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Outbox, The Startup That Digitizes Your Postal Mail, Raises $5 Million Series A
- joshuaellinger 13y agoIn the short term, it is a waste to 'undeliver' mail so you can send it digitally. However, if they can get some traction, it would drive a lot of direct mail advertising digital. I hope they make it work. There are still 80+ billion pieces of junk mail sent in the US each year. My company (http://www.exemplartech.com http://www.exemplartech.com) is working on this from the advertisers side but we need companies like Zumbox, Doxo, Manilla, and Outbox to get the consumers to change behavior.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoOr just let me opt out of your paper spam. If I want something, I'll go find it on my own.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI was under the impression that spam was one of the bigger sources of revenue for the post office...
- joshuaellinger 13y agoAbout $17B out of $65B. http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H2 http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H2 89.5 letters * $0.20 = ~ $17B.
- joshuaellinger 13y agoIronically, opting out by people like you is part of what makes it work for the advertisers. Basically, it is hard enough to opt-out that only the few people who really hate junk mail do it. This improves the efficiency of the channel from say 0.9% to 1.1% response rates (just guessing). Until someone like Outbox starts taking the responders out of the channel, the advertisers won't change behavior.
- nostromo 13y agoI recently bought a house that was gutted and had no mailbox when I moved in. I went for as long as possible without adding one. (It's 99% junk mail that I just recycle immediately.) Well, you can't actually get away with this for one reason: the government. Specifically, the IRS, but probably the census too. (And they only allow you to use a PO Box if you certify that you cannot physically accept mail at your residence.) If they send you an important document, there better be a box for the USPS to put it in, or you could end up in hot water. I wish the USPS & IRS & Census would allow addresses to opt-out of mail entirely. It's time to let people and companies go 100% paperless without paying for scanning services.
- jonny_eh 13y agoWouldn't you just end up with junk on your stoop?
- eli 13y agoThe Direct Mail Association has an opt-out (which is volutary, but many mailers abide by it): https://www.dmachoice.org/ https://www.dmachoice.org/ The FTC runs a opt-out program for credit card and insurance offers which is mandated by law: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
- sneak 13y agoI live on another hemisphere from my mailbox. (Don't blame me, blame webapps that don't accept non-US addresses.) I get my mail about 2-3 times per year. I stopped filing tax forms in a state I once employed someone. N.B. up front that I am configured _entirely_ paperless with my bank. The state (Indiana) made up numbers because, despite 6 quarters of forms filed with zeroes, they had assumed that no more filings meant "tax evasion". They mailed a few angrygrams, then filed a tax warrant. They handed it off to a private processing company who got a lien and sent it to Chase's lawyers. The bank's lawyers notified me by mail, of course. My first indication that any of this was happening was when the entirety of my business checking account balance disappeared from the web interface when Chase turned it over (less $150 in their processing fees) to the state. A half-dozen notarized(!) forms printed and certified mailed to Indiana and most of a year later, I've now got a credit on file with them - still no refund, of course - and I'll never get the processing fees back from Chase. It's not so much about the money (it's less than $5000) as the fact that, due to this insane idea that not calling someone, not emailing someone, it becomes A-OK to involuntarily seize someone's funds BECAUSE YOU SENT A PIECE OF TREE. Sorry, my little anti-mail rant turned into an anti-bureaucrat rant. (But are there really any others who oppose gutting the paper mail system once and for all?)
- cuttooth 13y agoWhy is this a thing? Are people so lazy to go through their own mail that they need to spend money to have someone else do it for them? Even if you factor in far-off edge cases, there is little to no money to made here except for the most insane of people who are almost never at their home address, and that number isn't all that large.
- tptacek 13y agoSpeaking for a family of four in Chicago: the amount of crap mail we get is a constant chore, and we regularly miss important things amidst the piles of upsell offers from the banks that own our mortgage, or the dealership that sold us a car, or the store we mail-ordered a pan from once, &c. I think you're wrong about the appeal of this service. I wish we had something like it here. Also, "laziness"? What does that even mean? There's a finite number of minutes in every day. Make a case for why I should spend any of those minutes dealing with paper mail. How many other goods and services do you use that we could interrogate as a facilitator of "laziness"?
- timjahn 13y agoSpeaking for a family of three in Chicago, we get a lot of crap mail as well. Really, it's all we get. But: a) my 3 year old has fun grabbing it out of the box and pretending it's from various people. b) it takes literally a few seconds to just throw it out. Now, if we were getting so much junk mail that it was making us miss our actual, important mail, that'd be a problem. But we don't get any actual, important mail. It's 99% junk. Anywho. The Postal Service is going to disappear in my 3 year old's lifetime anyway.
- caw 13y agoI can somewhat think of this for people with a lot of real estate. You don't necessarily want your bills and stuff sent to the rental house, and if you have a lot of properties it might be better to aggregate rather than to send them all to your permanent residence.
- crazydoggers 13y agoThat's like saying, 'why is email spam filtering a thing, it only takes seconds to delete all my spam!' Perhaps if you're young and single you may only get a couple of pieces of mail. Try having some kids, owning a house, etc, and you'll see the amount of crap that get's stuffed into your mailbox skyrocket. Then you've got to deal with shredding huge amounts of credit card and other offers, and trying to sift through piles of junk everyday just to see if there might be one important piece of mail out of the dozens. I would rather the post office did this for me (i'm suprised they're still not riding around on ponies), but I would most certainly pay for this service if it were available here. P.S. If you do the math, a median software developer salary is 90K, which is about $40 an hour. I could spend at least 10 minutes a day going through and shredding snail mail. That works out to 4 hours a month or $160 of your valuable time. $4.99 is definitely worth it.
- baran1 13y agoGiven all of the NSA/PRISM revelations as of late, wouldn't you want exactly the opposite of this?
- greyman 13y agoExactly my though. ;) I was thinking recently whether I shouldn't go back to have my phone invoices and bank monthly reports to be delivered by snail instead of email, like in those old times. ;-)
- baran1 13y agoI take it back http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...
- kmfrk 13y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052. Two important take-aways: 1) Your physical mail is destroyed eventually - not stored for perpetuity. 2) This doesn't have to be an alternative to your home-address mail; it can also be used as a P.O. box.
- krapp 13y agoI don't understand why anyone would think letting a company take your mail, read it, make a database from scanning its contents, then decide what you get to see from it, is preferable to the seconds it takes to throw a few envelopes in the trash. Ooh, here, let me give you my email passwords so you can delete all the spam from my inbox too...
- seltzered_ 13y agoIronically, I use unroll.me which arguably works like your last sentence - while it's saves me only "a few seconds", it still saves me from having to stare at the less-important mail when passively looking at my inbox. Also, it's more than a few seconds depending on your situation. You have to walk to a central mailbox for many newer suburbs. A rarer scenario, when I lived in Tahoe I had to drive down the mountain I lived to a P.O.Box - usually just to throw junk mail in the trash.
- krapp 13y agoYou can find a use case for just about everything. There's a use case for PRISM but that doesn't make it a good idea. The problem is, for added convenience (which might, like if you have to drive down a mountain, be more than minor) you're giving a startup complete control over your identity and just trusting them not to exploit that. If Outbox decides one day to censor the content, or sell your data, or if a third party pays them to get copies of your mail, what can you do if they acquiesce? If the US Postal Service announced it was going to pre-screen and digitize all outgoing mail, and only send people digital copies of everything but the 'spam', everyone would be screaming bloody tyranny. Admittedly, though, i've never had to drive down a mountain to get my mail and I might just be too paranoid.
- nedwin 13y agoAs someone who has moved around a lot this is a great service. Setup one address for all postal mail and no matter where I am I can get access to it. When I move the address stays the same - I can easily update my email address its sending to if need be. Being able to search my archive of mail would also save me a bunch of time though I can imagine I would be deleting the majority of it. I'd prefer it if the service was based outside of the US.
- mratzloff 13y agoI'm going to re-post my comment from the previous thread because I think it applies even more now. How did they get $5 million in funding? What is their business plan? I would really like to know. ---- 1. Collect mail door-to-door 2. Scan each page of mail, including envelopes 3. Post scans online 4. Return requested physical mail 5. Charge $4.99 for this service 6. ... 7. Profit? Looking at their job postings, they have one person per city managing a team of people working probably close to minimum wage going door-to-door. These people most likely scan mail at their homes using a scanner provided by Outbox. Let's say they pay a City Manager $100,000, or $125,000 after taxes, unemployment insurance, and benefits. An individual can take on 30 customers, is paid above minimum wage (let's say $15 after taxes, etc.), and works 7 hours a day (or 35 hours/week, making them part-time employees). That's roughly $30,000 per worker annually. At $4.99 per month, none of the economics work. At 30 customers per part-time employee, the break even point is $100 per month per customer. At $4.99 per month each PTE needs to handle around 600 customers each to break even. 100 customers per PTE at $30/month also breaks even. But even 100 per PTE seems unrealistic. Unless I'm missing something very basic, it just doesn't scale at $4.99 per month. At all. It's not even close.
- danielweber 13y agoDo they really need to go door-to-door? Why can't the USPS just forward it all to Outbox?
- arbuge 13y agoI think they tried to set this up once, but the USPS is giving a partnership with them the cold shoulder... http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/28/4039990/the-postal-service-is-bad-but-outbox-is-worse http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/28/4039990/the-postal-service... "At the time of its announcement, Outbox suggested it had reached an agreement with the USPS to allow it to intercept mail from ever being delivered to your home, and that it would instead be delivered to its warehouse. This would have made the service less wasteful, to be sure. From its description of the service today, that no longer appears to be the case, and Outbox employs its own "postmen" to pick up already delivered mail from your home mailbox."
- seltzered_ 13y agoThe other hidden use case: College students / Travelers that just want to keep their mailing address at a 'home base' (e.g. their parents house or a close friend). This is way cheaper of an option than using earth class mail, and allows for any super-important stuff to still get home quickly.
- gaahrdner 13y agoWhat differentiates Outbox from https://www.earthclassmail.com/ https://www.earthclassmail.com/ or http://www.virtualpostmail.com/ http://www.virtualpostmail.com/ (besides the price) that warrants a $5 million series A round?
- rolandm 13y agoEarth class mail had exactly the same idea 2004 and got 21.4M funding [1]. A documentary from 2008 about them: http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies . They later fired the founder and changed from B2C to B2B [2]: “As many a tech startup has discovered, though, a great idea doesn't always make a good business. Digitizing all that paper proved hugely expensive, and Earth Class Mail couldn't make its business pay.” [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/earthclassmail http://www.crunchbase.com/company/earthclassmail [2] http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class_mail_attempts_rebo.html http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class...
- Svip 13y agoPost Danmark (Danish Postal Services) offer a similar service called e-Boks.[0] The main drawback is that e-Boks is only available for senders that are registered as e-Boks senders. Fortunately, these include all government services (both local and national), as well as several private companies. [0] https://www.postdanmark.dk/da/Privat/Modtag%20Post/Sider/e-boks.aspx https://www.postdanmark.dk/da/Privat/Modtag%20Post/Sider/e-b...
- zallarak 13y agoThis is like slapping a very insecure solution on a problem that will eventually die (snail mail).
- rogerbinns 13y agoWhy aren't the USPS doing this? They already have to process some addressed mail specially (eg if you have them a forwarding address), so it would be practical for them to deliver your mail virtually.
- mratzloff 13y agoSelling a subscription service for something like this would be a great strategy for the USPS, but it's a giant bureaucracy employing 8 million people. Change happens slowly.
- nawitus 13y agoFinnish Post Office has offered this for about 5 years already, it's called 'NetPosti'.
- sunsu 13y agoI would much rather have an Outbox mailing address that I can give out. Would be much easier for Outbox to manage as well.
- Raticide 13y agoGreat, so now the NSA can harvest my post too?