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Comment by edouard1234567 | Hacker News Reader

Not if they have the right density. I think their business model is viable at scale.

Assume they pay their pick-up guy $20/hour. Each customer is paying $5 for 12 pickups = 60 cents a visit. To break even they will need to do pick-up 33 mail boxes/hr. This seems like a lot in a suburb but it's possible in a dense city. They will probably need to tweak their model but it's not unreasonable.

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That's just to pay the pickup guy. You have to pay for gas. And the costs of operating a batch scanning facility for mail. And most mail is not of uniform size and does not have uniform contents, so you end up having to manually open and scan the items.

It's totally unreasonable. The only place it makes even a hint of sense to do this is at the Post Office, before it goes to the actual customer. The customer could then choose scan, shred or deliver.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to get it. But this just seems ludicrous to me.

Their idea is to make revenue from additional sources other than just the monthly fee.

What might those be? The check cashing and bill pay mentioned are already offered for free by banks. Diversion of junk mail marketing $ into "effective methods" of marketing is pretty cryptic. I think creating some online equivalent of postal mail would be interesting (there are things like notarized letters, etc that still seem to require snail mail), but I don't see how this service as currently implemented really does anything novel. Scanning your postal mail is tedious and cost ineffective...whether it's done by a startup or not.

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