"Ensure you receive at least ONE brithday card, by sending it youself! By the time your birthday comes round you'll have forgotten you sent it, and will be pleasantly surprised."
Also things like sending letters a year on, with a reminder of what you hoped to achieve that year etc.
(Of course, the time lag is removed to demonstrate the general principle without having to watch a several month long video clip. And it's Christmas, not Birthday, cards.)
I was thinking along the same lines. There are already services for sending emails into the future (futureme.org is one), but I think being able to do it with actual mail is a clever idea.
One commercial use might be for real estate agents sending letters to new homeowners 1/2 months into the future asking them how they're doing, etc. I think that would seem a bit more personal than just an email. I always enjoy it when I start receiving mail at a new residence!
Compared to Dustin's though, both of those hurt my eyes to look at. This reminds me of Posterous, blogging is a crowded market but they differentiated themselves by being beautiful and dead simple. Competitors are good, it just proves that there's a market for a service like this.
I love the idea of a printed letter API (like what postful.com has) as a solution to send automated letters to people. First one that comes to mind is to send a letter to someone if they do a chargeback or their credit card was declined.
I look forward to implementing something like this!
If this gets popular, you could hire a few helpers to handle the printing/mailing. The job ad could go something like "Work from home. Get paid to stuff envelopes!"
Even better, you could distribute the mailing by geography to minimize shipping time. If it's close you could even have them deliver in person and save 44c.
(Did you just invent a new postal system?)
A couple thoughts
1). I usually love Dustin's work but am acutally underwhelmed by the design. I hate the black on white. It hurts my eyes
2.) Snail mail is meaningful becasue it shows that the person took time to WRITE and then send a letter. Its not nearly as meaningful if its typed up.
In this community, we don't vote based on whether or not we agree. We vote up if we think it is worth reading, regardless of whether we agree or not. We downvote when the message is inappropriate - flames and trolls, cheap humor, that sort of thing. I don't go to the comments to see who agrees with me, I go there to see who disagrees, and why.
In the year 2009 snail mail is grossly inadequate.
1. Does it prove anything? No. Sign something with a private key, that is proof.
2. Is it better for record keeping? No. Fires, floods, and rot are all enemies. Storing it digital allows one to replicate a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds.
3. Aesthetic? Only if you have a strong packrat or nesting instinct.
4. Cheaper? No. Not by a fucking longshot, not even close.
Take a one dollar bill out of your wallet, burn it, and send an email.
1. Public/private key authentication is, as of 2009, still not something the mainstream internet user can figure out to do easily. I'd guess most don't even know it exists.
2. I can also delete a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds. The steps required to redundantly store or back up data require either knowledge the layman doesn't have or expensive software (assuming they don't know of the free alternatives).
3. Letters are like books in that there will always be people who prefer the personal feel of paper and ink to a computer screen.
4. Agreed.
You seem to be assuming that his market is YC users or other techies. As stated in other comments, this has great applications for the elderly, non-techies, and people in other countries wanting to send mail to the US.
Snail mail does take more effort, though. Which directly leads to the following things:
1. Politicians receiving mail from their constituents will take a snail mail more seriously than email.
2. Love letters seem more meaningful when received via snail mail.
It also leads indirectly to the fact that there's no spam filter for snail mail to get stuck in. Not because there's no spam in snail mail, but because the amount of spam is reasonable. 95% of email is spam, which is manageable for the user because of spam filters, but false positives in spam filters make snail mail actually a bit more reliable for the average recipient.
Funny but as snail mail is used super decreasingly over the past decade, its personal value has drastically gone up.
I have an aunt who snail mails a few photos of her family every now and then with a handwritten letter. She's been doing this for years. Yet, each year receiving the personal snail mail brings more excitement than the previous year!
As long as you are only sending charectors on the paper, you might be right, but you can send physical items in a letter - unlike in an email.
And the set of people I want to send mail to intersected with the set of people who have the faintest idea what public/private keys are is the empty set. So that won't fly.
In addition, the fact that I am willing to pay a dollar to send a message is a statement that you might want to take five seconds to look at the letter, whereas most emails aren't worth taking a look at.
And yet despite all of those factors, I'll be using Snail.
I have elderly family that greatly prefers getting physical letters to email. I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.
Snail is a definitely niche product, and only useful in weird edge cases. However, you might be surprised how many people encounter those edge cases on a daily basis.
An interesting extension to the snail mail services would be to snap/upload a photo, use geolocation to find the user's current location and automatically send postcards "from" anywhere in the world.
I always send my postcards the last day and then hunt for the stamps and post box/office where I can send them from. I'd really find this service useful :) Although, arguably a big part of receiving a postcard is the stamp which you wouldn't have here.
I do a lot of foreign travel as well - but that is the only time I ever send snail mail! People love getting email from other countries. I always send letters and postcards to not only family/friends, but all of my best clients as well. In fact, one of my clients has all of the postcards I send them up on their office refrigerator. Talk about good for business - every time they go to get out the creamer, they are reminded of me. And though it's a little more expensive than domestic mail, an extra couple of bucks is worth the thanks I get in return.
Making people feel special is worth a couple of bucks.
Casual discussions with doctors tells me that some number of them do not trust E-mail, see assorted problems with it (security, authenticity), and prefer to get and send physical documents.
You can argue over whether theses concerns are legit or solved problems, but at least people are unconvinced, or are otherwise reluctant to switch to digital.
The vast majority of people I know don't know about digital signatures. Most of the remainder can't use them, and are uncertain of how to verify them. The result is that they don't trust them. They all, however, understand and trust a piece of paper with a statement and signature.
Dustin's service doesn't solve that, but your comments are, quite simply, ahead of the game, and detached from current reality. That reality, as is always the way with reality, changing, but that change takes time.
You are right, but keep in mind some organizations and processes still "trust" a time-stamped hard copy more than an email. We're fortunate enough to be very tech savvy, but this service, to me, is meant to be an accommodation to those who refuse to join us or are stuck in the past, or those who think it's a fun thing to try.
Perfect! Now no one will see me when I send my "Dear Penthouse" letters...
In all seriousness, this is a good idea, but you might be cutting yourself short on the profits. 6 cents a letter for probably 5 minutes worth of work? I think you should charge $1.50 a letter and make about 56 cents instead. Overseas business people might still be willing to pay that.
I've just been pondering such a service, as the result of a friend of mine, being moved to an assisted living facility. He has no email there, and wouldn't be able to use it if he did. I would love to send him quick updates on my life and my kids, but, while I could spare him five minutes to dash off an email and attach some photos to it, the task of printing the photos on a color printer, finding his address, etc., usually gets the task procrastinated, sometimes for weeks, in that "I'll do it tomorrow" procrastination dance.
My thoughts on this line were as follows.
1) It needs to allow photos. They can be an extra charge of course, but I would want to send photos.
2) There's a ton of paper handling equipment out there. If you invested about $20K, maybe 10K if you bought used, I would think you could get a solution that was 100% automated. It printed, stapled, folded, printed the envelope, and stuffed the contents. A service with such an automated capability, that showed pictures of their equipment on their website so I knew it was real, would definitely be reassuring from a privacy standpoint, as well as a reliability standpoint.
3) As for API, my thought was to make the whole thing, just email. Parse incoming emails to confirm the sender is an account holder. Parse the email for the markup headers that you define to designate recipient address. If they don't exist, fire off a reply email to the same address, telling them they messed up and didn't mark up their submission properly. Done. No visiting your website at all, after I set up my account.
3a) I would also suggest a way for me to assign frequently used snail mail addresses as part of an email address. For example, say you assign me the email address QWERTY@mailservice.com. Whenever I mail to that address, you know it's my account, and send the contents of the appropriately marked up email to the recipients. OK, fine. But now, allow me to assign sub-addresses. So, for example, if I email QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com, and I've already defined the address of terry, now I don't have to mark up my email at all. I just put QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com into my email address book, and my friend Terry is the same as contacting anybody else with email. With such a system, mailing somebody and emailing somebody take exactly the same steps on my part. In fact, I can even CC them on an email I send to somebody else.
I suppose if the service gets popular you'll have to find some way to make it pay, otherwise it will cost you a fortune in stamps. Any plans? Or is it "Wait and see.." ??
Dude, raise your price! The difference between $1 and $2 is immaterial to the buyer (heck, it costs me $1 in lost wages just in the time it takes to fill out the order form). Yet raising the price on your end will result in 1500% increase in bottom line profits. That's a no-brainer. You may even want to go as high as $4.
Here's your business model if you want to get serious:
1 - You setup a few offices in key metropolitan areas. (NY, LA, etc.)
2 - Each office has an automated setup to print envelopes and letters and stamp them. (I'm sure USPO has a system for this so you wouldn't need to literally stick things on an envelope.)
3 - Web-app/api is centrally hosted and linked to the distribution nodes. Based on destination, you assign the letters to the nearest distribution node.
4 - You undercharge FedEx/UPS/etc 2 day. (That's your ceiling). If you mail in NYC to another NYC address, they're gonna get it the next day.
You have fixed up front costs (the machines) and recurring monthly costs (rent, electricity, paper, ink, etc.).
I would think an investment of around a few 10Ks could get you up and running in the initial key metros (NYC, SF, etc.) and then expand.
I don't think it's all about costs. One great benefit of PayPal is that it's a known and (somewhat?) trustworthy brand. (Yes, I know, it's far from perfect...)
I would check that assumption. Most letters I have sent were required because some service was living in the stone age, or making my life difficult.
For example, to cancel my gym membership, I had to mail a notorized document to their corporate office. The entire purpose was to discourage and inconvenience me. I'm sure they toy with the idea of making cancellations in-person only, at an office on the peak of Everest. I'd just assume that letter arrive flaming as printed on high quality paper.
Build a API dude. This type of service can be useful to some of us who need to send snail mail to customers when they sign-up, cancel, etc. And I agree with everyone else about the prices. Eventually 6c won't cut it and then you'll have to jerk the price up. $1 sounds sexy, but you need to eat.
I'd use it for just about everything. I hate sending letters, but I do really enjoy writing to people. Making the system fully automated would be cool on a number of levels.
This reminds me of the service from the 1980s (was it Sprint Mail?) where you could dial up (over a 300 Baud modem), type a letter, and it would be physically mailed to an address.
Interesting. I wonder if dcurtis would mind describing some details of the operation. Is the postage being printed too, or are stamps being affixed some other way? And I guess someone is still delivering the mail to a box or post office--would that get annoying?
I had a beagleboard (beagleboard.org) sitting around in my closet, so I figured I should do something with it.
When you create a letter on Snail, the beagleboard pulls from the heroku database, formats the letter, prints it, and then sends me an email saying it's ready to be stuffed into an envelope.
(Well... sort of. In a perfect world, that is what would happen. Unfortunately, there are some bugs that I am still trying to work out.)
This was my biggest questions too, how much you were able to automate it. This seems like it would really only be viable if you could eliminate the human step as much as possible. Like, ideally, some sort of machine that printed, stamped, folded or put in some kind of envelope, and dropped it in a bucket of outgoing mail that the postman could play with.
If you can work ON the process instead of IN it then there is some potential for this to work on volume, but overall really cool idea, props!
You should invest in a cheap trifold folder and an envelope/postage printer (or envelope tray for your existing, presumably laser, printer). That would cut down your operations time a lot if it gets popular.
Though, I think big, sooo probably not worth the cash.
Pretty much, you can't trust users to send DVD's back in the mailing envelopes in any kind of reliable state (at all, one to an envelope, with the barcode facing out the window, with the correct disc in the correct slipcover, with the disc in any slipcover) so they have assembly lines of people to tear the envelopes open, check the right DVD is in the right slipcover, and so forth.
more useful and unique (?) would be the ability to receive snail mails and truly interface with the snail world. requires a lot more (like a mechanical turkish army in different postal jurisdictions) but worth a lot more.
It would be great if I can select a template for my mail.Definitely not on the landing page, it would clutter such a nice and clean page. May be a 'More...' option?
Wild, so he is actually folding, stuffing, and licking the stamp?
At 6 cents/per he'd need over 100 mailings/hr to come out around minimum wage.
I like the API idea, pdf idea, maybe .doc files.
You could do what those efax places do for free faxes and include an advertisement in the envelope. Hell, put advertisements on the envelope itself.
The problem with your business model is that you will not really make any money with a 6% margin. How about this? Start out with $2 a letter, then give bulk discounts based on the volume of mail sent. It seems that a lot of the comments here suggest that the API would be useful in a MASS mailling campaign. Your pricing should reflect this requirement without breaking the bank. Single letter users will in effect subsidize the mass mailers.
I actually wonder what is faster. Sending a snail-mail using regular airmail towards the US or sending one through this service :) At least it's 30% cheaper and saves me the time of formatting a letter and walking to the mail-office.
