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I like this a lot. Nice job taking an idea and running with it. At $1/letter this doesn't work, at $3/letter its an enviable opportunity. I find most of the co
by qeorge 17y ago
I like this a lot. Nice job taking an idea and running with it. At $1/letter this doesn't work, at $3/letter its an enviable opportunity.
I find most of the comments here to be quite pessimistic, so here's a few things to consider:
There are proven economies of scale here. With any volume, a bulk postage rate will start saving you money. There's no reason to think Paul will continue to pay 44 cents a letter. Furthermore, the cost of printing is being grossly exaggerated: I picked up a laser printer from Dell that included a 1500 page toner cartridge. That's .08 cents a page, with a free printer. Its easy to do get cheaper than that per page with a more expensive printer.
Also, all of this can be automated. I share an office with an attorney who sends out hundreds of letters per day, and it takes about 2 hours of his assistant's time to setup the Mail Merge in Word and start the machines. All stuffing, labeling, stamping, etc. is done by the machines.
Here's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24 hour turnaround now, but something to consider.
Paul's found customers and profitability from day 1, and he can just work hard until he generates enough cash to buy machines to handle it for him. It wouldn't be hard to completely automate the entire thing. I like it.
Feedback on your website: you knocked it out of the park. The domain is obvious and makes sense, the website is to the point and immediately conveys the benefit. There's no loose ends, from the privacy policy to the API. I'm seriously impressed.
- paulsingh 17y agoAwesome, awesome feedback -- thanks! Now, about your lawyer friend, is he interested in outsourcing? :)
- qeorge 17y agoGlad to help. I'll ask him on Monday if he has any interest in outsourcing, if it was automated enough I would think so. Of course it would fall on me to do said automation, so we'll have to see what the numbers look like. ;)
- paulsingh 17y agoSweet, looking forward to anything you're able to work out. :) My contact info is in my profile, keep in touch!
- nico 17y agoHere's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24 hour turnaround now, but something to consider. That should be considered into the business model, example: 24-hour guaranteed: $3, 2-3 day delivery: $2, 3-5 days delivery: $1. Then you could have different queues/printers for each option. If you start growing, you could set up different locations to print closer to the destination and you could have a really cool service like: 2-3 hrs delivery guaranteed! Also, you could outsource the printing and delivery, say high school/college kids who want to make some extra money, they sign up at your website and start receiving correspondence to print and deliver close to where they live. For each delivery they accumulate a certain amount of money and you send them a check at the end of the month if they have achieved a certain threshold. Btw, congrats and keep at it, try your best and you'll do great!
- paulsingh 17y agoI like this idea of "tiered" mailing times... I'm going to try to A/B test this sometime this week and see how it affects account signups.