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Outbox - Digital mail delivery

Do you think the service is too cheap? I'm not following your question.
 
I do not know if people will want the service. If it somehow skipped the USPS it would seem to be more valuable by speeding up service. Since it only provides a service after mail delivery, it is just a convenience. Seems like hitching your wagon to a dying service is a bad idea.

To your point, it will take a lot of clients at $4.99 per month to make money. The expense of someone driving a car from house to house seems inefficient. Is the service economically viable? Hard to say. Maybe I am missing something.

My curiosity is from knowing someone working on the project. I think they are at a critical point regarding long-term funding.
 
I hate mail. If this service were offered in CLT, I'd pay $60 a year for it without question. I already get the two print magazines I subscribe to delivered digitally. Noted, as structured, the business only really works in very high density urban areas to limit the driving distances. I'm sure they have a business plan and market study that helps them understand when the service should be profitable. If they didn't think it had a shot at being profitable, they probably wouldn't have found angel capital and they wouldn't be in business. They obviously have some sort of backing...getting written up by CNN isn't a benefit most startups enjoy. I also suspect $4.99 intro pricing will go up as the service catches on. Ads, etc will add to revenue as well.

I agree that it sounds inefficient, but it's still better than me having to open and sort through a bunch of crap everyday. I thought I had read about a service in the past where you could simply change your mailing address and have all mail delivered to a facility that would scan/email it to you. That certainly seems more efficient.
 
The bigger question is why the postal service, struggling to stay relevant and solvent, hasn't already pursued this.
 
Your last two paragraphs nail it.
 
The postal service probably knows that they could not execute the strategy required to make it profitable and effective. In better economic times they would do it just to stay relevant, regardless of cost effectiveness.

I believe it is active in Austin and rolling out in San Francisco and New York next. From your response, it sounds like there is a market. Just seems like it has a short shelf life. People will eventually get all mail electronically and I do not see the USPS as a part of the process. Maybe they are already working on this and this is why they have no agreement with the USPS. To get capital investment, they must have a long-term plan. Hope they don't get shut down for illegally taking mail first - apparently this is a risk.
 
Will be interesting to see how this all folds out. One of the co-founders is the son of one of my dad's former partners and he might be the most pretentious/douchiest kid I've ever known. Very, very smart, though.
 
RiskyBusiness said:
The postal service probably knows that they could not execute the strategy required to make it profitable and effective.
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I'm not sure why not. Due to the volume of mail they deal in, they could afford to automate the entire process. If these guys can do it for $5-10 a month on such a small scale with a very manual process, it should be a no-brainer on a much larger scale. Noted, this is the USPS...

Think of all of the $$ that could be saved in mail carrier salaries/benefits, vehicle costs, fuel costs, etc if even a small percentage of customers opted into the service and agreed to pay for it. And that's just in localized delivery. The mail can be scanned as it "enters" the system, preventing it from ever needing to leave the city/region where it originates, saving tons more transportation and people costs.

Hell, even $10 a month would be more than reasonable to have all of my mail delivered digitally.
 
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BeachBumDeac said:
The Verge is not a fan

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/28/4039990/the-postal-service-is-bad-but-outbox-is-worse
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I agree, there are some flaws to the process. The market is there for the right product (the USPS is in a great position to create it, but they won't), but I'm not sure this is the way to go about it. That said, it sounds like the company I remember hearing about that was going to have the mail delivered to a facility and the current iteration of Outbox are one in the same. From the article:
Note: At the time of its announcement, Outbox suggested it had reached an agreement with the USPS to allow it to intercept mail from ever being delivered to your home, and that it would instead be delivered to its warehouse. This would have made the service less wasteful, to be sure. From its description of the service today, that no longer appears to be the case, and Outbox employs its own "postmen" to pick up already delivered mail from your home mailbox.
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The USPS should be leading the way to figure out how to solve this problem for it's customers. At the least it should be working with a company like Outbox to help extend it's existence into the digital age. By refusing to work with Outbox, the USPS is just increasing the likelihood that people who would signup for an Outbox like service will continue using the USPS less and less. I can't remember the last time I sent a letter, and 99% of the mail I get in my mailbox anymore is unsolicited.
 
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