Show HN: Create and mail a free postcard
postcardmailer.herokuapp.com
postcardmailer.herokuapp.com
I made a WhatsApp chatbot[1] a while back that helps you customize and send postcards from within WhatsApp.
The card is however printed by a third-party with whom we thus have to share the address details for shipping. From there on the is no additional privacy concernes compared to sending a postcard by hand.
I think you should add a statement addressing the privacy issue. Will you or won't you sell data? Is the data encrypted? Will the vendor not sell the data?
I can see this product being a lot of fun. But not at the expense of loss of privacy.
At the time of building this project this was not yet available. And automating WhatsApp was somewhat of a hassle.
Good luck!
I would totally use this as a paid service. Current USPS post card rate is 35¢. I'd pay up to a dollar for this service; hopefully that would cover labor and overhead.
*It's worth noting that Gen-Z ("Zoomers" ick.) is correcting some of the mistakes of the millennials and swinging back toward the habits of Boomers and Gen-X. For example, there was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago that catalog distribution and sales are up massively thanks to Gen-Z because unlike their predecessors, they don't place all of their trust in something just because it's online. I think a good number of them might also latch onto something like this.
Every marketing company and sociologist disagrees with you.
I'd also disagree with your “every”.
Ultimately, users seemed to need to see the product before they spend money, so having a trial period of one or two cards seemed essential. Without it, conversions flatlined I suspect since you were asking people to pay for something they couldn't even see the quality of first. These one or two free cards greatly added to acquisition costs, and led to a long, complex acquisition funnel, and so you had to more than make up for sending a lot of free cards with your paying customers while the new leads converted. When you consider the free cards, you were now talking about $3-4 per lead, and with a generous conversion rate of 3% that is approx a $100 cost per customer to acquire them. Surprisingly, over the course of a year or so of a subscription this could actually work if churn was low.
But it was very risky and cost intensive to subsidize the acquisition costs for me personally, so I stopped working on it after sending approx 9k postcards and getting approx 250 customers, who almost entirely churned out after a few months.
I learned a lot from this exercise, one thing was anytime you hear anyone doing this idea, especially if they are VC funded, it's a good idea to bet against them surviving unless you see they have some kind of cheap, high volume, high quality marketing channel.
[1] Check out my profile for link.
But maybe OP can give us a hint about the real use case or he is hand-writing the cards himself.
So that said: nothing will happen with addresses entered. If this project grows to the point of a ToS/Privacy Policy, those documents will reflect that. At this point you've got to trust me: I've been active in this community for a decade and have an easily-Googleable reputation. If that's not good enough for you, I completely understand, and this service is a little too alpha for you.
But seriously, it's a great question and thanks for asking it!
https://anotherphotoproject.herokuapp.com/
Over the course of about a year, I gave away ~2500 photos at the coffee shop I used to work out of (and gave all the donations to the coffee shop staff as tips).
Lastly, I have written my own service (https://www.atvirukas.com) as well despite knowing that there are a lot of players in the market.
Swiss Post basically prevented other players entering Swiss market :)
A little extra context: when I first built this, it used the Instagram API to automatically mail postcards to my mother when I uploaded a new photo. Shortly after building it, Instagram changed their API and I was unable to get high enough resolution photos for postcards, so I "pivoted" it to the current product.
How is it different in the future? I think I can win on price-- it looks like Postable is $2.49 low volume and $1.00 at volume. Based on my costs, I can do $1.00 or lower with low volume.
If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."
Another thing worth looking into is the "confirm my account" link in email leads to a non HTTPS link
HN is definitely sending more traffic than the service is used to so I've temporarily increased the number of Heroku dynos-- hopefully trying again should yield better results!
What service do you use for sending postcards?
I hope you are aware that competition in quite serious in the market. E.g. mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day. What's your plan about that?
I wanna call bs of this claim. Postcrossing -- largest postcard exchange community, almost 800k registered users worldwide, not all active of course, but a large portion of them sending daily and are really hooked on the hobby.. The hottest month in 2016 was March, 17k/day. These are people who love sending cards. Just hard to believe another single service not oriented on hardcore regular senders would be doing even half that. I can be wrong, of course, but just hard to believe.
10000 postcards in Germany alone would be 0.01% of that and mypostcard works in multiple EU countries.