Apply HN: Melt – API for Physical Gifting | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Melt – API for Physical Gifting

6 pointsgxespino7 comments

Melt: http://melthq.com

Demo: http://melthq.com/dashboard

Problem: Companies are always looking for ways to engage with and delight their customers. Sending small gifts to customers is not scalable. Generic postcards and mailers are ineffective.

Solution: Melt is an API that devs can effortlessly tie into and trigger gift sending based on whatever conditions they want (customers bday, purchase amount, 10th purchase, etc.) Small gifts can be customized with customer info. We handle the production, customization and mailing and figuring out how to scale. Small gift ideas: chocolate, giftcards, flower(s), handwritten notes, whatever to delight your customer.

About us: I'm a developer and previously built and maintained a large hosting company's billing and customer service APIs. I'm a two time startup founder and also built a real estate company to mid six figures income while still in college. My partner is at Wharton working on her MBA. She previously scaled an ecommerce food startup from $45k MMR to $105k MMR in six months and worked at Uber doing operations and logistics.

Vision: We want to build a platform for anyone to send physical goods, seamlessly. What stripe did for payments we want to do for, say, chocolate bars and flowers.

Market: We're targeting client based businesses initially as they already send gifts to customers. Think Realtors, Brokers, Lawyers. Eventually any company looking to improve customer engagement and relationships would benefit from Melt.

Progress: I've been working on the code since late February. API MVP is about 75% complete. Web app is about 25% complete. We have ~35 signups from a small reddit post I threw up a month ago. Surprised to have had a few CEOs from large companies sign up, one of which is a YC company. Partner and I have talked to nearly 25 lawyers/realtors about their use case.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or interest in the project reach out. We'd love to hear from you!

OK, I like this idea - as a business owner I can definitely see the use case. Your home page presents the idea very simply.

One thing I instantly want when reading your site is a gift :) -- you say "try it out" but I think it would be pretty magical if you'd just send me one if I type my address, or something like that. Obviously you'd want some way to prevent abuse.

Second thing I want when reading the site is to see the pricing on the homepage. I'm not in the business and have no idea how much these gifts are going to cost, so an approximate range (or, even better, github style "plans" showing various gifts and how much they would cost) would go a long way towards getting my email address.

Lastly, you could probably get away with an insanely simple "api" for your mvp that just let the person upload a CSV of addresses, and then dumped them onto a stripe checkout. You could build that in a day and (I'd guess) go pretty far.

Thanks for the comment and suggestions. I'm actually working on a lightweight CSV uploader for some of our early users who are Realtors.

I like this. Currently sending e-gift certificates is the closest thing.

Would be nice if you could engrave the products as well. Like if a business wanted to send swag they could.

Imagine I was running a small company and I heard about your product but I'm skeptical of the value I'll get from using it. How can you convince me that spending money on gifts for my customers is worth it? What evidence do you have that sending a gift will net me more income in the long run?

How big is this market? In the $10 to $100 MM range? How do you grow past that?

The question I'd ask you is if you could afford not to use Melt as a way to delight your customers. Gifting your best customers with surprise tokens of appreciation (~$15), especially if your company's products are in the high end range of say $500+, you'd have to send out 33 gifts without a single subsequent repurchase to lose out, thats without taking into account the boost in social media, word of mouth, reviews, etc.

Our initial users will serve as case studies and we'll write up blogs about how we improved their bottom line.

And, If you're still on the fence, I'm sure receiving a random gift from us might help sway you.

The gifting market is huge if you include sub markets such as flowers, chocolates, corporate gifts. We'd be introducing a lower price point of < $15 gifts which would expand the market. While not entirely B2B, Harry & David had $300m revenue in 2014, Things Remembered - $315m in 2011. It's reasonable to say $100m is doable.

Customer engagement is not about hash tags and pop up notifications. It's about establishing relationships, something tangible. The companies who can do that will win. Melt allows brands to do that.

This is a great idea. Good luck!

Your blog is down :/

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