What we’ve learned from selling postcards on the internet

Tl;dr: We built a service that mails your photos on postcards to loved ones. 24 of our friends use it and love it. Now we’re asking you to forward this to your friends to further our mission of making it easier to do kind things.

Growing up, it was easy to stay in touch with my grandma. Every summer, my parents, brother and I would squeeze into our brown Volvo station wagon and drive 8 hours from San Francisco to San Diego. We’d spend a week boogie boarding, jamming on the piano, trumpets, and ukuleles laying around — remnants of the family polka band — and talking over heaping plates of my grandma’s rhubarb pie.

A lot has changed since then. In some ways, technology makes it easier to stay in touch because I can call her from anywhere in the world. However, because she doesn’t have a computer or smartphone, I can’t show her what I’m up to, which is really what she loves.

As a challenge, two college friends and I built a website that mails monthly postcards with your photos anywhere in the world. I could literally spend 5 minutes at a bus stop and boom — a postcard would show up in my grandma’s mailbox a few days later. It was that simple.

Then a wild thing happened: our friends started asking if they could use it. They started paying us money. We thought people would mostly use it for their grandmas, but we couldn’t have been more wrong: people sent thank you notes to friends, birthday cards to aunts, travel updates to parents, and inside jokes to siblings. Without any advertising, we’ve grown sendmorepostcards.com to 24 paying customers who have sent postcards to 5 countries.

As we enter the next chapter of growing into a sustainable business, we wanted to look back at what we’ve learned in our first few months to reflect and help us grow from 24 to 1,000 people sending postcards!

When we asked people to scroll through our site and speak their thoughts aloud, the most common question was “what do the postcards actually look like?” We had a mockup, but it wasn’t very convincing — it didn’t even have a stamp on it. I spent 15 minutes making the mockup more accurate and we immediately saw the question disappear from usability tests.

Our customers love the product, so it was easy to get quotes and videos from them talking about their experience. They look great on our site and social media, but I have a hunch that showing testimonials from the recipients of the postcards will boost sign ups even more because they’re the “why” behind the whole service. The tricky part is obtaining those testimonials… let us know if you have any ideas 🤔

I’m not a huge fan of social media, especially after reading Stolen Focus, but it’s an important growth lever for small businesses. We used Buffer to schedule social media graphics to post to Instagram (follow us!), LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook every day for three weeks. The outcome? It drove some engagement but few sign ups. In the future, experimenting with short form videos would take more time, but has more potential to go viral. Do you know anybody making Tiktoks? We’d love to chat.

We’re on a mission to make it easier to do kind things. If you think that’s important, there’s something that you can do to help us: send this post to a few friends. 

It feels like now more than ever we need something to bring us together, even if it’s as simple as sending a postcard of your dog making a funny face to your three best friends. 

Don’t just take it from me, listen to my grandma, our very first postcard recipient. I asked her what she thought about the service and I’ll let her glowing review speak for itself.

Thanks for reading. More soon,
Aiden, Ze’ev, and Zod