Show HN: SendWrite.com - your email just got physical | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SendWrite.com - your email just got physical

sendwrite.com

43 pointscolevscode31 comments

Be more upfront about the cost - I knew it was coming...I got the activate email link, still no mention of price - but I see you're alluding to something....stationary. After registering (3 steps) then I see - $4.99. I wrote a note to my mom. I prefer to skype with her for free. Put some use cases in your initial email - (ie: Interview follow ups, etc) for what your service might be used for.

It also wasn't clear where you deliver to....I wasn't sure if Canada would work.

By the way - the logout button is in a most unfortunate position when you are going through registration. I clicked logout rather than the BIG HUGE submit button because it was placed where I am used to the submit button normally being placed. Why would someone logout during registration? And it seems you needed to make this button BIG so people would see it (perhaps because others were doing the same thing as me?). Why not just cave, and put the submit button where it belongs and get rid of the logout button till i'm in the app?

I hear you. More cost transparency. I'll get it up on the front page asap. Thanks.

Right now I'm only delivering in the US.

I'll take a look at the submit/logout issue. Thanks again.

This opens up the door to some pretty nice automation.

You know, the kind that makes me look like less of a negligent husband/father/son/friend/uncle/etc...

(startups take their toll in many ways)

90% of my affection for a letter is for being handwritten, not merely physical (and printed).

Can Task Rabbits send letters? May be an interesting option.

I was a beta tester, and I sent my mom a card using SendWrite. She just told me she got it and that it was the single best thing she received this year =]

This type of service used to be popular among expats from India at one point when Internet service in India was not as wide-spread. For some reason most of the companies providing this type of service died out (the government run Indian postal service still seems to provide such a service though). Maybe there is some lesson to be learned from why a lot of these companies failed?

I'd argue that the use case was different (judging purely by what you've said, so correct me if I'm wrong). In the Indian expat community, this was providing "the" means to easily contact people (as opposed to positing a letter from somewhere else around the world), but clearly as internet connectivity appeared this turned out to be a lot easier than a middle man. As an aside, bizarrely, I was looking at India's internet and connectivity growth earlier today - it's a mad world!

SendWrite is (as far as I can tell) not pretending it's the only way to contact someone, more it's allowing "physicalization" of your digital message, maybe where this is necessary (such as older businesses that haven't fully adopted the webz), but perhaps more just where getting/sending a letter is nice, because frankly, people like stuff they can touch. I'd imagine thank you notes, and things of that nature would be perfect.

You are right in that contacting people was easier via the postal service that via the Internet.

BTW, my intent was not to discourage sendwrite.com, but to see if any lesson can be learned from the earlier attempts and avoid those issues. One of the issues I can see is charging small amounts (micro-transactions) for occasional use...it seems like it would be hard to make money that way. But I can see them doing well if they provide choices of stationery, providing a hard-written service, etc for a monthly subscription for people who do have a constant need for such services.

Yeah totally, I'd say people would almost welcome a subscription service - invariably this kind of thing is something you "should" do, and SendWrite just makes that easier. A subscription might make people use it more, as it adds a financial incentive to "get your money's worth", like paying for a gym is often the incentive people need to actually make them go.

This made me thing of a possible use case you could monetize - sending "Thank you" notes post interview. This is something that I always forget to do, although the last 2 times I interviewed I got the job anyways :)

An FAQ would be nice, otherwise it's a bit scary just emailing you a street address...

Feedback: only after step 3 of the signup process I discover that "The Netherlands" isn't in your list of states.

Of course I should've seen that coming, given how early launch this is and the cost of overseas mail, but still it's a late anticlimax.

I find myself really bothered by the fact that you would be reading all the messages. Granted I realize that in order to stuff the letters manually you would be able to see them if you wanted to, but the fact that you have to search each message for the address and then remove the address from the message seems very human meaning you're at minimum skimming every message. I would much prefer some other method like a web form that included a separate box for address and the message itself.

I too would be interested in an API for this in combination with some kind of developer pricing model.

I also sent a card to my mom. Next I'm going to send a card to some people who hosted me while I visited Canada. The difference between this and postcards (and postagrams) is that I can remember to use sendwrite.

Feature request: scheduled emails to remind me to send a card to a person. I can simply reply to the email to send the card. I'd definitely send monthly cards to various members of my family, or a long-distance sweetie, or what have you.

I wonder if there would be any money in having a free option that includes third-party advertising in the envelope. May need to limit the number of free sends per person over a period of time.

I'd be interested in knowing what type of messages people would send with the free method vs paid. You wouldn't send a birthday/congratulations note with ads, but maybe something witty/humorous to a friend. A semi-physical poke, as lame as it sounds.

I remember my old boss Bob Wyman said in 80's when Digital Equipment Corporation got connected to ARPANET. Because only few in the world then has email addresses, so one guy wrote a program that print out emails with snail mail address in first paragraph on typewriters and let mailmen deliver printouts.

Everything new was once old again.

I thought about this recently, but because I need to send mail to a few government offices, and to my university for my transcripts. Both have to be done in paper, but I'd love to upload a PDF, add an address and be done with it. I'd try to market this to legal offices as a time saver.

Thanks, you just saved me from a chore. although I've bought three mails, I have one I had to send, I am happy to pay $5 to send one. Make it so that I can upload PDF's or choose paper stock, I, and probably many other designers will be waiting in line for your service.

Reminds me of this really old website http://postagram.com/ that does the same for $1.00 -- note the site is ugly and mails really ugly letters in an untimely fashion, however it is somewhat usable.

Will there be an API? I can think of a few services that could integrate with this nicely.

I'll pay for this. I would pay an annual or (small) monthly fee for this.

are you doing all of these manually, I looked around but didn't see that you require the message and address in any particular format ? So how are you programmaticly parsing the incoming emails ?

Right now its partially automated. I get a message if my algorithm can't figure it out.

Why not just a separate field for the address?

This is intriguing.

How do you pay for it? (Do we, the users?)

Compuserve used to do this; it got old quickly; but good luck!

Maybe I am missing something.. but, where does one register?

hmm .. click2mail.com, email2postal.com, and postalmethods.com seem to have had the same idea.

Transmedia reification.

If only I had a service that did it the other way around. i.e. snail mail => email. Besides getting rid of the annoyance of having to physically throw away junk mail, I could get spam filtering on so I'd never even see it.

\m/

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