Personal Publishing With Postful
April 25, 2007
Print publishers are working to personalize the content they deliver to their subscribers. While they adjust from the top down, our users are creating personalized publications from the ground up. Mass customization is coming to the print industry from both directions, and it’s fun to see.
Wired ran a promotion last month asking readers to submit cover photos for their July issue. They’ll be producing 5,000 different covers from those photos. It’s an exciting experiment in reader interaction, but it falls short of what they describe as the “Holy Grail” of print media: personalized and targeted publication.
We saw another example of this with the issue of Reason where every subscriber received a personal edition with a satellite photo of their home on the cover. More intriguingly, Reason customized certain articles and ads based on the subscriber’s location.
I know from personal experience that this is an extremely difficult process. I spent a few too many nights sleeping on a print-shop floor working on the Reason cover. Despite the potential, it’s been hard to overcome the technical challenges. And efforts have been limited to the occasional test or promotion.
Postful’s users, meanwhile, are delivering extremely targeted publications at a very small scale. We already have users sending print copies of their blog articles to relatives who aren’t online. Some have automated this process with rss-to-email feeds or even compiled posts into mini-newsletters.
The potential for this is exciting. There aren’t too many steps from personal newsletter to small magazine. While the larger magazines work through the logistical intricacies of personalizing a product designed for mass runs of hundreds of thousands, the smaller ones can scale upward with a product meant from the start for individuals. Meanwhile, both can make use of the same web-based ad marketplace.
I don’t know whether the large magazines will adapt before the next generation of dynamic newsletters and magazines establishes itself. The one thing that’s certain is that the print world is changing. As I’ve said before, print isn’t dying, but the media apparatus built around it is. Print is just a delivery vehicle, one that is finally being incorporated into our digital life. We’re proud to have Postful play a part in that.
It will be fun to see how this develops as our users lead the way forward.
photo credit: Gastev
Ask Postful: Advertising and Branding
April 9, 2007
Ben posed some excellent questions in the comments to a previous post. Some I’m going to conspicuously leave unanswered for a few days, but let me deal with the first now:
here’s what I’d like to see:
1. A photograph of what a finished letter looks like. I don’t want to send a Postful letter if it’s got advertising or your branding all over it; I’m pretty sure you’re not doing this, but I want to be certain. Basically, I want to know my letters will look professional.
All we send is your letter inside an envelope with the recipient’s address, your return address, and a stamp. I’m putting up links to pdf’s of two sample letters (once again, thanks to Matthew for producing these samples during testing). The first is a text only letter, the second includes photos (warning: this is a large file). Here’s a very low-res pic of a printed letter and envelope (I’ll update with a higher quality shot).
These show you what we print: no added branding or advertising.
Some people are using Postful for personal letters and don’t want their grandparents getting an envelope of ads from them. Others are using it for business where advertising and branding is simply not an option. We will always provide a clean letter, branding- and advertising-free, just like you’d send yourself.
Ask Postful: Mailing Timeline
April 8, 2007
Q: How long does it take you to mail a letter?
A: Our eventual goal is to have any e-mail that enters the system by 3pm PST go out the same day.
Right now, we’re still adjusting our production process so we aren’t quite at that point yet. Our aim today is to have any e-mail entering the system out within 24 hours (excluding weekends for the moment). Over the next several months we’ll be steadily decreasing that turn-around time as we approach our target (hopefully not asymptotically).
Ask Postful: International Mailings
April 7, 2007
Q: Can I mail internationally?
A: Not yet. This is one of the most requested features from beta users so we’re moving it way up the development list.
The first step will be to offer international airmail service from our printers in the US. As we expand, the next step is to set up international print stations. These would have the advantage of dramatically decreasing mailing times (send the message from anywhere in the world and it’s printed and delivered locally).
We plan on having the airmail service available by June. The rates will be slightly higher for this to cover the additional cost of airmail postage.
I don’t have a timeline on the international print stations since that will depend largely on demand. As we roll those out, we will be able to lower our rates. Our target is to reach a single flat fee for a letter sent anywhere in the world.
Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) ready for rails
March 25, 2007
I’ve gone ahead and switched my development system over to Ubuntu 7.04 beta. I’d been having a few stability issues with 6.10 so I thought it couldn’t be worse. After a day of use, I’m glad I did. There are still some glitches (the built-in system for adding proprietary video drivers messed up my xorg.conf). But even though it doesn’t completely handle everything yet, it’s still a big step up from 6.10.
If you’re a rails developer, I can say that the full rails stack is working fine. Plus, for those of you using RadRails (thanks to Aptana for picking that up), the new restricted-packages installer makes switching to Sun’s JRE a snap.
Workers of the World, Unite!
March 20, 2007
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting some of the uses of Postful. Today, we start with small/medium sized business.
If you work in or run a small or medium sized business, you’ve probably felt the frustration of dealing with the occasional need to send a letter. Keeping materials stocked is expensive (letterhead, stamps, envelopes) and taking the time to produce, stamp, and mail a letter feels like a waste. Nonetheless, there are times when you have to mail something. Postful is here to make sending a letter as easy as sending an e-mail. Effectively, we put a corporate mail room in your e-mail client.
We give you the option to:
- Create an e-mail address associated with a physical address. Every e-mail sent to that address is printed and mailed to the associated physical address. This is great for frequent contacts.
- Send a letter to quickletter at postful.com with the name and address of the recipient in the subject line. We parse the address and send the letter on. This is perfect for one-off letters.
With Postful, you can:
- Produce and mail a letter from anywhere. On a business trip? Working remotely? Need to send a quick letter? It’s easier than you could do it at present in your own office (and really you should be using Postful in your own office as well!).
- Easily keep records of sent letters as easily as you keep and track sent e-mails.
- Quickly send hard copies of documents to any location, from any location.
- Eliminate the expense and inconvenience of stocking letterhead. Each letter can be printed on your own letterhead.
Mail isn’t the primary communications tool for business anymore, but it remains an important one for key tasks. However, the very rarity of those situations has increased the expense of mailings. Before Postful, any business too small to have it’s own mailing department was left to absorb those increased unit costs and unnecessary inconveniences. We’re happy to provide a solution for the rest of us.
Joyent (TextDrive) Accelerator Review
March 20, 2007
We recently switched our deployment from dedicated RHEL Linux servers to Joyent TextDrive Accelerators. In the interest of helping others faced with similar deployment choices, I thought it might be useful to put up a review. For the short attention span crowd: if you are looking to deploy a Ruby on Rails application, go check Joyent out right now. Their deployment environment and support service for Rails apps are the best currently available. For those of you interested in details, read on (then go check them out).
(For the previously mentioned short-attention span crowd, here’s probably the key point from the rest of this: It’s common to make compromises in your initial deployment architecture due to limited resources. Joyent makes it inexpensive and easy to do things right from the start.)
What’s Postful? What Do You Do?
March 16, 2007
What are we? We are exactly two things.
First, we are the fastest way to send a letter. We are a way of sending snail mail straight from your favorite e-mail application.
Second, we are a cubby of mailboxes, so that someone sending e-mail can treat a physical mail address just like any other e-mail address.
Let me give an example. Let’s say that you wanted to send photos from your last vacation to your entire mail list. Your grandmother would really like to see them, but she either doesn’t have an e-mail address or doesn’t check it that often. Just sign up, and create a mailbox for her, calling it, say, ‘granma@postful.com’ and then include that address on any mailing list.
One advantage of this is that once you create a mailbox for your grandmother at ‘grandma@postful.com’ , then anyone can reach her by that e-mail address. Instantly, she just got connected.
So, for example, you could create a Postful mailbox for yourself and distribute your address to others to reach you by.
Success to the Roman Host
March 11, 2007
We recently decided to switch our hosting to TextDrive (part of Joyent). Why would we switch our entire system over to a new architecture about a week prior to launch (and, in the process, probably delay our launch at least a few weeks)? Mostly it came down to recognizing what we do best and where we needed help.
The fact is that we aren’t experts in deployment (shocking, I know). Given that we’ve already given up things like sleep, time with friends and family, etc, it wasn’t clear where the time to gain this expertise was going to come from.
We had deployed and prepared our system to launch on a system of fairly heavy-duty linux-based servers. But part of the reason the system needed to be heavy duty is that we had no confidence in being able to scale out quickly. It’s a bad thing when you recognize that you may have troubles if you succeed.
Around this time, I read this blog post (joyeur had been on my feedreader for awhile). 4000 req/s sounded pretty good and having long heard of TextDrive as the premier Rails hosting company, I thought I’d at least put in a request for more information.
After talking to Jason Hoffman, I was ready to go. I had a list of dream features that I wanted to build into our deployment at some point. Jason, in the course of telling me about their accelerator setup (now with more options), basically mentioned everything on my list and told me how it was already built-in to their basic offering. This… pleased me.
I’ll be posting a full review of our experience with Joyent soon. For now, let me just say that it has relieved a huge amount of stress in terms of our future scalability and ability to handle growth. The choice was a couple of weeks of extra work at this point (transition time to the new system) versus having a system unable to grow when we need it. A pretty easy call.
EC2: the first server platform
January 18, 2007
Amazon’s EC2 has the potential to change the entire delivery of both commercial and open source server-based software. The key cost for most deployments isn’t the software licenses, it’s the server setup and configuration. Trying to meld together the hundreds of pieces necessary for a functional server while maintaining security and performance is a frustrating and thankless task. Most importantly, it’s an expensive task (very expensive even if you get it right and even more expensive if you get it wrong).
What if server software were available as packaged units, all the pieces already confirmed to work together? I’ve seen efforts at this with one-click install packages and distros set to install full stacks. But an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) could go even farther. No physical server setup to worry about. No hardware differences. A controlled environment. It wouldn’t be hard to extend this to the point where it’s not much more difficult than setting up a desktop app.
In fact, it could be easier. Go to Amazon, buy the software you want, they automatically load up an EC2 instance, and your service is ready. This could be a fantastic deal for software developers, users, and for Amazon. SaaS (software as a service) is capturing a version of this, but for the cases where a company wants to run their own setup or needs their own servers, the field is wide open (and, of course, all of those SaaS vendors need a place to run their software…).
Of course, this goes from being a cool service to potentially dominant at the point that there is competition pushing the whole game forward. To that end, Amazon has a huge interest in making the AMI format standard. At the point that tool vendors can target the AMI format and other services can deploy AMI’s, there will be enough development to lock this in.
If they pull this off, Amazon will be in a position to be at the core of server-based software development and deployment for at least the next 5 years. I think I can safely say that no one expected Amazon to be the company with the best chance of pulling that off.
