Hacker News Reader

Comment by theveloped | Hacker News Reader

Awesome seeing this here! I hope this will get you the traction you need to keep it up and running! Happy New Year by the way!

I made a WhatsApp chatbot[1] a while back that helps you customize and send postcards from within WhatsApp.

1: https://melonpost.com

View on HN

This is a great idea , it all comes to privacy on the address that is shared. How are those preserved

It’s definitely important! The addresses are stored for generating the postcard designs and shipping them to the recipient only.

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.

Love the idea. I hope it sticks.

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.

There is a privacy statement on the bottom of the page that covers this. Let me know if you feel this is not thorough enough or not prominent enough.

This is pretty cool. Do you have any metrics on how long it takes to arrive at the destination from the time of ordering? I'm curious to know how long it would take to arrive in the USA, South America (i.e Colombia) or Australia.

Not the OP, but I post postcards from USA as hobby (member of site Postcrossing); Cards to slower postal countries like Russia China or African Continent take anywhere between 15-45 days, depending on how countryside the address is. Cards to faster postal countries like Germany Denmark Sweden etc take about 6-10 days. Obviously there are exceptions.

That’s spot on. We send the postcards from the UK so for the UK and Europe mainland we can manage 2-6 days even.

Anything like that for Telegram? Not necessarily by you, I mean in general. I know it supports bots so this should be possible.

None that I know of but it should be fairly easy in telegram. It perfect for chatbots! Integration with WhatsApp was the hardest part really. I know there used to be a version for Facebook messenger[1] though.

1: https://postcard.im/

Is the Whatsapp Api hard to work with? Or does it require using private APIs?

Not op but Twilio has a whatsapp integration, and it seems pretty straightforward.

WhatsApp has recently announced their plans for their API after a very long beta program (open to enterprise companies only). They will not be working directly with customers but have chosen 20+ partners through which their API will be available (e.g. Twilio).

At the time of building this project this was not yet available. And automating WhatsApp was somewhat of a hassle.

Great idea! I considered an SMS interface but kept with web as an MVP. Good luck with your project! If you'd like to stay in touch, please connect with me: adam@der.wiki

Reply on news.ycombinator.com