Outbox Is Shutting Down
blog.outboxmail.com
blog.outboxmail.com
This part is really interesting. Why would USPS do that ? Can someone from outbox elaborate on this ? I would love to get rid of the junk mail that I receive on a daily basis in my mailbox. It is crazy and I have to waste time in taking it out of my mailbox, sorting through them to ensure they indeed are junk and then throwing them into my recycle bin. Not to mention that the recyle bin then needs to be placed bi-weekly outside to be picked up. It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.
Sad to see these guys go. The business model sounds like something I would have tried as a user. Funny though that never heard of them personally. Guess need to watch more Jay Leno!!
Except for package delivery it's all unprofitable though, especially in rural areas.
The Outbox dudes complain about government but many/most companies would not so willingly partner up to shrink its best business.
There are services that let you unsubscribe from junk mail (after a ruling that said that there has to be a way for consumers to unsubscribe, similar to like in email) like https://www.catalogchoice.org/
Up here in Canada I've almost got my mail to a point where I can tell them (Canada Post) to suspend service to my home. My estimate is that I'll have about 6 pounds less paper waste to drop into the recycling bin every month.
I'm not saying such a plan would work for USPS, and definitely not saying Outbox could have brought that sort of value proposition to USPS, but reducing revenue is not always a poor business decision.
Not so sadly, doing so allows more reasonable rates for normal mail.
It's quite unbelievable that it works so well for such a cheap price.
Not to mention I have two packages to return, and a bunch of my wedding accessories shipped USPS. All this week, before I consider any business-related needs (another 6-7 envelopes).
Not a terrible service at all. Could be better, fairly cheap for what it is, and I wish I could pay to not get junk mail, but...not too bad. Definitely better than Ontrac ;)
About 80% of the mail in my mailbox is junkmail. Someone is paying to send that. It seems pretty obvious why the USPS wouldn't want to limit junkmail.
Spam in your real mail box which even at a quick glace effects:
- waste management resources
- recycling resources
- extra work for USPS (sorting, shipping, delivery)
- extra weight == more gasoline required
- environmental issues (litter, printing chemicals, trees = cut down)
And that is probably just the tip of the ice-berg on actual impact... nope, not an issue, this is how we make money.
I've had a problem with this for years, but there is no way to fix it besides charging the producers of such "mail" an arm and a leg.
Maybe we should push for the death of "Mailbox Neutrality"... or wait, should we support it so they'll kill it off?...
/rant
Edit: source [1] http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H1
How so? I'd say that number is actually much higher.
LOADS of what people classify as "spam" is simply stuff they signed up for and forgot about. Just last night a client had someone write in saying "I'm not getting your emails!". After some back and forth they had - 2 days prior - marked it as "spam" because they didn't recognize the name of the list, and so weren't getting any more mails (or, they were getting junked).
You may be able to make an internal distinction between "the spam industry" and "email" but many people can't or don't. Or perhaps more to the point, many people classify spam as "anything I don't like or didn't ask for" (even if, by dint of entering in to a transaction, they do in fact grant permission to get necessary emails now and then).
The UK has such a scheme: the Mailing Preference Service (http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/)
It is the mail equivalent of the Telephone Preference Service (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/)
http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...
Sorting my important mail from my junk mail is just not something I need help with. And the extraordinary wastefulness in my mind of paying a company to follow postmen around and take back the mail just delivered to my box seems so ecologically wrong that I couldn't support it on that ground alone.
I'd honestly be happy just to see a service in the "use us as your mailing address" market with lower and less byzantine pricing than Earth Class Mail ($20/mo plus $5/mo for searchable PDFs, $1.50/piece to actually scan mail, $20 to deposit a check, $4.95/mo to shred mail, $0.30/mo/piece to store mail, etc.) and without the subtly deceitful tactics of VirtualPostMail (auto-applied promo codes that hide what the actual ongoing service limits are, big listed pricing that actually doubles after 3 months, etc).
(I have no affiliation, I've just been a satisfied customer for a few years.)
These kind of tactics are familiar to me from previously working in the web hosting industry, where the tricks of "the eye-catching price is actually the temporary one, you have to look in the details for the real price" and "a coupon code makes it look like your service can do more than it can" are very common.
So is the aftermath, with many people who are confused and upset when the "temporary" part runs out but not quite confused and upset enough to cancel the service.
The coupon code thing is a little weird, but I don't see how you can complain about it: it only increases your limits. It's just a way for them to offer two types of plans: one for people who like to scan most mail, and one for people who don't.
I used to be an ECM customer way back when, before they tripled their pricing as you mentioned.
I also found the government bashing at the end to be pretty weird, given that they failed to explain why the USPS should want to partner with them, let alone how the entire government is backwards.
Good luck with the next thing, guys! Glad you tried for a big problem.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RmsoUYOh5Ak/Tx7K8aL_b5I/AAAAAAAAAW...
I wondered why librarians were delivering post. More coffee needed!
This is really disappointing - first time in a while I've seen an "we're shutting down" announcement and been really, truly, genuinely disappointed by it.
Physical mail is but one of many small parts of daily life that's increasingly feeling like an anachronism.
The fact that we have to regularly physically go to our mailboxes, open them, receive physical paper communication, and then shred/dispose/keep it all is annoying. I was really looking forward to Outbox growing and spreading to other cities.
(BTW: It's worth noting that my rejection of paper mail doesn't mean I reject the notion of the nice parts - hand-written letters, greeting cards, wedding invitations. Those are great. But I'd be totally happy seeing a high quality digitized version of those appear in the email inbox.)
I do hope someone figures out a good solution here, because I'm certain there's demand for this service in some form or another.
(edit: As a friend pointed out - $5/month is probably far too cheap. Earth Class Mail starts at $20. I'd gladly pay that for Outbox - probably more.)
I'm a little surprised why did they think it would be a cheap operation. They send someone to pick up the mail from your house, that's insane. Of course that will be expensive. And it's only $5 per month. There are a few old school services that do the same but they ask the customer to redirect their mail to a specific new address. I wonder why outbox didn't go down that route.
Definitely sad to see them go.
I didn't read the entire post yet but I wonder why they never tried to or considered raising prices. I would of paid substantially more for the service.
I don't see all that much value in the service for my personal mail but for my business mail, I purchased a UPS mailbox and have all mail sent there and outbox takes care of it for me without me having to go there all the time. I just renewed my UPS mailbox for the year too!
myus.com, earthclassmail.com, usglobalmail.com, bongous.com, usamail1.com, maillinkplus.com, usa2me.com, usabox.com, reship.com and probably 50 or so other.
The google keywords you want to search with are "mail forwarding" or "international mail forwarding" or "virtual mailbox" to get started. Not all of them offer pictures of the mail or scanning, but some of them definitely do.
It's a REALLY fractured industry because there's essentially zero M&A activity. The Form 1583 is a giant pain to fill out and it ties you to a specific both company and address. Furthermore if you decide to switch from one to another you can't take advantage of the USPS' normal "fill out this form to get your mail forwarded" feature because as far as the USPS is concerned that's the CMRA's problem, not theirs.
In fairness to the USPS it's a really tough task to determine not only what address mail is going to but what person's name (and box/suite/apt/whatever number) it's going to at that address. Then once you figure that out, you have to figure out if that's one of the probably 500 people who are on the "forward" list at any given time. I know because I built a system to that and more for the company I worked at and it wasn't foolproof. So if it can't be automated easily the only alternative is to have the postal worker on the route do it. Where I worked we got many thousands of letters a day, it would have taken our mailman/woman half a day or longer to go through everything trying to match recipients up against the list of 500 people who want forwarding.
Also, of course, then you have to contact everyone who sends mail to get them to send it to the new address. (I did it as part of a move, so I had to do that stuff anyway.)
That said, they were charging less than what the service cost to provide, and -- judging from the comments here -- less than what their customers valued their services for. So perhaps they didn't have a good idea of what value is and how to sell it.
FTA: "we serviced a mere 2,000 customers in two relatively small markets"
"This final challenge—product market fit"
They invested a very large amount of money, and put the most important challenge at the very end.
"This final challenge" should never, ever, ever be the final challenge. Product-market fit should be the first challenge. Everything flows from matching the product to the market. The fact that they believed this was "the final challenge" shows that they were making decisions in the wrong way -- a way that brought them failure.
I only hope they consider profit/market fit BEFORE they spend more of their investors money.
Meanwhile, Earth Class Mail (https://www.earthclassmail.com/) seems to be going strong following the same "digitize your mail" approach. They don't seem to build their business around spam reduction specifically, just around paper reduction, which doesn't threaten the USPS.
The only exceptions to that, were in 2010, when I needed to get a California ID, and they would only mail it to my home address. Soon thereafter I started getting Jury Summons (Ironic for this Canadian) - with those two exceptions - no paper sent directly to me, couldn't be happier.
Pro Tip - A Post Office box at a "friendly" POBox location will throw away all your junk mail (probably in violation of some kind of USPS statute) and for a small fee, remail it to you anywhere in the world. Never have to change your address ever again. Never receive any direct mail.
Most interesting quote to me, and thank you so much for the candor.
> After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model. Our monthly operating deficits were too high, and even though we continued to get better at acquisition, each small success actually saw our cash curve decline further because our density remained flat. For longer than we would be willing to tolerate, we would lose money for each additional customer we gained. Despite the massive interest in our company, we learned that the product we built did not find fit in the market we targeted.
P.S. I am doubly sorry to hear that the USPS shut down the partnership due to threatening unwanted!! ad revenue... this is making me feel even more sad.
Since many seem to be asking about alternatives, I have generally positive views about VPM and ECM. They get the job done, though neither of them will blow your socks off from a technology standpoint (e.g., search, image resolution). I used ECM for 2 1/2 years and then switched to VPM, which I've been using for the last 2 1/2 years. VPM is considerably less expensive than ECM (which probably targets pricing for SMBs rather than consumers).
For reasons I can't grasp, I consider dealing with physical mail one of the most undesirable "life maintenance" activities imaginable. In 2000, I started using paymybills.com (became Paytrust/Intuit) -- basically VPM for bills only plus online bill pay. I paid ~$10/month and easily would have paid double that. I emailed them around 2001 and suggested they expand to provide the same service for all mail. When Intuit acquired Mint, I emailed Aaron Patzer a suggestion that they look into doing to mail what Mint did for financial information. He put me in touch with a product manager he said was looking into this, but apparently it never went anywhere.
When I heard about ECM, I signed up for their service in a heartbeat. It wasn't perfect, but I considered their service to be (barely) worth the $800-$1000/year I paid them. When I learned about VPM, I quickly switched to them and remain a generally happy customer and average about $200/year in fees.
Similarly, I signed up for Outbox the instant I heard of it, wanting to test it out on the trickle of mail I still get at home to see if it might be an improvement on VPM. The one thing I never got from Outbox was peace of mind that they would be around for the long haul, so I thankfully never cancelled my VPM service. I sent Outbox an email in March 2013 inviting them to charge more because I knew today's announcement was inevitable if they did not make some fundamental changes. I never understood why they wouldn’t scan bulk mail I wanted open (you had to have it delivered). But I was cheering for them and am sad to see it come to an end.
[Edit: typo]
http://www.siyumhaseinfeld.com/eps/season9/905-TheJunkMail.h...
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/outbox-digitizes-sf-snail-m...
It just never fully made economic sense. Especially with the overhead of undoing something that was just done, mail delivery.
For a startup, especially a smaller one w/o an office manager or formal office, it is an amazing value. The SF office in particular is very helpful.
I loved Outbox and will miss the service, however I do agree with the poster below. 5$ seemed like a steal.
Right now these services mostly target a very niche market of expats, travelers, etc, but I could definitely see an argument (just from a convenience perspective) of why this could be greatly expanded to a much more general audience.
Hell, I would have still paid for the service for the archiving and online filing part even if they continued to send junk mail.
Good luck guys.