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Show HN: Create and mail a free postcard
- hbcondo714 7y agoGood time to have this but how is this different from services like Postable? We just used it to mail out 100 postcards for the holidays.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoWhat was the cost per card if you don’t mind me asking?
- derwiki 7y agoRight now, it's not much different than Postable or any number of similar services. Except they can send internationally and this service cannot :) Based on the number of similar services, this doesn't seem like a winner-take-all market. But I would be very interested to hear your thoughts: how you chose Postable from competitors, what you like about them, don't like, etc. A little extra context: when I first built this, it used the Instagram API to automatically mail postcards to my mother when I uploaded a new photo. Shortly after building it, Instagram changed their API and I was unable to get high enough resolution photos for postcards, so I "pivoted" it to the current product. How is it different in the future? I think I can win on price-- it looks like Postable is $2.49 low volume and $1.00 at volume. Based on my costs, I can do $1.00 or lower with low volume.
- hbcondo714 7y agoI think it would be nice to have an address book feature. This is what led us back to Postable, we had used them a couple years ago for mailing thank you cards which involved uploading our addresses to their address book. Overall, their post card design templates appealed most to us.
- derwiki 7y agoThanks for the feedback! If you'd be willing to chat a little more, I'd love to connect: adam@der.wiki
- hbcondo714 7y agoAnother nice to have may be the ability to track the card. When we purchased our order on Postable, the order status displayed as "Sent" which is kind of generic. We don't know which of our recipients actually received the card.
- trwhite 7y agoFunnily enough, I had this exact idea ~6 months ago. Whether this becomes a paid service or not, people will always appreciate a little goodwill.
- derwiki 7y agoLaunching this as "free" is similar to another project I had a few years back: https://anotherphotoproject.herokuapp.com/ https://anotherphotoproject.herokuapp.com/ Over the course of about a year, I gave away ~2500 photos at the coffee shop I used to work out of (and gave all the donations to the coffee shop staff as tips).
- OrgNet 7y ago"We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."
- 4d66ba06 7y agoI am also getting this error when clicking "Preview" Another thing worth looking into is the "confirm my account" link in email leads to a non HTTPS link
- derwiki 7y agoIs this with one recipient? HN is definitely sending more traffic than the service is used to so I've temporarily increased the number of Heroku dynos-- hopefully trying again should yield better results!
- 4d66ba06 7y agoYes, one recipient, thanks and no worries, I may try back in a few days :)
- pimlottc 7y agoHmm, for some reason when I click the link, it opens with the page scrolled halfway down. It might have sometime to do with my 1Password extension, as it has the "email" field focused. https://imgur.com/X3TkUSa https://imgur.com/X3TkUSa
- canadaduane 7y agoIf I click "Choose a Photo" before filling anything out, it says "Validation failed: Email can't be blank, Password can't be blank." Maybe I'm unusual, but I want to see the picture I'll be sending, before I commit! :)
- theveloped 7y agoAwesome seeing this here! I hope this will get you the traction you need to keep it up and running! Happy New Year by the way! I made a WhatsApp chatbot[1] a while back that helps you customize and send postcards from within WhatsApp. 1: https://melonpost.com https://melonpost.com
- rammy1234 7y agoThis is a great idea , it all comes to privacy on the address that is shared. How are those preserved
- theveloped 7y agoIt’s definitely important! The addresses are stored for generating the postcard designs and shipping them to the recipient only. The card is however printed by a third-party with whom we thus have to share the address details for shipping. From there on the is no additional privacy concernes compared to sending a postcard by hand.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoLove the idea. I hope it sticks. I think you should add a statement addressing the privacy issue. Will you or won't you sell data? Is the data encrypted? Will the vendor not sell the data? I can see this product being a lot of fun. But not at the expense of loss of privacy.
- theveloped 7y agoThere is a privacy statement on the bottom of the page that covers this. Let me know if you feel this is not thorough enough or not prominent enough.
- ConsiderCrying 7y agoAnything like that for Telegram? Not necessarily by you, I mean in general. I know it supports bots so this should be possible.
- douglaswlance 7y agoAre you selling the addresses?
- derwiki 7y agoNope. More details in another thread on this post, but tl;dr: 1. This is a side project and I'm eating all the sending costs while iterating on the product 2. Selling addresses is shitty and if I monetize, it will just be mark-up on the selling costs 3. If this project continues to grow, I will make the ToS/Privacy Policy clearly state that we will never sell addresses
- ta999999171 7y agoWho would you even sell them to? Sharper Image?
- rammy1234 7y agoWhat Happens to the addresses that are entered ? Privacy ? Any info about that
- derwiki 7y agoVery good question. As alluded to under "About", this is very much in side-project phase and absent ToS, Privacy Policy, payment, etc. I considered slapping a generic privacy policy up there before launch, but convinced myself I was coming up with excuses for not launching. So that said: nothing will happen with addresses entered. If this project grows to the point of a ToS/Privacy Policy, those documents will reflect that. At this point you've got to trust me: I've been active in this community for a decade and have an easily-Googleable reputation. If that's not good enough for you, I completely understand, and this service is a little too alpha for you. But seriously, it's a great question and thanks for asking it!
- turrican 7y agoI would happily pay for this service and know others that would as well. Lots of people have kids and grandparents that would get a kick out something like this. Good luck!
- reaperducer 7y agoI have lots of non-old friends* with whom I enjoy exchanging postcards. You can't stick Instygram to the refrigerator or put it in a frame, especially since the number of households with a printer is dwindling. I would totally use this as a paid service. Current USPS post card rate is 35¢. I'd pay up to a dollar for this service; hopefully that would cover labor and overhead. *It's worth noting that Gen-Z ("Zoomers" ick.) is correcting some of the mistakes of the millennials and swinging back toward the habits of Boomers and Gen-X. For example, there was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago that catalog distribution and sales are up massively thanks to Gen-Z because unlike their predecessors, they don't place all of their trust in something just because it's online. I think a good number of them might also latch onto something like this.
- quickthrower2 7y agoThe Boomer/Gen x etc. bands are arbitrary. I don’t believe there is one size fits all generalisations about these bands that can be made.
- reaperducer 7y agoI don’t believe there is one size fits all generalisations about these bands that can be made. Every marketing company and sociologist disagrees with you.
- wizzwizz4 7y agoThen they are wrong as a matter of fact. These generalisations are descriptive stereotypes, not prescriptive laws. I'd also disagree with your “every”.
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- ed 7y agoNeat! It's like a free https://sincerely.com/ https://sincerely.com/
- reaperducer 7y agoI just looked at sincerely, and that looks like it only prints 5x7 photos and mails them, not actual postcards. Maybe that's why it starts at $2 each.
- bdibs 7y agoLooks pretty neat, what are your costs?
- davchana 7y agoExperience: clicked the above link with herokuapp.com; signed up (saved Chrome auto generated password in Chrome) & sent postcard. But the signup email sent the link with .us ending; & had to copy password again from herokuapp entry. Maybe the email should send herokuapp link; or herokuapp can be auto forwarded to .us?
- netsharc 7y agoSwiss Post has an Android app that has the same idea, and they even let you send 1 free postcard per day to Switzerland and Liechtenstein: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.post.it.pcc https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.post.it.pcc
- daliusd 7y agoOverall it is not new idea. Main players in the market currently are mypostcard (Germany) and touchnote (UK). One of them is in US as well (or maybe both). I personally identified at least 10 more. Lastly, I have written my own service (https://www.atvirukas.com https://www.atvirukas.com) as well despite knowing that there are a lot of players in the market. Swiss Post basically prevented other players entering Swiss market :)
- kohanz 7y agoGreat start! Reminds me a bit of https://nanagram.co/ https://nanagram.co/, the creator of which I believe posts here.
- flamey 7y agoVery brave for you to offer 5 free cards (or any for that matter) -- when postcrossers find out you may run out of money quickly :) postcard exchange if a fairly popular hobby.
- hnbreak 7y agoIDK. While this idea is as old as the Internet, does it make any sense? The key point of a postcard is not to communicate (limited space, not secure, slow) but being a gesture. Buying a postcard, writing something on it and bringing it yourself to the post office is a huge gesture and signals many things--in contrast to postcard gateways like this one. Any receiver who will get this machine printed postcard will think, 'why didn't she/he just text me?' and throws it in the trash bin. But maybe OP can give us a hint about the real use case or he is hand-writing the cards himself.
- xnzakg 7y agoOP's reason for making this is mentioned in the "about" section of the page - sending physical photos to people who prefer those over something like Instagram.
- hnbreak 7y agoStill doesn't make sense. Instagram and postcards have different use cases and latter is not about sending someone a physical photo or showing a any photo (hint again: it's a gesture).
- daliusd 7y agoThere are cases where sending real postcard is not feasible. E.g. traveling in mountains. Sometimes you are a little bit lazy but still want to make it at least a little bit personal.
- daliusd 7y agoAs I have created similar service (EU based) I wish you good luck with it. Is there a way to track your progress? Do you share your findings anywhere? I hope you are aware that competition in quite serious in the market. E.g. mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day. What's your plan about that?
- flamey 7y ago> mypostcard in 2016 claimed that they print 10000 postcards per day I wanna call bs of this claim. Postcrossing -- largest postcard exchange community, almost 800k registered users worldwide, not all active of course, but a large portion of them sending daily and are really hooked on the hobby.. The hottest month in 2016 was March, 17k/day. These are people who love sending cards. Just hard to believe another single service not oriented on hardcore regular senders would be doing even half that. I can be wrong, of course, but just hard to believe.
- daliusd 7y agoLet me give you another number: Germany's most widely-used postal service, Deutsche Post, delivers more than 61 million letters every day! (source: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/communication/post-mail-germany https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/communication/post-mail-g...) 10000 postcards in Germany alone would be 0.01% of that and mypostcard works in multiple EU countries.
- bbody 7y agoI created a similar (non-free) service for sending emojis via postcards https://www.emojimailer.com/ https://www.emojimailer.com/ What service do you use for sending postcards?
- djbeadle 7y agoI have been a big fan of https://www.thesimplepostcard.com/ https://www.thesimplepostcard.com/ which lets you text photos to them.
- bones151 7y agoNice work. How are you printing them? What kind of printer / paper? Is it automatic or do you have to do some work for every order?