Send hand written greeting cards to anyone, anywhere without an address | Hacker News Reader

Send hand written greeting cards to anyone, anywhere without an address

bfore.me

1 pointreplayzero3 comments

We launched last week and already we are sending cards all over the world.

Congrats on the launch! It's an interesting solution to the issue of not having someone's address and I can see how this could catch on. I'm really curious to find out how the recipients of the cards feel about someone else writing the letter by hand. That's typically something done to make things more personal, but wonder if you're short-circuiting that by having someone else do the writing. I'm thinking people who can't write by hand might also make for a good market to target.

Can't wait to see how things progress!

Two quick peevish side-notes: 1) The root domain bfore.me leads to a Heroku error message. 2) The "How it works" page needs some proofreading for grammar (and probably worth canvasing the site for any other grammar glitches, too.) I'm only pointing this out because it feels like trust is a major requirement for your users to adopt & there's a direct link between trust and grammar.

Two quick UX notes: 1) Searchable friends please...before you even clean up how friends are displayed, make them searchable. 2) This is probably related to me having 50+ tabs open, but does lead to a solution that addresses another issue with the site (page load time): the dashboard was really slow to respond when trying to scroll around. It worked fine for me in a fresh browser, but you probably could still avoid the issue (while reducing HTTP requests and page load time) by generating a sprite of the facebook thumbnails and possibly also the cards.

Hi Crawford,

Thanks for the positivity and feedback. This is what I was hoping to get from posting here.

We aren't going to hide the fact that other people will write the cards, infact we want to celebrate it. We want the writers of the cards to be a big part of the product. I think that is the only real way to "short circuit" the issue. Having written a number of the cards you begin to make the words more interesting, you add little doodles. The people who have received cards so far seem to like it. It's a bit like when the pizza delivery guy draws a unicorn on the box when you put in special request.

I am self funding this project right now and there are some typo's in the how it works page. I agree with you 100% that needs to be sorted. We have been live now for a week and the UX stuff is top of the agenda. Our back end is quite robust and seems to be functioning without issue. So thats a good thing.

This is MVP 1.0 and in the lean tradition we kinda tried to keep features to the bare bones. If people like the service we are going to develop it as much as possible and make it as simple and fun as possible.

Features to be added: - Searchable friends yep. - Faster page loads yep - Choice of delivery yep

Really glad you like it and can see the potential

Create better memories :)

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