Comment by faxman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faxman | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, that's a lot of material to digest, thanks!

Let me start at the end - the idea isn't actually original. I remember Compuserve offering a similar service around the late 80's! I agree this all succeeds or fails based on execution.

> ... make sure you're doing address cleansing for the extra postage discounts.

Yes, this is actually addressed in our FAQ - we do address validation.

> Make a utility print driver so I can "Print To Postal Shout" -- this is VERY easy to do, at least on windows...

Could you please elaborate on this? I was always under the impression that building print drivers was a very expensive undertaking.

> ...Upon completion, create an XML doc (or similar) and call a web service ...

We actually do this now with our Word add-in which makes it easy to submit letters to distribution lists. Instead of running a mail merge in Word, the document and list are uploaded via Web Service.

> ...If you could somehow incorporate electronic signature / notary / SOMETHING into the documents...

This is very forward-looking at this stage of our project. I'll keep this in mind for later.

> Offer stationary / letterhead for the customers to design and use...

Great idea! With digital printing it's possible to print letterhead on the fly.

> You could offer discounts on the actual costs if the user was willing to have ads printed...

We haven't been successful in generating additional sales from similar initiatives in the past. I'll need to revisit this option.

> target Salesforce.com...

We do this with our postalmethods product, but haven't been diligent enough in execution. Will need to put more energy into this.

Thanks for all the suggestions! It would be great if you could clarify on the printer driver question above.

Building a print driver is a very daunting task - so let me clarify. Don't build it yourself! There are programs out there that will serve as the underlying driver and you can hook into it to launch your program upon pdf creation. I believe I used print2pdf in the past to launch my own wizard.

You can modify the registry entries to have the print driver called "Postal Shout Printer" -- upon user selection, it prints the document to your desired format and then launches your executable. From this, you get the filename and start all the processing. Step One: Who would you like to send this to, Step Two: starts the upload, etc... I built this wizard functionality over 10 years ago for a client and that's what triggered my idea that you've started to execute on. Back then, it was VB6 exe that was being launched and it was incredibly stable. I wrote some winapi hooks to get byte transfer speeds and calculate remaining upload time, etc... Also, hooked it into a CRM system so that the document could be linked to the CRM. Slightly different use case, but same net result.

I'm sure that driver isn't the only one capable of launching your own executable. I did a lot of research back then (including writing my own driver) and had many options - the pool of options must be much greater now.

I had the ability to create everything on my own back in the day, but I didn't have the capital to purchase the equipment necessary to make it all happen. That would have ran into the millions of dollars and I was never able to push it through (didn't really try that hard I guess). I should have just done the printing manually to build up a user base - but I didn't know much about business or even how to do it then. Heck, I still don't! :-)

My email is in my profile if you want more info. Or, feel free to ask here - your choice.

This is definitely interesting - "printing" the active document, selecting the recipient from an address book, then selecting the job type is a very natural work flow. I'll definitely research the availability of printer driver SDK's that can reduce implementation complexity.

Thanks!

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