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This idea just doesn't seem to want to die. I saw an investor presentation for Earth Class Mail back in the day. They would scan the front of your mail, and th

This idea just doesn't seem to want to die. I saw an investor presentation for Earth Class Mail back in the day. They would scan the front of your mail, and then you could choose which items to have them open. They would then have to manually open and scan the items you instructed them to open at additional cost. Earth Class Mail blew threw most of their funding (http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class_mail_attempts_rebo.html http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class...) and rebooted with a different focus. I don't see how this company plans to run a courier service to collect your mail from random places, then scan it, for $5 a month. The economics make 0 sense. More importantly, snail mail is dying off. This is like building a business to make your horse and buggy move faster just as the automobile is being developed.

kalleboo 14y ago
Faxes are also dying out, but there are plenty of companies making a living off of e-fax services. Although I agree the economics of picking the stuff up out of your mailbox makes little sense... Mail forwarding or PO boxes would be far more efficient.
- rosenjon 14y ago
  Any business is about balancing cost structure with revenue potential. For an e-fax service, once you invest in the initial infrastructure (and these days, there might not even be much fixed cost investment.... link together Twilio and a website for example), you are probably making money at $10 a month per customer. So it doesn't really matter that fax usage may be decreasing...there are still lots of people using fax machines and you make more money than it costs you to run the service. My point with the mail pickup thing was that they could never make it scale. Their costs will kill them in the short and long term...even if they get a lot of customers. That is why the e-fax service works and the mail service doesn't.

kalleboo 14y ago

Faxes are also dying out, but there are plenty of companies making a living off of e-fax services. Although I agree the economics of picking the stuff up out of your mailbox makes little sense... Mail forwarding or PO boxes would be far more efficient.

rosenjon 14y ago
Any business is about balancing cost structure with revenue potential. For an e-fax service, once you invest in the initial infrastructure (and these days, there might not even be much fixed cost investment.... link together Twilio and a website for example), you are probably making money at $10 a month per customer. So it doesn't really matter that fax usage may be decreasing...there are still lots of people using fax machines and you make more money than it costs you to run the service. My point with the mail pickup thing was that they could never make it scale. Their costs will kill them in the short and long term...even if they get a lot of customers. That is why the e-fax service works and the mail service doesn't.