Outbox Is Shutting Down

155 点作者 mariusz331超过 11 年前

38 条评论

codegeek超过 11 年前

" senior leadership of USPS made it clear that they would never participate in any project that would limit junk mail and that they were immediately shutting down our partnership."This part is really interesting. Why would USPS do that ? Can someone from outbox elaborate on this ? I would love to get rid of the junk mail that I receive on a daily basis in my mailbox. It is crazy and I have to waste time in taking it out of my mailbox, sorting through them to ensure they indeed are junk and then throwing them into my recycle bin. Not to mention that the recyle bin then needs to be placed bi-weekly outside to be picked up. It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.Sad to see these guys go. The business model sounds like something I would have tried as a user. Funny though that never heard of them personally. Guess need to watch more Jay Leno!!

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encoderer超过 11 年前

I may be wrong, but my impression of Outbox has always been that they were designing an impressive solution to the wrong problem.Sorting my important mail from my junk mail is just not something I need help with. And the extraordinary wastefulness in my mind of paying a company to follow postmen around and take back the mail just delivered to my box seems so ecologically wrong that I couldn't support it on that ground alone.

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al2o3cr超过 11 年前

Better title: "Libertarians Find Out Delivering Mail Is Hard and Expensive"

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nlh超过 11 年前

WHAT.This is really disappointing - first time in a while I've seen an "we're shutting down" announcement and been really, truly, genuinely disappointed by it.Physical mail is but one of many small parts of daily life that's increasingly feeling like an anachronism.The fact that we have to regularly physically go to our mailboxes, open them, receive physical paper communication, and then shred/dispose/keep it all is annoying. I was really looking forward to Outbox growing and spreading to other cities.(BTW: It's worth noting that my rejection of paper mail doesn't mean I reject the notion of the nice parts - hand-written letters, greeting cards, wedding invitations. Those are great. But I'd be totally happy seeing a high quality digitized version of those appear in the email inbox.)I do hope someone figures out a good solution here, because I'm certain there's demand for this service in some form or another.(edit: As a friend pointed out - $5/month is probably far too cheap. Earth Class Mail starts at $20. I'd gladly pay that for Outbox - probably more.)

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hellonoam超过 11 年前

"total yield from the waitlist was under 10 percent" that's 10% paying customers that's definitely not as bad as they made it sound.I'm a little surprised why did they think it would be a cheap operation. They send someone to pick up the mail from your house, that's insane. Of course that will be expensive. And it's only $5 per month. There are a few old school services that do the same but they ask the customer to redirect their mail to a specific new address. I wonder why outbox didn't go down that route.Definitely sad to see them go.

bstar77超过 11 年前

I read this kind of quickly but did they actually say that they raised $5,000,000 6 months ago, decided in that time that their business model would not work then decided to go into 'stealth mode' and work on their next fancy?

BryanB55超过 11 年前

I'm an Outbox customer and am really sad to see it go. I did it expect it though. In fact, every time I thought of Outbox it was always accompanied with worry about them shutting down. I just couldn't see how they could afford to do what they do when customers only pay $5 per month.I didn't read the entire post yet but I wonder why they never tried to or considered raising prices. I would of paid substantially more for the service.I don't see all that much value in the service for my personal mail but for my business mail, I purchased a UPS mailbox and have all mail sent there and outbox takes care of it for me without me having to go there all the time. I just renewed my UPS mailbox for the year too!

jlas超过 11 年前

Just a FYI there are a handful of companies already doing something very similar. Except instead of physically picking up your mail, they receive it on your behalf (made possible by USPS form 1583 [1]). Then they digitize and forward (you pay S&H.)[1] <a href="http://about.usps.com/forms/ps1583.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://about.usps.com/forms/ps1583.pdf</a>

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smortaz超过 11 年前

This is sad to see. As the co-founder of <a href="http://www.paperkarma.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.paperkarma.com</a> who's had to deal with some of the same issues (USPS regulations) I was keeping an eye out & pulling for them to succeed. We need further legislation to enable citizens better control over unsolicited mail. You guys built a great service & should be very proud! [edit: spelling]

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cjoh超过 11 年前

Seems really strange that they're shutting down. With a substantial customer list and some infrastructure that's hard to build, that's a business that could be sold for something -- perhaps not substantial exit money, but still.That said, they were charging less than what the service cost to provide, and -- judging from the comments here -- less than what their customers valued their services for. So perhaps they didn't have a good idea of what value is and how to sell it.

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JacobJans超过 11 年前

There is one small nugget in the article that demonstrates exactly why they failed:"This final challenge—product market fit"They invested a very large amount of money, and put the most important challenge at the very end."This final challenge" should never, ever, ever be the final challenge. Product-market fit should be the first challenge. Everything flows from matching the product to the market. The fact that they believed this was "the final challenge" shows that they were making decisions in the wrong way -- a way that brought them failure.I only hope they consider profit/market fit BEFORE they spend more of their investors money.

JoshTriplett超过 11 年前

It sounds like their original business model got shut down due to positioning: they pitched it as reducing postal spam, and in the proces they attracted unwanted attention from the USPS, who profit from postal spam.Meanwhile, Earth Class Mail (<a href="https://www.earthclassmail.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.earthclassmail.com/</a>) seems to be going strong following the same "digitize your mail" approach. They don't seem to build their business around spam reduction specifically, just around paper reduction, which doesn't threaten the USPS.

ghshephard超过 11 年前

Clearly there is no need for physical paper mail/envelope delivery to most people's home. With just a few exceptions, I haven't received a single piece of USPS physical mail "directly" since 2003. I was moving that fall, so I had picked up a PostOffice Box (And I had been using paytrust for all my paper bills since 1999) - and when I moved back to the Bay Area - I just never told anyone what my home address was, and put a big "DONOTDELIVER" on the post office box that came with my apartment.The only exceptions to that, were in 2010, when I needed to get a California ID, and they would only mail it to my home address. Soon thereafter I started getting Jury Summons (Ironic for this Canadian) - with those two exceptions - no paper sent directly to me, couldn't be happier.Pro Tip - A Post Office box at a "friendly" POBox location will throw away all your junk mail (probably in violation of some kind of USPS statute) and for a small fee, remail it to you anywhere in the world. Never have to change your address ever again. Never receive any direct mail.

ivanplenty超过 11 年前

Very sorry to hear this outcome, and I wish the best for the team. Perhaps you can sell standalone products? There is still value in never having to touch paper, and I would have been a happy customer had I known the wait list was done. It was such a promising product!Most interesting quote to me, and thank you so much for the candor.> After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model. Our monthly operating deficits were too high, and even though we continued to get better at acquisition, each small success actually saw our cash curve decline further because our density remained flat. For longer than we would be willing to tolerate, we would lose money for each additional customer we gained. Despite the massive interest in our company, we learned that the product we built did not find fit in the market we targeted.P.S. I am doubly sorry to hear that the USPS shut down the partnership due to threatening unwanted!! ad revenue... this is making me feel even more sad.

shravan超过 11 年前

I'm terribly sad about this. I was eagerly anticipating their rollout to my market and would've happily paid more than the $5/month charge for the benefit of never opening another piece of junk mail again.

cfield超过 11 年前

I am a current customer of Outbox and also a customer of VirtualPostMail (VPM) for both personal and business mail. And I am a former EarthClassMail (ECM) and PayTrust customer.Since many seem to be asking about alternatives, I have generally positive views about VPM and ECM. They get the job done, though neither of them will blow your socks off from a technology standpoint (e.g., search, image resolution). I used ECM for 2 1/2 years and then switched to VPM, which I've been using for the last 2 1/2 years. VPM is considerably less expensive than ECM (which probably targets pricing for SMBs rather than consumers).For reasons I can't grasp, I consider dealing with physical mail one of the most undesirable "life maintenance" activities imaginable. In 2000, I started using paymybills.com (became Paytrust/Intuit) -- basically VPM for bills only plus online bill pay. I paid ~$10/month and easily would have paid double that. I emailed them around 2001 and suggested they expand to provide the same service for all mail. When Intuit acquired Mint, I emailed Aaron Patzer a suggestion that they look into doing to mail what Mint did for financial information. He put me in touch with a product manager he said was looking into this, but apparently it never went anywhere.When I heard about ECM, I signed up for their service in a heartbeat. It wasn't perfect, but I considered their service to be (barely) worth the $800-$1000/year I paid them. When I learned about VPM, I quickly switched to them and remain a generally happy customer and average about $200/year in fees.Similarly, I signed up for Outbox the instant I heard of it, wanting to test it out on the trickle of mail I still get at home to see if it might be an improvement on VPM. The one thing I never got from Outbox was peace of mind that they would be around for the long haul, so I thankfully never cancelled my VPM service. I sent Outbox an email in March 2013 inviting them to charge more because I knew today's announcement was inevitable if they did not make some fundamental changes. I never understood why they wouldn’t scan bulk mail I wanted open (you had to have it delivered). But I was cheering for them and am sad to see it come to an end.[Edit: typo]

lazyant超过 11 年前

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet the Seinfeld scene with Kramer and the Postmaster General about junk mail:<a href="http://www.siyumhaseinfeld.com/eps/season9/905-TheJunkMail.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.siyumhaseinfeld.com/eps/season9/905-TheJunkMail.h...</a><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKlzQo3Wqo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKlzQo3Wqo</a>

pbreit超过 11 年前

This is one of those things that seemed sorta cool (but not really) and probably the future will look more like it than what we have today. But then you start thinking about the cost to operate it and trying to get people to pay for very marginal value. And it's pretty easy to predict demise. I'm sure folks will say that's not always the case so please provide some examples.

billnguyen超过 11 年前

Crazy. Some of the comments on this old TechCrunch article about the economics of Outbox look Nostradamus-like<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf-snail-mail/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf-snail-m...</a>It just never fully made economic sense. Especially with the overhead of undoing something that was just done, mail delivery.

digikata超过 11 年前

With the listed problems getting to breakeven density, marketing traction, and a mention of an email marketing campaign for what is a physical->electronic mail service, I can't help but wonder if Outbox had ever ran a physical junk mail campaign for targeted physical addresses in order to push up the customer density. (not meant as a criticism, just idle curiosity)

evanm超过 11 年前

A truly great service. I'd even be willing to pay 3-4x. My apt building is from the early 1900s and my tiny mailbox overfills after 1-2 days -- it's been wonderful to not have to come back from vacation to a clogged box. Outbox has saved me all kinds of time and patience and am terribly sad to see them go. Best of luck to the team in their next project!

oregondan超过 11 年前

Hey everybody. Earth Class Mail is currently running a promo (OUTBOX2014) for people feeling aimless in the wake of Outbox's closure. It'll give you two months free and waive your sign-up fee. Shameless plug, I work there. I can vouch for the service, though; it's legit, and we're working really hard to grow the company.

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jjcm超过 11 年前

Damn. I have a post office box located in SF that's my main mailing address, but I live in Seattle right now. I suppose it was my own fault relying on them exclusively and not having a backup plan, but does anyone know any service that does something similar to outbox mail? I'd love to keep using my SF address.

chacham15超过 11 年前

For those who have no idea what Outbox is, here is their original landing page: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140116081115/https://www.outboxmail.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140116081115/https://www.outbo...</a>

AustinScript超过 11 年前

I despise mail. I check it once a month and my box is crammed the max with ads and the important mail items are crumpled. I would unsubscribe from all mail if such a thing was possible.I loved Outbox and will miss the service, however I do agree with the poster below. 5$ seemed like a steal.

winterchil超过 11 年前

Very sorry to see them go and it was a beautiful product. However, this is no surprise at all. More surprising is that they were able to raise money for a business model that is fundamentally unsustainable (negative gross margins).

ericmsimons超过 11 年前

What a shame, I was really excited to try out their service. I never considered that USPS would ban them from providing their service, but I'm sure it has something to do with all the revenue that the USPS makes from spam mail.

sunsu超过 11 年前

I always thought it was absurd that they actually had people picking up your mail from your mailbox. I wanted a "Google Voice" for mail. Just let me give out some proxy mailing address that goes straight to their scanners.

nezza-_-超过 11 年前

Shouldn't one of the first sentences of the article contain a deadline on how long the service will remain functional? It's the most important thing current users have to know.

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karenxcheng超过 11 年前

One of the best letters of this kind I've seen. I like how they were up front about the mistakes/miscalculations they made, and what they learned from it.

crystaln超过 11 年前

Why would they not pivot to being an Earth Class Mail competitor? At that point, they are not competing with or undermining, but rather contributing to the USPS.

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fuadksd超过 11 年前

When you control the mail, you control... information!

MyNameIsMK超过 11 年前

What pain-point was Outbox solving and was it really that painful to get you to pull out money for a scanning solution...

abhi3188超过 11 年前

Is it just me or today seems to be a day a lot of startup shutdown announcements have made it to the hackernews homepage

nielsbot超过 11 年前

sorry to see it go. USPS should have bought it or integrated it (but I saw the blog post about them saying "we'll never do that")Hell, I would have still paid for the service for the archiving and online filing part even if they continued to send junk mail.

carsongross超过 11 年前

Man, seems like this is "Useful Startups Going out of Business" month...Good luck guys.

james33超过 11 年前

That is unfortunate, I would have loved to use this service.

atoponce超过 11 年前

I'm sorry, who is shutting down? Never heard of them