aacook

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

I have been wondering about this argument about the decline. Check out these numbers: https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/

From 2010 to 2019:

-Overall annual operating revenue has increased from $67.1B to $71.1B

-First-class letters has dropped from 77.6B to 54.9B

-Shipping/package volume has grown from 3.3B to 6.2B

-Marketing mail has dropped from 81.8B to 75.7B

I would not call a 29% drop on first-class mail over a 10-year period with a 100% growth in packages a "collapse."

I wonder how this stacks up in comparison to FedEx and UPS who are surely seeing a drop in letters/flats through their system. It would be interesting to track down the same numbers and compare.

People assume UPS can deliver letter-sized envelopes just as well as the USPS but they simply can't. I'm working on https://nanagram.co and up until recently we used UPS. The average delivery was 7-9 days at best with poor tracking. I switched everything over to the USPS in July and even with all the pandemic the post office is more reliable than UPS and also a little cheaper. We've been seeing deliveries in 2-4 days and before the pandemic 1-3 days.

This was a solid read and hits close to home. I lived through this last summer. I'm in Plymouth MA which is just outside the critical zone of the outbreak described in the article (we entered "moderate" risk). I remember the feeling of the EEE reports in August and subsequent personal protection actions. It all felt very similar to coronavirus. I still went in the woods but less often and doused in bug spray. This past winter 2020 was the most mild of my lifetime. I hope the EEE outbreak isn't too crazy this summer; being in nature is an important factor for me for producing good work and the only way to see safely see family & friends right now is outdoors.

This is beautiful. Great job.

Awesome! Check this out: https://usdawatercolors.nal.usda.gov/pom/home.xhtml

Thank you! You should be good to go now.

Thanks for sharing, brother! <3

I would like to take this moment to give a big shout-out to the USPS. NanaGram wouldn't exist without the postal service, in the US and abroad. Apparently, the USPS is struggling financially right now. You can help the USPS by buying stamps, which you can order online [1]. If you're new to the old-school hobby of letter-writing, I wrote some guides [2] to help you figure out how much postage you need for letters domestically and abroad (e.g. Canada [3]). Lastly, a delightful thing you can do for a family member or friend is send them old photos in the mail (just be sure to scan them in first if you're mailing originals) — I wrote a post about sending photos with stamps. [4]

[1] https://store.usps.com/store/results/stamps/_/N-9y93lv [2] https://nanagram.co/blog/how-many-stamps-usps [3] https://nanagram.co/blog/postage-to-canada [4] https://nanagram.co/blog/how-to-mail-photos

Thank you. When I initially launched on Reddit, lots of folks asked for an "adopt a grandparent" mode. I talked with some nursing homes last week and we're exploring the possibility now. I've always been hesitant to do this, primarily out of concern for abuse (e.g. elderly financial abuse) but a partnership with nursing homes plus background checks could be the answer.

Right on! Shoot me an email if you have any questions: alex@nanagram.co.

Thank you. Credit goes to @andygcook for the initial idea to handle photos over SMS. We also support email. I've thought about web uploads but hardly anyone has asked for it. Behind the scenes, we also support iCloud sharing albums, Google Photos albums, and Google Drive. I've been working on a WhatsApp integration which will be pretty neat; just a couple hurdles to overcome first.

Thanks for being a NanaGrammer. :) If I haven't sent you some already, drop me an email and I'll mail you some sweet NanaGram stickers.

Thanks you. It feels like I'm constantly chasing the inbox zero tiger. Words like these make it totally worth it.

Thank you very much for the kind words. :)

Hi HN — I built a simple site called Protect Our Seniors. The goal is to get more people to stay home by focusing on seniors and their stories, not numbers. Please consider posting a photo of a loved one and share with friends.

I've noticed this as well. Services like Twilio provide an endpoint to check the carrier. For my Google Voice number, they return "Google (Grand Central) BWI - Bandwidth.com - SVR."

No, they don't. I haven't tested this in a while though.

Edit: Oh, I think you may mean a support response. Twilio helped me dig into the issue to great lengths. Ultimately, it was out of their hands. I think it's a lazy decision on AT&T's choice. Seems like a very rudimentary spam filter. You'd think they'd at least whitelist numbers customers are actively texting, especially if they don't contain keywords like "stop" or "spam."

If you send a message containing a hyperlink or email address from a Twilio number to an AT&T number, AT&T will block that Twilio number across its network without any notification. This happens even if you have an ongoing thread going with the customer. Even if after the block happens the customer pings the bot with "START" or any message, AT&T silently ignores it and continues to block the number. The customer can continue to send messages inbound to the number (and I believe those get received by Twilio but can't quite remember) but any outbound responses are blocked by AT&T from making their way to the customer, even though they're marked delivered by Twilio. This was the case as of Feb 2019. It could've changed since then and I haven't checked recently.

I think it's actually $0.005 which is 1/2 a cent. I hope so, at least!

I'm about to release a bot for Whatsapp for NanaGram (https://nanagram.co). Amped!

The user experience of SMS-first products is novel and fun. There's something magical about snapping a photo and just texting it to a unique NanaGram number powered by Twilio. It takes just a couple seconds. I'm excited to deliver the same experience through Whatsapp to customers around the globe and people on wifi.

Building NanaGram SMS-first has been a challenge. There have been all kinds of gotchas:

1) AT&T started blocking any number permanently across its network last January if it contains a hyperlink or email address, even if the customer interacts with the number. I had to create separate messages just for the 12.5% AT&T users.

2) Twilio only works when you have cell service. If you're indoors with wifi only, the text won't go through.

3) Images are downsized in an unpredictable way by the carriers. If you're sending 1 or a couple images, they're pretty good quality. If you send ~5+ photos, they get downsized pretty far and luckily they're still good enough for 4x6 photo printing. Certain carriers like cricket are super aggressive with downsizing.

4) When Apple users with iCloud enabled share more than 1 image, it generates a sharing album which has been a beast to support. Then there's the added challenge of Apple's recent move to HEIC/HEIF images.

5) Twilio doesn't support group threads (WhatsApp doesn't yet, either)

... I could go on and on.

Getting approval from Whatsapp took a while. I first applied about a year ago and didn't hear anything, then applied again and was approved a few weeks ago. I'm guessing the approval layer is to ensure only high-quality bots make the cut. They also have an approval layer for all of your messages sent outside a 24-hour window of the last user interaction. The approval for that took a few days.

Integration with WhatsApp has been surprisingly easy. I basically just had to change "+1{number}" to "whatsapp+1{number}"

Awesome, checking it out! Thanks for sharing.

Thank you! I squashed the bug. You should be good to go now. :)

Yes it is tough. It’s been mostly word-of-mouth growth. I’ve run lots of experiments and most of them don’t pan out. Like, recently I tried mailing a bunch of old school cassette walkmen with the above voicemails on them to the media along with a letter and sample photos (“just press play to hear it straight from happy recipients”). I sent 15 boxes and haven’t heard back on any. It feels like the kind of service that would do well on the news/etc so I’ll just keep trying!

Thank you!