paulsingh

Well, the vast majority of them are paid pieces -- I haven't checked where we're at for this month but usually ~99.5% of all mail volume is paid (not trials).

As for getting all those postcards, I need to find some way to figure out who's behind them. :)

FWIW, my goal is to see if I can get some customers that would be willing to pay some sort of fee while I ramp up the hardware to actually deliver that sort of service.

As much as I enjoy reading stuff like this, I have to admit that I've been buying a ton of these lately (>20K in March) and, as long as my cash flow permits, I'll continue to by just a little more than my monthly needs to help hedge against future increases.

I use them on the outbound mail for MailFinch (which, by default, uses Forever Stamps instead of a postage meter -- customers swear it increases the open rates but I don't have any data to back that up).

The back-end printing operations.

Well, I sent ~5500 pieces of mail during February (my 3rd month in existance) and we're on track to finish March with ~20K.

So, pretty good, I think.

Actually, I do this: www.mailfinch.com

It started out as a joke -- partly inspired by Dustin Curtis' Snail project and the fact that my dad (and a bunch of his friends) sent a lot of flyers for their small businesses.

I wouldn't have believed this guy until I recently stumbled across it myself. I started MailFinch as a bit of a joke a few months ago (actually, it was partly inspired by Dustin Curtis' snail project as well).

Turns out, people actually liked that story and we're now sending almost 20K pieces a month.

Don't do it. I've been considering the same thing for my startup (MailFinch) for a while now -- it's so tempting, but it's not worth it.

These days, here's what I do to "sponsor" events like these:

1. Give away a door prize. In my case, I give the conference organizer the ability to give away three of my "Freelance" packages for a year -- those are worth $300/each.

2. I tell the conference organizer that I only have budget for stuff that is guaranteed to bring me customers. I tell the organizer that I'll give them an affiliate commission on anyone that signs up through the special link I provide for the conference. (This is a relatively new tactic for me and, so far, only seems to work with the larger conferences...)

+1 for "So much cash offline, go and take it. It may be harder to do it based on the country, but I refuse to believe there isn't at least some need for it. If not - hit up craigslist in the US and start pimping your offerings"

I can't echo this enough -- small businesses have so much cash for offline stuff, it's not even funny. I'm learning that via my latest startup, MailFinch.

It's definitely going to come down to your own budget. When I launched SnailPad (www.snailpad.com) I decided that I wouldn't spend anything out of my own pocket -- if SnailPad could afford something on it's own, that's how I'd buy it.

In reality, that meant that I pretty much had to cold call people all day for the first few weeks. In my case, I specifically targeted real estate agents, insurance salesmen and lawyers that had large print ads in my local newspapers. I figured that if they were already buying print stuff, I wouldn't have to convince them of the value.

One other thing: you should include these words (in some variation) in any initial phone call or email you send someone: "I'm not trying to sell anything, just get advice..." :)

Good luck!

This is awesome feedback -- would you mind reaching out to me via email? (It's on my profile.)

I'd love to get an idea of where you think that picture ought to be and any other feedback you have.

Believe me, an internal dashboard is in the works! I intentionally forced myself to use Excel to ensure I was looking at the right stuff (and that the numbers made sense in the first place).

Now that I'm starting to get confident about things, it's just a matter of blocking off a few hours on Saturday morning and turning it into code.

And yes, all unused stamps expire at the end of each month -- it's in the TOS. :)

I love the idea of the failsafe... this is definitely going in.

> Why two free stamps per month?

I figured that you need to be able to send yourself at least one sample -- it takes one stamp if you live in the US and two stamps if you're anywhere else on the planet.

> If someone uses your free service for three months, or six, or twelve, what are the chances that they will upgrade to a paid service?

Ask me again in 3, 6 and 12 months. :)

> Why would this be more profitable than a plain pay-as-you-go plan with no free stamps, or one or two initial trial stamps?

I originally had no free stamps included in the pay as you go plan. This idea of including a few free stamps started up just a few weeks ago so I don't have any long term data. The theory here is that I "hook" you buy giving you an easy way to send your first letters... then you'll (hopefully) see the value in upgrading.

> If I choose to sign up with one of your monthly plans, will you offer me a refund of my unused credit if I decide not to use it?

Technically, no (it's in the TOS, etc). (Though, I'd probably refund the money if someone asked for it. I'd rather keep some good karma going...) When you pay your phone company (or 37signals, or anyone else) for a full month and then decide to quit, I doubt any of them will easily give you a refund. :)

I just did a quick dig through the DB -- looks like ~60% are using that first stamp (or two, if they live outside the US) to mail something to themselves. The remaining ~40% either don't use those stamps at all or they send a letter to someone else.

As for the picture of the paper/envelope, (this is probably going to sound dumb) but I can't figure out how to take a decent shot without making the stuff look terrible. Any tips or thoughts on how to get past that?

I'd love to see that screenshot!

Awesome, awesome advice -- I'll start messing around with the external pages and see what I can do. I've been meaning to do this for a while and have always found excuses to work on other stuff. :)

I should also mention that my target market is no longer the person that wants to send a letter to grandma every few months -- I haven't found a real demand for that service.

That being said, I have found that my ideal direct customer is a real estate agent, car salesman, insurance salesman or anyone else that does face-to-face selling to their local geographic market. These guys already mail out ~1K pieces of mail every month and they have to manually do it all because the bigger print shops really can't afford to help them unless they were doing tens of thousands each month.

I think that's where the sweet spot is for SnailPad -- we're making direct mail painless for small businesses, freelancers and "high touch" sales people. The margins are so "good" on this side of the business because these customers want good paper and nice envelopes -- they can't get that anywhere else unless they go to large print houses, commit to yearly contracts and prepay tens of thousands of dollars each month.

On the API side, the "ideal" customer is primarily some company that sends a ton of invoices or other automated documents to their user base (or to their user's user base). These guys still want the high quality that I described earlier but they also can't justify the expenses associated with talking to the bigger mail shops.

In general, I'm really excited about the space I've stumbled into. There really hasn't been any innovation in a decade or more -- there could be a reason why people stay away from it but I'm taking a more naive approach to see what I can do. So far, so good. :)

Well, everyone does actually get the API key and is able to use it anytime they like -- I really need to do a better job of explaining the product, features, etc on the site. :)

For the API customers, I've ended up haggling deals with them to get them on board. In general, I give those guys the ability to prepay in larger amounts to get a better per-piece rate or postpay for "higher" rates (believe it or not, most of the higher volume API-only users prefer to postpay because it improves their cash flow situation).

Yep, I spent an hour or two creating a nice little spreadsheet that helped me justify the additional hardware expenses, etc. I make it a point to revisit it at the beginning of every month to make sure I know how I'm doing.

Any hosting company with an outage is going to get headlines these days.

My first startup was a hosting company -- my partner still runs it and I exited a few years ago. Having "been there and done that," I have a lot of respect for anyone that can stay in the hosting business -- when everything is running just fine, your customers are complaining about why things can't be cheaper. As soon as the network blips for even a second, everyone's talking about how crappy the network is, why they pay so much (even on $10/mo accounts), etc.

In other news: it's early, I can't sleep and I might be a little cranky. :)

How about your parents or local/state politicians? Interestingly, those tend to be the top two use cases for letters sent from people without accounts. (The other major use case is invoice/receipts and snail mail marketing -- but that tends to be solely through the API, which requires an account.)

http://www.snailpad.com - snail mail for small business and freelancers. I'm hoping to find a way to meet someone from MailChimp, Aweber or other places to see if they'd be interested in integrating.

Can you elaborate?

I've been building a little side thing called snailpad (http://www.snailpad.com) and have a beta API running for some of the paying customers at this point.

+1 for the snail mail letter, it worked for my last startup :)

Shameless plug: If you're serious about snail mailing people, check out my latest project, SnailPad (http://www.snailpad.com). Pretty soon, you'll be able to upload a PDF and blast it to anyone you want, etc... my contact info is in my profile if you're interested in checking it out.

I 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.

Sweet, looking forward to anything you're able to work out. :) My contact info is in my profile, keep in touch!

Awesome, awesome feedback -- thanks!

Now, about your lawyer friend, is he interested in outsourcing? :)

I don't have any hard data either though, anecdotally, it seems that people are willing to pay $3 for their one-off letters.

RE: Easier Registration... Definitely, I'm thinking the same thing actually (especially after watching how some of my repeat users have been using the system this week).

Thanks dude. :)

Actually, I would rather setup a monthly plan instead... I got some initial pushback from my initial customers when they balked at the idea that they'd have to pay the monthly fee whether or not they actually mailed the allotted amount of letters each month. To be clear, the notion of "use it or lose it" seemed to scare people.

What you're proposing sounds a bit better (and helps me make more sense of the numbers), I'm going to put some thought into it this weekend.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on the pricing models?

EDIT: I've switched the plans over to monthly instead. Will monitor signups over the next few days and see how that compares to the pre-paid stuff I had originally.

Question: If I let you pay $1.60/letter, how many would you actually send? :)