Dustin Curtis's new web app
snail.dustincurtis.com
snail.dustincurtis.com
http://www.postful.com/ http://www.l-mail.com/
Both look pretty clean and offer various capabilities to send lots of letters more efficiently, including an API.
In all seriousness, I thought Postful looked pretty good.
(warning: autoplay music)
I look forward to implementing something like this!
I remember looking at these a while back, and I believe Postal Methods is more robust than either of the two you mentioned (and pretty cheap too).
"Ensure you receive at least ONE brithday card, by sending it youself! By the time your birthday comes round you'll have forgotten you sent it, and will be pleasantly surprised."
Also things like sending letters a year on, with a reminder of what you hoped to achieve that year etc.
One commercial use might be for real estate agents sending letters to new homeowners 1/2 months into the future asking them how they're doing, etc. I think that would seem a bit more personal than just an email. I always enjoy it when I start receiving mail at a new residence!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A0yqKbIpAU
(Of course, the time lag is removed to demonstrate the general principle without having to watch a several month long video clip. And it's Christmas, not Birthday, cards.)
Note: I developed this iPhone app
In the year 2009 snail mail is grossly inadequate.
1. Does it prove anything? No. Sign something with a private key, that is proof.
2. Is it better for record keeping? No. Fires, floods, and rot are all enemies. Storing it digital allows one to replicate a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds.
3. Aesthetic? Only if you have a strong packrat or nesting instinct.
4. Cheaper? No. Not by a fucking longshot, not even close.
Take a one dollar bill out of your wallet, burn it, and send an email.
2. I can also delete a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds. The steps required to redundantly store or back up data require either knowledge the layman doesn't have or expensive software (assuming they don't know of the free alternatives).
3. Letters are like books in that there will always be people who prefer the personal feel of paper and ink to a computer screen.
4. Agreed.
You seem to be assuming that his market is YC users or other techies. As stated in other comments, this has great applications for the elderly, non-techies, and people in other countries wanting to send mail to the US.
Dustin's service doesn't solve that, but your comments are, quite simply, ahead of the game, and detached from current reality. That reality, as is always the way with reality, changing, but that change takes time.
EDIT: First paragraph re-written.
Despite its age and the fact that it is grossly inadequate, snail mail still has a place in our society - at least for now.
You can argue over whether theses concerns are legit or solved problems, but at least people are unconvinced, or are otherwise reluctant to switch to digital.
I have elderly family that greatly prefers getting physical letters to email. I also do a lot of foreign travel, where it's inconvenient and expensive to send letters.
Snail is a definitely niche product, and only useful in weird edge cases. However, you might be surprised how many people encounter those edge cases on a daily basis.
Hence the suggestion that you use email.
Making people feel special is worth a couple of bucks.
I always send my postcards the last day and then hunt for the stamps and post box/office where I can send them from. I'd really find this service useful :) Although, arguably a big part of receiving a postcard is the stamp which you wouldn't have here.
I have an aunt who snail mails a few photos of her family every now and then with a handwritten letter. She's been doing this for years. Yet, each year receiving the personal snail mail brings more excitement than the previous year!
1. Politicians receiving mail from their constituents will take a snail mail more seriously than email.
2. Love letters seem more meaningful when received via snail mail.
It also leads indirectly to the fact that there's no spam filter for snail mail to get stuck in. Not because there's no spam in snail mail, but because the amount of spam is reasonable. 95% of email is spam, which is manageable for the user because of spam filters, but false positives in spam filters make snail mail actually a bit more reliable for the average recipient.
And the set of people I want to send mail to intersected with the set of people who have the faintest idea what public/private keys are is the empty set. So that won't fly.
In addition, the fact that I am willing to pay a dollar to send a message is a statement that you might want to take five seconds to look at the letter, whereas most emails aren't worth taking a look at.
My thoughts on this line were as follows.
1) It needs to allow photos. They can be an extra charge of course, but I would want to send photos.
2) There's a ton of paper handling equipment out there. If you invested about $20K, maybe 10K if you bought used, I would think you could get a solution that was 100% automated. It printed, stapled, folded, printed the envelope, and stuffed the contents. A service with such an automated capability, that showed pictures of their equipment on their website so I knew it was real, would definitely be reassuring from a privacy standpoint, as well as a reliability standpoint.
3) As for API, my thought was to make the whole thing, just email. Parse incoming emails to confirm the sender is an account holder. Parse the email for the markup headers that you define to designate recipient address. If they don't exist, fire off a reply email to the same address, telling them they messed up and didn't mark up their submission properly. Done. No visiting your website at all, after I set up my account.
3a) I would also suggest a way for me to assign frequently used snail mail addresses as part of an email address. For example, say you assign me the email address QWERTY@mailservice.com. Whenever I mail to that address, you know it's my account, and send the contents of the appropriately marked up email to the recipients. OK, fine. But now, allow me to assign sub-addresses. So, for example, if I email QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com, and I've already defined the address of terry, now I don't have to mark up my email at all. I just put QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com into my email address book, and my friend Terry is the same as contacting anybody else with email. With such a system, mailing somebody and emailing somebody take exactly the same steps on my part. In fact, I can even CC them on an email I send to somebody else.
:-)
In this community, we don't vote based on whether or not we agree. We vote up if we think it is worth reading, regardless of whether we agree or not. We downvote when the message is inappropriate - flames and trolls, cheap humor, that sort of thing. I don't go to the comments to see who agrees with me, I go there to see who disagrees, and why.
Sincerely,
mkyc
In all seriousness, this is a good idea, but you might be cutting yourself short on the profits. 6 cents a letter for probably 5 minutes worth of work? I think you should charge $1.50 a letter and make about 56 cents instead. Overseas business people might still be willing to pay that.
I like the interface of your service!
www.mailaletter.com
None of the competing services that I know of provide an API, and if dcurtis releases an API that would be a significant edge.
* 10c to paypal
* 44c to stamp
* 40c for envelope and paper
I make about 6c on each letter.
For example, to cancel my gym membership, I had to mail a notorized document to their corporate office. The entire purpose was to discourage and inconvenience me. I'm sure they toy with the idea of making cancellations in-person only, at an office on the peak of Everest. I'd just assume that letter arrive flaming as printed on high quality paper.
(I am from Old Europe so I might be off about prices in the USA)
http://www.printpsi.com/automated_mailing_system_maverick_in...
Here's your business model if you want to get serious:
1 - You setup a few offices in key metropolitan areas. (NY, LA, etc.)
2 - Each office has an automated setup to print envelopes and letters and stamp them. (I'm sure USPO has a system for this so you wouldn't need to literally stick things on an envelope.)
3 - Web-app/api is centrally hosted and linked to the distribution nodes. Based on destination, you assign the letters to the nearest distribution node.
4 - You undercharge FedEx/UPS/etc 2 day. (That's your ceiling). If you mail in NYC to another NYC address, they're gonna get it the next day.
You have fixed up front costs (the machines) and recurring monthly costs (rent, electricity, paper, ink, etc.).
I would think an investment of around a few 10Ks could get you up and running in the initial key metros (NYC, SF, etc.) and then expand.
How many people would use a physical mailing service like this, if it had an API and lots of options for paper and envelopes?
When you create a letter on Snail, the beagleboard pulls from the heroku database, formats the letter, prints it, and then sends me an email saying it's ready to be stuffed into an envelope.
(Well... sort of. In a perfect world, that is what would happen. Unfortunately, there are some bugs that I am still trying to work out.)
Though, I think big, sooo probably not worth the cash.
I always wonder about stuff like that.
If you can work ON the process instead of IN it then there is some potential for this to work on volume, but overall really cool idea, props!
At the time, it was several dollars per page.
I think Dustin's service is most suitable for occasional letter senders while PostalMethods is most suitable for businesses wanting to automate their mailing.
You could do what those efax places do for free faxes and include an advertisement in the envelope. Hell, put advertisements on the envelope itself.
http://localhost:3000/success?merchant_return_link=Return+to...
Edit: Also, a personalized handwriting font upload would be neat.
Sorry to nitpick. But, in the preview letter page, it reads "Make a mistake?". It should instead read "Made a mistake?"
Would make it a lot easier for Amnesty International. All that handwriting makes my hand numb!