany alone would be 0.01% of that and mypostcard works in multiple EU countries.
What service do you use for sending postcards?