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No. but glad other people are thinking about this too. Curious to hear what other thoughts you have about this topic.

by bavidar 13y ago

encoderer 13y ago
I've had the idea on my list for years, and a couple years ago spent a few months really digging into it, talking with advisors, etc. It grew from a need in a web app I was creating to send off a post card to verify a users postal address. I wished it was as easy as using an API. Ultimately I decided this wasn't the best use of my talents, but I think there's utility to a service like this. I rejected it partly because I didn't want to be part of the problem of paper waste, but mostly because I had spent a month on the phone and email reaching out to various parts of this potential market and I just didn't find encouraging signs. Smaller users indicated they'd use it infrequently and were more concerned about quality of the sent articles than anything else. But these customers dealt in volume so low that ANY real acquisition cost would take ages to recoup. Larger users indicated very low willingness to pay. Basically a business has some rough sense of how much the "materials" cost -- printing and mailing costs are often and easily tracked -- and they didn't seem to have any tolerance for margin on top of that. Even though there's a labor factor in there that isn't calculated when you look just at printing and mailing costs, I learned that to the customers I talked to, they saw this as irrelevant because they weren't going to let somebody go or reduce their pay just because they can outsource this task. I figured that if I was running at a very high volume and ran my own high volume printing and mailing operations, there would be acceptable margin on large direct-mail-style printing campaigns. I'm not at all trying to be a pessimist on the idea. I'm just sharing what I learned when i took this concept out for a spin circa 2011.

No. but glad other people are thinking about this too. Curious to hear what other thoughts you have about this topic.

by bavidar 13y ago

No. but glad other people are thinking about this too. Curious to hear what other thoughts you have about this topic.

I've had the idea on my list for years, and a couple years ago spent a few months really digging into it, talking with advisors, etc. It grew from a need in a web app I was creating to send off a post card to verify a users postal address. I wished it was as easy as using an API. Ultimately I decided this wasn't the best use of my talents, but I think there's utility to a service like this. I rejected it partly because I didn't want to be part of the problem of paper waste, but mostly because I had spent a month on the phone and email reaching out to various parts of this potential market and I just didn't find encouraging signs. Smaller users indicated they'd use it infrequently and were more concerned about quality of the sent articles than anything else. But these customers dealt in volume so low that ANY real acquisition cost would take ages to recoup. Larger users indicated very low willingness to pay. Basically a business has some rough sense of how much the "materials" cost -- printing and mailing costs are often and easily tracked -- and they didn't seem to have any tolerance for margin on top of that. Even though there's a labor factor in there that isn't calculated when you look just at printing and mailing costs, I learned that to the customers I talked to, they saw this as irrelevant because they weren't going to let somebody go or reduce their pay just because they can outsource this task. I figured that if I was running at a very high volume and ran my own high volume printing and mailing operations, there would be acceptable margin on large direct-mail-style printing campaigns. I'm not at all trying to be a pessimist on the idea. I'm just sharing what I learned when i took this concept out for a spin circa 2011.