Comment by arkades | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkades | Hacker News Reader

I signed up for this the last time it came up on HN. Although I’ve had trouble on my end with mailing addresses and uncooperative nursing homes, Alex at Nanagram has been absolutely fantastic and proactively helpful.

It’s been a niche use-case for me - getting photos to the two grandparents that can’t get on board with smart phones - but as far as it goes, it’s a phenomenal product for that niche. It’s definitely allowed me to keep grandparents involved with my newborn in a way that would otherwise not be nearly as convenient. The closest alternative would be to make a point of sending a snapfish order every few weeks; with NG, I just text a photo to them at the same time I’m texting my other relatives.

My only wish is that they could somehow foolproof their packaging to get past the front desk at nursing homes, but I don’t know if that’s possible. NH seem to just not be built for accepting mail for their residents.

It’s a good service, run by good people.

Thanks so much for the kind words. I'm working on some new packaging. Nursing homes tend to be pretty sensitive about HIPAA and mail. I had a dream to get NanaGram into nursing homes as a group activity, hammered on sales a while and put it on the back burner. I'll probably revisit it soon. The general idea is people would open their photos together, making for a way for residents and team members to get to know each other better. All of the photos would come in one box to avoid delivery issues.

All that said, I'm working on some new packaging and will reach out to you by email to get you hooked up in a beta so we can improve your delivery.

> The general idea is people would open their photos together, making for a way for residents and team members to get to know each other better. All of the photos would come in one box to avoid delivery issues.

Thank you very much for thinking this way. This is the sort of entrepreneurship that's genuinely good for the world.

Add chocolate to the boxes ;-)

And a note: "take care of the grandmas/grandpas and also make sure these photos gets delivered to their rooms and there probably be another box next month."

I'm joking but I feel I'm not too far away from a useful idea.

It's a lovely idea, but with forethought into allergy concerns in medical facilities and shared homes (especially in international market), as well as maybe import/health code related stuff, I wouldn't sidetrack the original vision for it.

I like the idea of adding more goodies to the shipments! Hoping to get to that soon. That, and greeting cards.

The key challenge with the experiment was a sales challenge. At the time, I didn't have too much runway. The sales cycle was longer than I could afford.

But speaking of chocolate, one idea I had was to send giant chocolate bars to the nursing home directors to get their attention :)

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