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)

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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!

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...)

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).

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

Good work!

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.

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.

But well done.

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.