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This seems like an interesting service, but I want too toss out a suggestion for those looking to disseminate info about a product or service: Tell me a story.
by lelandbatey 10y ago
This seems like an interesting service, but I want too toss out a suggestion for those looking to disseminate info about a product or service:
Tell me a story.
More specifically, use a hypothetical story to provide context and an example of why the hell I'm reading your page. This is the explanatory copy on this page:
Our mission is to help you sell and ship stuff directly to your fans for a
fraction of the cost and effort of doing it yourself. Blackbox works like a
co-op: if we all go in together, we get the cheapest pricing, the fastest
shipping, and the best service. The shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax.
You can customize the packaging and the inserts. It’s pretty great.
At the end of this, I still am confused about what you do. What would help is a hypothetical use case and narative, and to demonstrate that, I'll invent one:
Let's say you're running a Kickstarter. You're a domain expert who's built
something awesome, and you've even successfully kickstarted a project to
build what you love. Now though, after having built all these gizmos you
need to ship those to your backers, and this is something you're NOT an
expert in. Looking in to shipping, you see it's going to involve
complicated contracts and procedures to ship your gizmo at any scale, and
at a cost that FAR exceeds your back of the envelope calculation of price
and effort. You wish there where some simple shipping service where you only worry about the packaging, and they handle picking up from the manufacturer, storage, and shipping; a service with
straightforward pricing, and customer service oriented at helping someone
with your needs and your scale.
That's where BlackBox comes in. Our mission is to help you sell and ship
stuff directly to your fans for a fraction of the cost and effort of doing
it yourself. Blackbox works like a co-op: if we all go in together, we get
the cheapest pricing, the fastest shipping, and the best service. The
shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax. You can customize the packaging
and the inserts. It’s pretty great.
I don't know if the above story accurately represents what it is that BlackBox provides, but I hope you can see that having a story helps a reader answer the question of "is this helpful or relevant to my situation or goals?".
- aug24ta 10y agoAccording to their FAQ, they sell merchandise on consignment. I think the source of your confusion is that they refer to themselves as a shipping company when that's not what they are.
- cormacrelf 10y agoPersonally I think it's fairly obvious from the first sentence what it does. It's blunt and to the point, kinda like how the service seems to operate. I enjoyed how efficiently and clearly the whole thing came across.
- Dylan16807 10y agoForming it into a narrative like that makes me want to run out of the room as fast as possible. Tell me what you do, great. The story you propose doesn't say anything more about what they do than the simpler version. Don't tell me I screwed up calculating shipping costs or what I wish for. That's hostile and putting words in my mouth.