Show HN: Text a photo to send as a postcard

While I haven&#x27;t tried this service and thus cannot vouch for it, I can say that:<p><i>&quot;I love your business model!&quot;</i><p>It&#x27;s simple, it provides a lot of value for a little bit of money (yet still allows you, the owner, to make a tiny profit on each transaction), and it doesn&#x27;t require a complex database driven website...<p>Also, I&#x27;m guessing (but not knowing!) -- that a business like this could be started for $50 or less... the only thing you&#x27;d really need is a good enough postcard printer (OK, so maybe a bit more than $50 if you include that), some cardstock, and the willingness to make a trip to the post office (or local mail drop-off point) every day (or when orders were received...)<p>Again, I reiterate, <i>&quot;I love your business model!&quot;</i><p>The only real thing that a business of this sort would need then is some online advertising...<p>Google ads would be too expensive relative to the cost to acquire new customers -- so you&#x27;d have to advertise via single links posted here and there on public forums...<p>Well, I upvoted you and favorited you here on HN -- which might generate a teeny tiny bit more traffic for you -- or so I hope!<p>Wishing you and your business well, whoever you are!

I don’t have much time so excuse my brevity, but:<p>I love the idea. It’s simple, it’s solves a user problem. You can explain it in 1-2 sentences. Setup = adding your number to the contact book.<p>Tips&#x2F;ideas:<p>Consider adding a CTA pointing to a .VCF file so people can “install” your app with 2 clicks.<p>Consider changing the design&#x2F;bg photo a bit so the copy is more visible.<p>Q: Could you share any details regarding your stack (tech or services)?<p>I was thinking about building a slightly similar tool, but as a site where you could drag and drop a photo and then pay with Apple Pay. I think I like text more though.

This is fun. I worked at a company that did something very similar around 2008. We had too much fun testing it out and I remember getting lots of ridiculous post cards in the mail from co-workers. I don&#x27;t know that it was ever something that was likely to make much money, just one project among many at the company. Unfortunately, 2008 was a bit of a wrecking ball and we never got to find out. We had an iPhone app back then and my boss was skeptical that Android would ever really compete.

You should add a ‘tap to add to Contacts’ link - I think a vCard would work?<p>I don’t want to send a postcard right now, but I’d definitely like to store the number for later use. It’s actually kind of hard to do that, though, on iOS at least. Tapping opens up Messages, where there isn’t an easy way to add to contacts without sending a message, and long-press doesn’t seem to contain ‘add to contacts’ option. I’m stuck copying the number, launching Contacts, and creating a new contact by hand.<p>[Edit: Uh, and this is cool! Sorry to be the first commenter with a slightly negative post! I love it.]

Can we see a sample postcard? The link to a sample postcard is a render, not a photograph of a postcard.

Despite some of the negative comments here - as a postcard fan - I love this!

Is MMS compression an issue? I typically never text photos from my android and instead rely on WhatsApp so they don&#x27;t get compressed

I would love an email bot. I sent a message to the number from a prepaid EU sim, it told me to send an image, I sent an image, I got a &quot;mms not supported&quot; error. I remember mms from around 10 years ago, not sure if they are still standard in US?

As a side note I must confess a certain degree of uneasiness reading some of the borderline-toxic comments, which - to be fair - are nothing new.<p>This time around though it seems there&#x27;s a certain obvious difficulty in certain commenters to contextualize what&#x27;s being shown here.<p>I understand that &quot;oh but that could be an app&#x2F;website&#x2F;whatever&quot; or that &quot;it&#x27;s an US phone number, I ain&#x27;t gonna use that&quot; or &quot;ahhhh, this is gonna be abused soooo bad&quot; and so on and so forth... but folks: this clearly is meant to be something quirky and - I think - a v1.<p>Have we perhaps become a bit of a boring grumpy bunch around here? My 2c.

I love this. Will this have the postage stamp from a particular country though? That&#x27;s probably hard to implement, but it&#x27;s what&#x27;s magical about postcards to me

Trying this out, I&#x27;ll report back in a couple weeks!

What a lovely idea! OP, did you make this?

Czech Post has an app that does. Local price is like a $1. It works worldwide regular international price.

Is the resolution of MMS high enough to make a good postcard?

It&#x27;s totally not sure whether a snail mail made-of-paper postcard is meant. Or just some HTML email with a fancy border. I hope it&#x27;s the former.

I&#x27;m in Europe with an iPhone and this didn&#x27;t work, but I&#x27;d like to try it.<p>[edit: telegram integration would be quite cool.]

I think it’d be a neat value-add if there were some (optional) postcard templates. Stuff like “Greetings from scenic &lt;location_name&gt;” that could either be used seriously or ironically. Obviously one could edit the JPG themselves to include that but I think more people would use it if it were an easy option.

This is awesome! May I recommend a package deal? For example, I want to send to a bunch of friends, maybe a different price point for larger orders (if feasible)? $10&#x2F;4-5 for example.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fizzer.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fizzer.com</a> does the same, and it&#x27;s quite nice to use.

That&#x27;s a cool use of lob.com. I used their &#x27;send a check&#x27; feature to automate sending payments for sweepstakes and contest prizes.

I gave this a spin and sent a few cards.<p>It was great, very low friction and easy to use.<p>In the age of ChatGPT showing how easy a chat interface CAN be this seem really on point.

The biz case here is interesting: I had no idea what the postage rates are from the US, so checked and saw that they <i>start</i> at $1.45. Maybe you can get bulk rates from the USPS but let’s assume that’s the shipping cost. Let’s assume &lt;50c for printing so roughly $2 per postcard. That only leaves $1 for profit &amp; op expenses which sounds a bit low.<p>What am I missing here?<p>Additionally, I would not be OK to enter friends’ addresses in a random app.

This is great. “Yes” shouldn’t be case sensitive though.

just the headline makes me go &#x27;this is cool and i wish i thought about it&#x27;<p>as a lazy person i will assume it delivers as advertised.

Nice idea, but the fact that it requires sending to a US-specific phone number makes it unusable for most of the world.<p>For me, the ideal implementation of this would be a simple app to which you could send the photo using the &quot;share&quot; functionality built into iOS&#x2F;Android.

Cool! Why does it require texting a phone number, though? Why not just put a form right there on the site?

&gt;STOP to unsubscribe<p>Confused. Is this charged per shot or subscription?!?

Should probably replace the address in the sample postcard. While most here will probably get it&#x27;s intent, I imagine your target audience will not appreciate any associations to &quot;hackers&quot;

Have you though about how malevolent people will abuse this? E.g. sending a pic from a shocksite to someone you don&#x27;t like? You&#x27;d have to set up a content moderation department to deal with this sort of thing.