In the meantime, to build upon euroclydon's summary, do you have any recommended articles about catering to, um, middle aged women? (software! I mean software-wise!)
On your blog I found only something about abusive customers :)
I have quite a few HN comments about it. Most of them boil down to "You should try selling software to women. Women pay money for software, unlike 20-something white and Asian males. You are more likely to sell software which solves a pressing problem for her than to sell software which solves a pressing problem for him like 'How do I steal music more efficiently?' Also, since the industry spends a disproportionate amount of time and effort on the needs of techies, the software currently available to her largely sucks, and fairly few competitors are in any given niche relative to the market opportunity. This is profitably exploitable: make something that she wants, charge money, she will happily pay you money."
That's the big thing I see missing here. "Having it sent" is the goal of the game. Otherwise I might as well snap a personal photo and send it with Postino (which is how I am doing things now - and unscientific sampling shows that is much more likely to stay on somebody's fridge long after the event is past).
Still, wrapping paper has some potential, especially if they offer good quality paper, which Hallmark/Walmart/whatever don't seem to carry much.
Possible variant: Accept a picture/image of a handwritten message, and apply it (cleanly) to the card / piece to be mailed.
EDIT: I'm thinking of e.g. an image from a cell phone, if you can get sufficient quality. Not something that becomes significant effort for the user. Bonus points if, or necessary that it looks (fairly well) handwritten.
- front page looks very different from the voting index, as though they're very different sites
- front page lacks focus
- index mentions tacky greeting cards but only shows blank white line-art empty cards rather than actual examples/previews (even if they're not real yet). I'd cut back (or shrink) the front page text and put some designs to vote on there too.
Hopefully the front page is just temporary until winning designs are chosen because all the best stuff is hidden behind it.
Related: Someone should collate "Threadless for x" and FML clone sites so people can see what openings are still available in the market.
i actually owned the domain chirp.ly back in the day. got an inquiry of purchase sometime that would fall in line with the conception of this company. though lost contact with the inquirer.
possible it wasn't the yc company, but i only bring it up because i've seen this happen several times on hn and hey, small world.
Probably the more appropriate question is - how it's different than http://minted.com? I know TinyPrints is not crowd-sourced, but Minted is.
Please note, I'm not trying to demean your service or existence by any means, but just trying to learn how you're distinguishing and plan to compete with this super growing startups?
Greeting cards have needed fixing for a long time, but the traditional card brands have tended to pay for fitting/fixtures etc. to have a monopoly in stores (at least here in Aus). Always good to see more competition in this space.
On my Mac, Safari & Firefox, the "Shop" links on the front page do nothing. Also not sure why the links there aren't seasonal -- the Christmas Cards link is useless, but a Valentine's Day link would be useful.
Wow, I'm bachelor dude and I don't care for stuff like this and even I want to order from them. If this is how I feel, I can't even imagine what... this is going to be HUGE.
1) Targets women, so leverages 50% of patio11's awesome advice.
2) Unlike the similar product I'm working on, solves the huge problem of content creation.