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Comment by RyanGWU82 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. When I need to mail a letter, why can't I just send it myself?

Hint: If there are some good usage scenarios, it would be good to explain them on the home page. Customers evaluate new products by their benefits, not their features.

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laziness, i assume. here's the steps i need to take in order to mail a letter: (a) buy a printer/set it up (b) buy paper/envelopes (c) visit the posto office with my sealed letter, so that they can tell me how much it will take to ship it to some destination abroad (because how the hell would i know)

for something i do, maybe, once a year, that's a hell of a lot of work

and, no, i don't own a printer. it's not useful in the general case. ditto television. my toaster oven rocks the house, though.

The same way I am, I mail so rarely that I usually dont have any stamps, and when I do they are usually the wrong amount (seems to change often). So I need to spend the time to find the correct price, maybe go buy more stamps then mail it. If I could just use a service like this I would probably do it. Although when I do have to mail things I usually have to include things so its a manual process anyway.

Maybe this is tailored to use for complain letters or threats that people don't want coming from their geographically location...?

How about cost/speed of delivery? What if you live in India, and you want to send a b-day card to your cousin out in the States? Instead of $.42 or whatever, you have to pay and wait for international travel.

I can kinda see where they are going with this. Although I would probably never use it (I very rarely send a letter by regular mail), I can think of some use cases where I could use it. My great grandma doesn't use email. I don't think she even has a computer. Every time her or my great grandpa would send me something it would come with at least a page of a letter just telling me about how they were doing. I also never seem to have any stamps. So in lieu of going out getting stamps and writing something on paper, and buying getting envelopes, I could just send an email. I mean if it is rare occasion why not? It's going to cost me like $20 for the stamps, maybe $10 for the envelopes. Thats just to send one letter. Now if I sent letters all the time the investment of stamps and letters would be worth it, but because the next time I am going to send one again will be months, years, whatever, I will probably lose the envelopes, the postage will be raised and I will need more stamps, and my grandma will never get a letter.

I am in agreement. This sounds like an idea that was not thought out.

C'mon. Where else can you get your message enveloped in "Jakob Nielsen Green"? That's startup gold, IMO.

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