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Comment by wallawe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

> 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 ?

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.

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