Show HN: Letter from You – Handwritten letter, mailed for you | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Letter from You – Handwritten letter, mailed for you

letterfromyou.com

16 pointsanthonylee24 comments

Maybe some people with bad handwriting might find such service useful, or other reasons (what dugluak mentions is also a possibility; another possibility may be if you do not want to get all of the envelopes and stuff yourself). Sometimes people used to hire scribes to write stuff, so if that is what you want, then this service could do such thing, although it seem less being needing these days. Still, if anyone wants this service, now you have it; just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it is no good for anyone else either.

However, I think I do not need this; if I want a handwritten letter (for various reasons, including I am composing it while not at the computer, to include hand-written diagrams, or because I have the postal address to send it to, etc), I will do it by myself (I will still generally type the address on the envelope with a typewriter, though). If I wanted a copy of text from a computer I would probably use the printer (except that it seems to sometimes doesn't work on my computer, but sometimes it does work).

What everyone is really waiting for is when the Microsoft research voice changer is finally production ready and there will be a service to call whoever you want(parents/significant other) and just pretend to be interested in what they tell you. If scheduling comes up pretend to need to sync the calendar and if anything really hard surfaces feign a work call/ cell phone trouble. People will feels much more loved and suddenly nobody will get enough of your favorite stories. As not to denigrate anyone I will provide examples of these calls made to myself. I can already picture how good it would work on me.

Yes nasmorn, Tell me more about how increasing your weekly running mileage has made you feel sluggish. So you are using soy yogurt in your shakes now, how interesting.

and then emails you a summary.

This reminded of the movie "Her"(2013) where the actor worked at a company with a similar use case. The difference being they wrote the letter for you (by dictating it to the computer) and then mailed it to the person. Wish they could do that!!

Reminds me of the movie "Her". Not sure I would use this but its a fun idea to experiment with.

I don't understand one thing. The customers know that companies are here just to make money. Then why do they think the letter is coming from the heart? Why don't they think it is some marketing guy's ploy to extract little more value/money?

I see your point, I think from a different angel— it depends on your use cases and how much time you want to save.

Mind elaborating some of those use cases?

I can't answer if the receiver should feel as if the letter should be written from the heart or not... but I think some businesses are interested in sending nice handwritten letters. I see people in jewelry and fashion industries interested in sending these crafted handwritten letters to their clients as a thank you note, etc. It seems like they value their packaging. I am still learning why some of my clients are interested in this product myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . My conclusion is that they want to stand out.

I agree with the final conclusion. Thanks for answering

You don't send handmade letters if you need to save time.

Sometimes you’ll build up long lasting, trusting and mutually beneficial relationships with some of your best “customers” (a person you do business with inside a company) you’ll even do business with these individuals across different companies. The times I’ve sent my customers something (be it a swag pack, bottle of drink or anything) it’s been really appreciated. A handwritten letter would be amazing! I did send a hand written thank you letter to a customer once (but the person is a good friend too so it didn’t count as much, although I thanked him for being a customer and wished him luck etc) and he was super excited and happy about getting a physical post card in such a digital age. It definitely is a good thing to do, and helps keep things human.

That's a good point, I guess it means more than a printed letter. But I'm still skeptical that you can outsource something as personal as your own hand writing. I feel it breaks down trust and diminishes the effect of your real hand written letters ...

Reminds me of stories about "letter writers" sitting outside post offices in rural India. Only difference is that some customers couldn't write and some couldn't even read. One feature you guys can pull from that is allow users to provide a gist of what needs to be in the message and you guys come up with actual message. Some people like me lack the skill of coming up with beautiful words ;)

That's a great idea! We can definitely implement that.

This is neat! I'm not sure I have a real use for it - but if it was cheaper I'd use it a few times just for fun.

I wonder if they would send me a letter of a long, encoded string? Imagine ~300 characters of hand written hex encoded bytes, framed on your wall. .. man, I kind of want that.

The question is, would they write that?

I am sure they'd do, if you ask nicely next time.

Oh my. I think our writer will go crazy.

This is ... so creepy. Humans as a Service, basically.

As opposed to monkeys as a service? All service businesses up until recently (and still most today) are literally selling the time of a human being to do something.

You want a toilet fixed, you call a plumbing service, which is a human as a service. Why is this creepier than the old-school scribes that would write what someone dictates?

=( Sorry to hear that—but it did make me laugh little bit.

So is the custom handwriter an AxiDraw Pen Plotter?

Could Amazon's mechanical turk be used for this?

reminds me of violet evergrand

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