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Comment by aacook | Hacker News Reader

YC W21 will be remote. Applications are due in 10 days on the 23rd. I put together this Google Doc to make it easy to draft and share with proofreaders. To make your own copy go to File > Make a Copy.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P0IzDEwKQ7C8kXKdSm1WQmQ_...

I'm applying with NanaGram (https://nanagram.co). NanaGram is a service that helps you send regular printed photos to your grandparents in the mail. All you have to do is text your photos. What makes it different is you can add siblings and cousins to curate photos as a group. It's bootstrapped, solo, and profitable. I've been on-and-off full time. There's so much room to grow. I'm doing the Startup School build sprint (https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-yc-build-sprint-and-...). It's been so helpful to have somewhere to report to each week. I'm planning to focus on NanaGram exclusively the next 6 months with continued weekly reporting cadence.

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I really have to applaud your courage to start in a space that's already occupied. I know I couldn't do something that wasn't absolutely novel because the marketing chops aren't there.

EDIT: Absolutely brilliant. Your service is the top result on Google for "send photos to grandparent" and you snuck an ad into the featured result listicle. Not to mention this very "informative post" that doubles as an ad.

How did you develop your marketing skills?

There are some giants in the space for sure: Walmart, Amazon, CVS, Walgreens, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and many more. None of them did what I needed: Nag all my siblings on a regular basis to send photos to my elderly grandparents. Print quality in the industry is surprisingly varied: https://nanagram.co/photoprintingnearme

Here's a concern I'd have investing in this space. What percent of the population* prefers receiving physical photos from loved ones instead of digital ones, and how do you expect that group to change within the next few decades?

* Within the geographic area that you plan to serve, e.g. USA and potentially Canada, West Europe

We ship worldwide. This is a good question. To be honest, I'm not thinking decades out.

My siblings and I tried to set my grandparents up with devices which never worked. People often tell me the same when signing up for NanaGram. Products like digital photo frames are great but require set up and internet. An envelope of 10 prints can be mailed in a couple minutes and provide joy in several places throughout the home; after delivering the first set of photos to my grandparents, I came back the next week and my grandmother taped photos across her entire kitchen. :)

There's also something about printed photos that a glowing pixel can't beat. The closest analogy is vinyl records.

All businesses need to adapt to their customer's changing needs as time goes on; some know that in advance and some don't. I think you've built something incredible here: you've taken the lowest-friction way your customers want to share photos (texting them), and made that your primary interface.

You took a real-world impedance mismatch, and you serve as the interface between people so that all of them can interact in the way they most want to interact. There are a lot of potential businesses there, and I'm sure you'd be well positioned to grow into future such adaptation layers; I can imagine a brand built around a family of such inter-generational adaptations, in both directions.

A close relative of my partner's just passed away and one of the first things the family did was dump out a couple of boxes of photos and spread them out so they could go through a bunch of memories together. Then they picked out a bunch of the photos and attached them to some posterboard today for tomorrow's small service.

These people aren't luddites. It's just easier to do this stuff with physical photos. The tech-obsessed might forget about that sometimes.

Which problem is harder? Texting photos and converting them to physical delivery, or texting them and just picking the delivery address?

If they have already solved the harder problem, a future potential pivot to digital delivery hardly feels like a roadblock to me.

> I know I couldn't do something that wasn't absolutely novel because the marketing chops aren't there.

You actually need more marketing chops if you're doing something absolutely novel.

Cool and good luck!

I applied with my roomba/robot outdoor trashcan (Trashie).. never have to wheel that stupid thing down to the curb again; automatic and it texts you reminders that tomorrow is trash day. Please fill me!

You too! That's awesome. Text reminders are where it's at. Do you have a website yet?

Hey, I loved the idea of NanaGram: not only sounds good, but also it is a startup that makes the wolrd a better place.

However, after a few minutes checking your website, I noticed that all the old people I know (my partner grandmother, my friends' grandparents, etc), they all use Facebook or Whatsapp in one way or another, so it is really easy to send them digital photos. And considering I am from 3rd world country, I wonder how that is not the case in the United States.

I really appreciate this feedback. We have plenty of people who are on those services and still enjoy NanaGram. There are also lots of younger grandparents who love getting physical prints too. I'm not super well versed on printed photo habits in 3rd world countries but in the US people like to display printed photos in frames around the home, sometimes on the fridge. We ship around the world if you want to give it a try. There's a way to send 3 photos completely free or if you want to send more you can sign up for a paid account which is backed by a money-back guarantee.

My grandparents are theoretically all on these services as well, but just like getting stuff in the mail. I will be using the service.

Sweet! With all the junk mail we seemingly all get, something from a loved one is cherished for sure. Related, we're about to print 20,000 NanaGram envelopes (up until now it's been basic white envelopes) with a red foil liner to make "NanaGram day" even more exciting. We're printing them at one of the USA's last remaining envelope factories, run by a veteran and in business since 1921.

I believe there was a previous YC startup that did this... maybe... I’ve definitely used an app to do this for like $1. I think they even sent it to England.

Still great idea!

Bill Atkinson’s PhotoCard has been around on iOS since 2010. $1 to get a 4x6 print mailed anywhere in USA or Canada.

Yes, the Bill Atkinson from the original Macintosh team. He’s also been a photographer for decades and presumably used his printing knowledge to get the meatspace logistics set up.

This is so awesome. Didn't know about this until your comment. Thanks so much for sharing. I love how bill lets users use his photographs for the postcards.

I've dabbled with releasing a text-to-postcard service but standard 4x6 prints have kept me pretty busy. I'm doing a postcard experiment of sorts: I commissioned my brother-in-law to create unique monthly art and we're adding a free blank postcard in each shipment. My dog Yoda was the subject in July: https://www.instagram.com/p/CE9qMA-FMVo/

I'm not aware of one but I'd love to know about it. I wonder if it was a postcard you sent? There are a couple native apps that focus on postcards that are doing well.

Yeah might not have been yc..

Could've been PicPlum: https://web.archive.org/web/20120108183334/https://www.picpl...

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