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Comment by mikkergp | Hacker News Reader

“How do we scale that feeling that someone got a personal handwritten note” is really dystopian.

Very reminiscent of the movie Her, where the main character worked at a letter writing service you could pay someone to write thoughtful letters to family and friends.

In Japan you can rent a family.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service

In Nevada you can rent a girlfriend experience. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/sex-wo...

I think that has been a thing in Japan for a long time!

surely not just in nevada?

Last year I built an entire service [1] around the idea that scaling handwritten cards was a good business…

Before ultimately concluding that you’re right, it’s pretty dystopian.

So I called it quits.

[1] fountaincards.com

Was it working / were you making money?

Automated handwritten notes companies seem like they render text using a handwritten font and then potentially pass it off (via API) to a “print anything and ship it” company — is that an accurate statement?

Is there a clear advantage to building and maintaining the hardware / plotting pen portion? i.e. isn’t that something you could do by randomizing font parameters?

Also, it does seem like a pretty crowded space - was that ever a problem? Googling “handwritten notes automation” brings up a lot of companies/ads.

Thanks. Really curious about this!

I replied to parent, but we built the company that shows up #3 for that query (at least on my browser) - handwrite.io. I felt that there would be a massive audience for the API so worked on building that out in the early stages while my cofounder built the hardware. It's a super costly process, requires a lot of human touchpoints even when you've automated a lot of the machinery (e.g. sealing and stamping cards). There was a decent amount of competition but even more demand. We had a couple of good sales guys working strictly on commission that got us to 40k MRR ish in a relatively short timespan but the margins were horrible. In the end we burnt out and sold to a client.

Thanks a lot for sharing, really interesting.

I edited my comment so you may not have seen my additional question: why build out hardware vs. outsource the printing / mailing?

i.e. with enough randomness in the font/text/letter generation, was it still obvious to tell what was “handwritten” by a plotter vs printed?

And re: margins, you could have raised prices but that would have made you not competitive?

It is possible for a plotter using a real pen to make a card which is indistinguishable from a truly handwritten card.

People are rightfully squeamish about sending out cards which “look” handwritten but aren’t. Imagine a customer realizes that you are faking it…the consequences to reputation could be substantial.

That said, I personally find printed cards using handwritten-style font to be insulting, so that was a no-go for us.

We considered using a third party fulfillment service and essentially charging a fee on top of that, but the returns would be microscopic for the effort.

it depends on who you ask and how hard they look, but in my experience yes. i did numerous non-scientific experiments of just showing people a card and asking them if they thought it was handwritten or done by a robot. sometimes i would show them an actual handwritten card, sometimes the robotic one and for ours at least, they had a tough time telling them apart.

edit: i can't speak to the technology the company uses now, i believe they switched away from our tech to something more scalable so it's probably not as good now.

> why build out hardware vs. outsource the printing / mailing?

we wanted the handwriting to feel as real as possible. to that end, my cofounder wrote an algo that varied each character slightly, the robots held real pens, etc. We couldn't find anyone to outsource the fulfillment to that matched this level of authenticity. Some competitors used lob.com and simply print an image of handwriting which actually can work pretty well, but is definitely recognizable if you look closely.

> re: margins, you could have raised prices but that would have made you not competitive?

This was a big point of contention between me and my cofounder. We raise them towards the end some but not enough. After selling, the company that bought us raised them substantially and are doing very well from what I understand. We should have done this early on, but focused too much on winning the deal which is what burnt us out in the end (too much business too quick, lots of sleepless nights).

How can you spot the difference between a robot written letter and a printed one?

And what about volumes, is each letter has different text? Should have slightly different writing?

Or are there some volumes in the system?

There are variations in pressure that are really easy to recognize.

Not sure I understand the second question.

Edit: Do you sometimes print the same letter(or a templatized letter) 100/1000 times ?

This would have been a good optimization but we did not. Every letter generated was unique even if it was a templatized piece.

Do you sometimes print the same letter(or a templatized letter) 100/1000 times ?

I was about three years behind wallawe’s reply.

The technical parts are fun…the core thing for us was that it was actually written by a real pen. The difference between a print and real writing is obvious to most people, so we wanted it to be believable.

Our system used a set of handwritten fonts, along with a bunch of “fuzzing” of line height, line direction, and character swap outs. This created an SVG path that a robot used to trace with a pen.

The hardware and margins were what killed us. As wallawe noted, there’s still a lot of manual labor that goes into a system like this, even if the writing is automated. Envelope stuffing and card-envelope matching are big problems.

Its not a super competitive market yet, but the margins on what could be charged per card were pretty low, especially factoring in paper costs and labor costs.

> Our system used a set of handwritten fonts

What betrays handwritten fonts is nobody writes "a" the same way every time. I get that you're addressing this with fuzzing, but that's not enough. The pressure put on a pen also varies, people make mistakes and cross them out, there are ink blotches, etc.

There were enough character alternates and special compound ligatures that it’s really hard to tell unless you know it’s machine-produced.

I think you would be surprised at how realistic it can be.

Perhaps. Just yesterday I received a handwritten note from a business. The varying pressure on the pen was clear if you ran a finger over it, as some areas were more deeply indented than others. The line thickness varied, sometimes trailing off into nothing. No two letters were the same, some were illegible in isolation. The lines would even overlap. Every ligature was different.

I've never seen a machine handwrite that way.

I'm sure they'll get better, but there's a long way to go.

I feel like I've been able to detect these, e.g. examine the writing and note that each letter is exactly the same every time it appears -- real people don't write that precisely. Though I'm sure that some random variation would not be difficult to introduce.

Bottom line it's like anything else -- if I don't know the person who sent it to me, I don't trust it. Automated handwriting is just more big-tech destruction of yet another facet of human to human communications.

We built and sold a similar business (handwrite.io) and it was a pretty rough experience. We scaled to 40k MRR within several months (bootstrapped) but the margins were terrible and hardware is not fun, especially not being a hardware guy so I had to rely on someone else to make sure we had an efficient/quality product.

I looked at handwrite.io when I was getting started…impressive!

Sounds like y’all made it further than we did, so congratulations. :)

Totally agree on margins. I vowed to skip physical products on my next effort (moneyhabitshq.com).

The article itself isn't much better. Great way to turn a nice thing from "Aw, that's sweet" to "Ugh, another piece of emotionally manipulative advertising".

Yeah, if I find out that a company attempts to deceive me with this kind of thing, I'd completely stop buying from them.

Not at all new by the way. First parent is 220 years old.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

Faked signature by machine had been popular for 80 years.

I would have preferred a video FaceTime call from the business owner or one of the partners anyway.

Let's see, we already have deep faked audio that can be trained to sound like anyone, deep faked video, and chat bots that can be trained to talk/write like anyone, so scaling this to millions of customers is not far off

Once that happens, I will prefer a home visit and maybe a non soup meal.

It already exists. I won’t link to anyone, but I just found a site claiming to be a “personalization platform for automated 1:1 video messaging”

They specifically show that their videos will use text to speech to personalize the “Hi $firstname” greeting at the top of the video.

Dystopian, like many people here are saying.

Alternatively, "a scalable way to bring a little bit of joy to many people" is actually nice & good.

In the short term. In the long term, “a way to reduce trust in society”. It is why I assume everything on social media is staged.

You should assume zero trust in anything you see at this point, in case that was not already obvious.

It's not "bringing joy", it's emotional manipulation. Intent matters. This isn't any better than MLM people pretending to be your friend in order to sell you tupperware.

In a single naive interaction, sure, it may bring joy. But repeated at scale throughout society, it creates distrust by being insincere and devalues sincere expressions of kindness, harming everyone.

That’s the harm - you’re taking things the body and brain are used to and simulating them to elicit the response you want.

I’m sure a company could develop an AI advanced enough to imitate a cute employee who is really into you when you have an issue - and use that to encourage you to spend way more because “they love you”.

Hell, I bet you could offer “CEO on HackerNews” as a marketing service - keep an eye on posts involving your company and impersonate the CEO as necessary- and of course be able to actually call him in if needed. Probably already being done …

The thing about CEOs on HN is they have to say the right thing to be appealing. CEO on HN saying the wrong thing can really nail down the impression that a company is doing something awful and it’s not just the fault of the marketing intern or some misguided but well intentioned employee. If you hear the same crap from the top in a supposedly personal comment, there’s not much room left for assuming the best.

That's why the service would be so valuable! People perfectly trained to craft just the right amount of "mea culpa" and "we'll make this right" and "we're not actually lizardmen from mars".

Heck, if you had multiple clients you could even "reinforce" each other. It's so good ... I'm kind of scared it's already being done.

The reason it brings joy is because they think it's from a human. If they knew it wasn't it wouldn't bring joy.

Thats true for every product though. People are willing to pay more for something that pretends to be hand made rather than something manufactured. There is no new insight here.

They are willing to pay more for something they think is hand made, not for something they know pretends to be handmade. Fraud is not excusable.

Somehow Starbucks seems to excel at bringing prepackaged microwave food to a personalized premium price point. I stand there and watch them put it in the microwave.

Until everyone finds out what is happening and another last source of human connection becomes ruined. Writing a post about it is a surefire way to get there, but having te idea in the first place is how you start.

no more dystopian than AI text or image generation.

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