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.<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2009/11/17/snailmailr-send-mail-from-the-web/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2009/11/17/snailmailr-send-mail-from-the-w...</a><p>Further proof -- to give you an idea of the flavor of Snailmailr, I put a ZIP of Snailmailr marketing materials online here: <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37621685/snailmailr.zip" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37621685/snailmailr.zip</a><p>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.<p>Good luck!
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?)<p>Also: More information about process.<p>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.
At the risk of hijacking the thread, we've been doing this for about 7 months now (out of beta for 4+) @ <a href="https://www.trypaper.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.trypaper.com</a>, we wish you guys the best of luck!<p>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.<p>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.<p>The email was formatted like this. <a href="https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5709486" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5709486</a>
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...
What kind of postage is used?<p>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]<p>I'll have to brainstorm with my notebook tonight.<p>[1] not the exact quote, but close <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112615" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112615</a>
This seems interesting.<p>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.<p>What type of security is in place to make sure my documents are not abused?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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: <a href="https://boutiqueducourrier.laposte.fr/lettre-en-ligne" rel="nofollow">https://boutiqueducourrier.laposte.fr/lettre-en-ligne</a> (in french obviously) and it's relatively cheap too. They have quite a lot of options such as recorded delivery and high priority mail.<p>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.<p>#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.<p>Just some 2 cents that might help, otherwise disregard
This is called hybrid mail: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_mail" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_mail</a><p>In Germany, this has been available for some time now: <a href="http://epost.de/" rel="nofollow">http://epost.de/</a> (<a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Postbrief" rel="nofollow">http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Postbrief</a>)
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.
Very nice.<p>More documentation about payment processes, some discussion of bulk rates, etc. would be good.<p>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?<p>Why can't it all be done purely on the web itself?
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.
Can you explain the workflow a little ?<p>- How does the document get stuffed in an envelope<p>- How does the envelope get stamped along with the From/To addresses ?<p>- Who drops it at the Post office/USPS box etc ?
For growth, you should consider opening up an API<p>Besides the other recommendations to write more about yourself, have you considered accepting Bitcoin?
found broken link in API doc:<p>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<p>The SPS page link 404s.