Tell HN: I ripped off Dustin Curtis' snail and got slightly different results

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940776

by paulsingh • 17 years ago

62 60 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

First off, Dustin -- sorry! Second, I'm still relatively new to RoR and design stuff -- so, yes, I ripped off stuff that I liked from common sites I visit. :)

Anyways, I saw Dustin's post the other day about Snail, his new webapp and thought it was a pretty sweet idea. A couple days later, I saw that he tweeted about it not being too profitable at all. Bummer.

Then, last weekend, my dad happened to complain about having to find "damn stamps" every time he needed to mail a customer a invoice or receipt. (He's in construction, an industry that really doesn't use email for anything...)

Anyways, I threw this together and launched it on Monday and now mail off 20-30 letters a day. It's barely profitable but most of that is because I haven't automated some of the key steps... stuff I'll be doing over the next few days.

Today I threw some ghetto code together for another guy that wanted to be able to email stuff to me that gets automagically mailed off to his clients. I think I just doubled the amount of letters I send every day...

Anyways, I'd love some feedback: http://www.snailpad.com

nym• 17 years ago

Sometimes it's all about finding a market.

aarongough• 17 years ago

I actually think it looks really good! I'm assuming that you're not new to web-development, just to RoR, because if this was a first (or even second, or third) app I would decry it as impossible :-p

Good work!

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Thanks for the complement, I appreciate it! This is my second semi-serious app with RoR.

ars• 17 years ago

Change:

  Just address your envelope, write your letter, verify
  its appearance, then pay using your Paypal account.

Add the words "electronically", or "via this website" or something like that.

You have a bunch of '2' showing up all over the place.

Mention that you don't retain the contents of the letter once printed (if you don't, and I hope you don't).

Include a photo of a sample letter so people can see if the paper really looks greenish (joke). But really, people want to see if the printout will look professional. And a photo of the envelope too - with stamp.

Mention where you are physically located, so people have an idea of how long delivery will take.

What happens if the letter is so long it takes many sheets of paper (i.e. more stamps) - is there an additional charge? Can I download a book, paste it in and you'll print and mail it to me? Just mention "up to 5 sheets of paper" or something like that, in the pricing page, but don't bother programming it, handle it manually.

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to nail these down soon.

As for the sheets of paper, for now I'm betting that the average letter won't be more than 4 pages (since that's when the postage costs rise).

symptic• 17 years ago

That's not very sound basis for your bet. Though you'll be able to study this with the more letters you send. I just wanted to point out that you need to test this rather than assume.

tdavis• 17 years ago

I wouldn't say "pay with your PayPal account" because that makes it seem like you need a PayPal account -- they also accept credit cards for those without accounts.

shimon3• 17 years ago

I too felt strongly that I want to see a picture of a printed, stamped envelope (as you would send) somewhere on the site.

csmeder• 17 years ago

very nice: simple but has enough features to be valuable to people.

bravura• 17 years ago

Here is a variation on an application that involves mailing physical letters. It reconciles two salient facts:

1) people love to complain and be activists, but are also lazy and would rather click a button on the web than lick an envelope

2) most businesses respond better to a printed complaint than a digital one.

Anyone can start a petition. e.g. "You, the cafe at the corner of Fifth and Main, charge too much for their coffee and we would probably come their more if it cost $.25 less." You provide the address of the recipient: Expensive Coffeeshop, Fifth and Main, Smallville, NY

The application is integrated to facebook, so each time someone signs the petition it is posted to their wall for people to see. Once a critical mass of signatures has been reached, and the numbers of signees starts to level off, the petition is printed and automatically mailed.

(I have copied this idea onto idea-ne.ws: http://idea-ne.ws/item?id=155)

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Interesting, but who pays for this? Is this an ad-supported model, or are you charging each signer a fee?

xinsight• 17 years ago

I'd love to see an new idea aggregation site, but was bummed to see that it just returns: "502 Bad Gateway"

tedunangst• 17 years ago

Companies respond to lots of printed letters. One letter with a thousand [forged] names on it is no different than one letter: the return address gets a coupon for a free coffee.

gcheong• 17 years ago

Where do your customers come from?

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

For now, they're coming from word of mouth within my dad's circle of friends.

Probably not enough word of mouth for this thing to scale dramatically (yet) but enough to help me cover my costs and then have some serious beer money on top.

tsally• 17 years ago

Perhaps you should allow people to upload a company logo? If your dad is mailing customers for his business, how much better would it be if you did the letterhead for him?

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Definitely worth looking into... for now, I've just asked them to send me a PDF with the letter content so that the letter looks exactly like they expect it to.

The letter input screen you see on the site today is pretty new and intended for new users that just want to send a one-off letter or something.

mikeryan• 17 years ago

I'd add a way to upload pdf's or docs so people could send things like invoices/contracts etc.

But well done.

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Definitely, I'm working on that as we speak. I'm planning to offer the PDF upload capability on the letter input form that you see on the site.

Additionally, I'm thinking about creating the ability for people to just email something like "letters [at] snailpad.com" with the recipient's address in the subject line and either (1) the letter's content in the email body or (2) a PDF attachment of the letter content.

If they're a recognized user and have available credits in their balance, I'd shoot off a confirmation and queue it for physical mailing on the next day. Otherwise, I'd reply with an email containing a PDF preview of the letter and some text encouraging them to signup or reload their account.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

You should add a 'skypeout' like option to this where it works internationally.

People in the country of destination would print out the items and mail them for the cost of a local stamp and get some compensation for their efforts.

That way you can offer international 'real' snailmail for a tiny bit over the price of a local stamp.

superkarn• 17 years ago

You could do that domestically also. This could be a way to scale it. Allow people to sign up for "mailer" accounts, where they can print out the letters and mail them for a small compensation.

You'll have to work out the privacy issue though.

tesseract• 17 years ago

As I mentioned in the thread about Dustin's app, this sounds like the snail mail version of the RFC 1530 (http://tpc.int) fax service.

russ• 17 years ago

You also ripped off github's desgin ;-)

techiferous• 17 years ago

github should take that as a compliment. :) github's design is okay, but it's too cluttered for my tastes. It feels like a messy desk.

kirpekar2• 17 years ago

1. Do you do international? I see a lot of need for letters to Mexico, China and India.

2. You could charge a lot of money for handwritten notes. In fact, I would pay $20 for someone to hand write a letter to my grandma, once a year, or so.

3. CC from email. It would be great if I could simply cc xxxx@snailpad.com which you would print and physically mail out.

4. It would also be useful if you could print and snail mail some documents I email you (receipts, hotel reservations, maps, etc).

Edit ... oops I see you have a lot of these features already. Maybe you can work on #2. Cheers!

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

I love #2... that's an awesome idea. (Especially since my wife has some pretty badass penmanship!)

BenS• 17 years ago

On #2: you have missed the point of why a hand written letter to a loved one is special.

kirpekar2• 17 years ago

I certainly understand the value of a hand written letters. I am only suggesting a market opportunity.

fendale2• 17 years ago

You know, I came up with this idea ages ago, and did exactly nothing about it. I think it came about because I needed to mail a single letter and had no printer, no envelopes and no stamps ... surely there must be many more like me!

Would I pay £1 ($1.60) to send a letter - probably - beats needing to buy a printer (ok, I can use the printer in work) find a stamp, take it to the post box etc.

What about recorded delivery letters? I would need to queue up in the post office for those - maybe there is some why that could be handled in batches.

Also, I think companies who send lots of letters get a discount on the standard stamp price.

You could also have 'printing centers' in various countries around the world for cheaper and faster 'air mail'.

I think this idea has a lot of potential, but it would probably require TV commercials to get it to the masses!

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

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

fendale2• 17 years ago

I don't need to send many letters ... I haven't sent one for about a year now. So for my annual letter sending needs I'd easily pay above the odds, being that I still don't own a printer or stamps! I bet there are many people like me, but I've no real data on that!

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

Wait, so what are you doing differently than Dustin on your end?

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Technically, probably nothing. Fundamentally, I'm trying to go after solo entrepreneurs and SMBs that need to send stuff out to clients, prospects, etc.

Unless I'm mistaken, Dustin's service is better for people that have a "one-off" need to mail stuff. I'm setup for that use case too, but am trying to build stuff to cater to a group of people that have already budgeted money for this expense.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

Ok, so nothing. Just leveraging your contacts better. Cool.

rbritton• 17 years ago

If you can validate the addresses and generate Zip+4s, you may want to look into this if your volume reaches the minimum: http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/senditwithintheus/pr...

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Definitely, I actually spoke to the USPS folks today. This shouldn't be too hard at all, though I may defer this for a little bit -- you actually don't save all that much so I may not spend the time setting this up until I've got a little more volume.

EDIT: Also, when you send via bulk mail, you have to take it to specialized bulk mail facilities... unfortunately, I'm ~50 miles from the nearest one. So, unless I can fill a truck full of mail, I'm not sure how I'd make the numbers work.

grippy• 17 years ago

Here's how you can lower your overhead on postage:

Flip the sender and recipient addresses around and don't place a stamp on it. The mailman has to send it back to the sender, who, in this case is actually the recipient, because of the missing postage. HA!

vaksel2• 17 years ago

probably a good way to end up in jail

khangtoh• 17 years ago

Just curious, who is hosting this?

Also, lots if good feedback given by others but I especially liked using your service to send invoices, etc. So here's my suggestion, create a developer API and other web applications can use your service to send out snail mail.

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

It's on Heroku at the moment.

Yes, definitely. I actually have one customer that's beta testing an "email to snail mail" system that I've built. I need to clean up a few things but should have that available to everyone sometime next week.

If you're serious about using the service to send invoices (or anything else), feel free to ping me -- my contact info is in my profile. I'll trade you a reduced rate for solid feedback. :)

vaksel2• 17 years ago

the problem with this is scale.

Just look at what you need to do: print out the letter, print out the envelope, stuff the letter, apply stamp, seal the envelope. Double check the data.

That's 3-5 minutes per letter.

   @3 minutes that's 20 letters per hour. 
   @4 minutes that's 15 letters per hour,
   @5 minutes that's 12 letters per hour.

So your potential income is $12-20 an hour.

Let's add up all your variable costs: stamp: 44 cents ink: 22 cents (sample laser cartridge is $35 for 470 pages, count 3 to print envelope+2 pages)

So based on this, you are making 33 cents off each letter. That means your current profit margin per hour is:

   @3 minutes: $6.66 per hour
   @4 minutes: $4.95 per hour
   @5 minutes: $3.96 per hour

At those rates, you can't even legally hire anyone, since the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

Even if you get super efficient and cut that down to 1 letter every 2 minutes. (simply can't do it faster than that on consistent basis), that's only 30 letters mailed. Or $9.90 an hour.

At $1 a letter you simply aren't making enough money. You need to pretty much double your rates, to make this workable.

shimon3• 17 years ago

At scale, all of these things can be automated. The challenge is getting to scale but not getting destroyed by someone who already has the infrastructure to do this at far lower cost. (Vistaprint, for example, could probably offer this service with just a little bit of programming work.)

To avoid that, you'll want to offer users whatever you can to make your service a more efficient option: address book integration, built-in letterhead, quickbooks integration, who knows.

You might also expand to adjacent markets. I once heard of an online greeting card company that lets you enter in the addresses and birthdays of everyone you want to send cards to. Then a couple weeks before each birthday, they mail you an envelope containing a pre-addressed, stamped envelope with your choice of card. You just write a note and drop it in the mail.

You could do the same sort of thing, maybe even including the handwritten part!

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

+1 for "At scale, all of these things can be automated."

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

I'm with you, it's tough to make the numbers work unless you've got some serious volume. You'll notice that one-off letters are actually $3 each.

You don't get the lower rates unless you commit to spending more... take a look at the pricing/signup link at the top. (Also, would love some feedback on this page...)

shimon3• 17 years ago

The idea of charging an up-front-buy-in is unusual, and I'm not sure why it makes any sense, except as an unusual way of helping you bootstrap this business.

What about replacing the Lite plan with something that costs $25/mo and includes 15 letters (add'l $2) and the Pro with, say, $99/mo for 99 letters (add'l $1.50).

patio11• 17 years ago

That's 3-5 minutes per letter.

That's 0 seconds per letter, if you're calling out to an existing API, which would be the only way I'd even consider getting into this business. You just take the difference between your marked up rates and the underlying service provider's bulk rates.

Any defensible value in this service is in the marketing/app design, after all. Printing, stuffing envelopes, and dropping them in a bin is always going to be a commodity service.

pingswept• 17 years ago

Perhaps it's time to invest in an automatic letter folder? http://techkousa.com/letterfolders/

Perhaps a postage meter that prints postage on the envelope? http://www.pitneyworks.com/postagemeters/

Who's going to step up to hack a letter folder so it inserts the letter in an envelope?

With $40k of automation, I bet you could hit 20 letters per minute. You'd make your investment back in just a few short decades!

agbell• 17 years ago

To quote your blog :" Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Good execution is rare." Nicely done.

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Thanks dude. :)

balakk• 17 years ago

I like this.

A bit of feedback:

- Sometimes, registration makes sense. In this case, it does. if I'm going to be a regular customer, why should I need to enter my address every time? (Not sure if you have an option - I looked around but couldn't find any).

- Letter templates would be nice. Just basic business letters, personal letters, even 2 or 3 options would be great.

- You can offer a selection of greeting cards. Season's around the corner - you could make a lot of money.

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

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).

qeorge2• 17 years ago

I like this a lot. Nice job taking an idea and running with it. At $1/letter this doesn't work, at $3/letter its an enviable opportunity.

I find most of the comments here to be quite pessimistic, so here's a few things to consider:

There are proven economies of scale here. With any volume, a bulk postage rate will start saving you money. There's no reason to think Paul will continue to pay 44 cents a letter. Furthermore, the cost of printing is being grossly exaggerated: I picked up a laser printer from Dell that included a 1500 page toner cartridge. That's .08 cents a page, with a free printer. Its easy to do get cheaper than that per page with a more expensive printer.

Also, all of this can be automated. I share an office with an attorney who sends out hundreds of letters per day, and it takes about 2 hours of his assistant's time to setup the Mail Merge in Word and start the machines. All stuffing, labeling, stamping, etc. is done by the machines.

Here's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24 hour turnaround now, but something to consider.

Paul's found customers and profitability from day 1, and he can just work hard until he generates enough cash to buy machines to handle it for him. It wouldn't be hard to completely automate the entire thing. I like it.

Feedback on your website: you knocked it out of the park. The domain is obvious and makes sense, the website is to the point and immediately conveys the benefit. There's no loose ends, from the privacy policy to the API. I'm seriously impressed.

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

Awesome, awesome feedback -- thanks!

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

qeorge2• 17 years ago

Glad to help. I'll ask him on Monday if he has any interest in outsourcing, if it was automated enough I would think so. Of course it would fall on me to do said automation, so we'll have to see what the numbers look like. ;)

nico• 17 years ago

That should be considered into the business model, example: 24-hour guaranteed: $3, 2-3 day delivery: $2, 3-5 days delivery: $1. Then you could have different queues/printers for each option.

If you start growing, you could set up different locations to print closer to the destination and you could have a really cool service like: 2-3 hrs delivery guaranteed!

Also, you could outsource the printing and delivery, say high school/college kids who want to make some extra money, they sign up at your website and start receiving correspondence to print and deliver close to where they live. For each delivery they accumulate a certain amount of money and you send them a check at the end of the month if they have achieved a certain threshold.

Btw, congrats and keep at it, try your best and you'll do great!

paulsingh19• 17 years ago

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.

mojonixon• 17 years ago

If you're interested in how the pros do it, about 5 years ago I temped at a bulk mailer--mostly medicare checks to doctors--using pitney bowes(IIRC) equipment. The machine I was running was organized in an L shape 20'x20'. One side would strip the letter off the continuous paper stack, collate it, fold it, and seal it in an envelope. The second side would stamp it and stack it in postal bins. A bad day I would do about 20,000 but if I had everything calibrated and the guy on the shift before didn't muck things up too bad I could get close to 50000 in an 8 hour shift. The system I was using rather old and temperamental, so I wouldn't be surprised if modern equipment is an order of magnitude faster.

Once the machine was running I didn't have to do much besides put envelopes in the hopper, but the noise, paper cuts, and opportunity to lose a finger while clearing a jam made it a horrible job.

Tell HN: I ripped off Dustin Curtis' snail and got slightly different results

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