I've enjoyed my experience with lob.com. I have sent one post card, done a Zapier integration, and introduced them to folks at my company that send a lot of postcards. Also had a conversation with the founders after signing up--that's always nice. (It is interesting that the API isn't really RESTful, but rather form/param based.)

Frankly, I've been wracking my brain (and those of friends at coffee meetings) trying to think of a business to build on top of this API.

Reminders and marketing are the two broad markets that jump to my mind, but I'm struggling a bit to find niches where the attributes of postcards (or letters) win vs other solutions:

  * cost (94 cents vs free for email or far cheaper for text messages)
  * timeliness (5-7 days vs immediate)
  * point of delivery (physical address vs device or computer)

This means it has to be a fairly high value marketing or reminder opportunity.

Regardless, I'm impressed with lob.com and when the right mail business opportunity comes along, I know who my API partner will be.

Getting things in the mail is turning into a treat for younger generations. I can think of a few:

- Automated postcards generated from your Facebook timeline or Flickr feed when you're traveling

- Simple/inexpensive invitations for parties, reunions, save the dates, etc. Hook it up to Facebook, too.

- Information distribution to parents of school children (how to register for online report cards, absentee reports, etc).

- Targeted political messaging (although there are already companies that do this)

One quick note - we dropped our on-demand postcard price down to 70 cents recently!

https://www.lob.com/blog/lowering-postcard-pricing

Wedding invitations?

Though it seems a better fit for marketing automation systems: i.e. if you supply software to a car dealer, then you can use them to send reminders to people for their annual checkup or services.

We started with Lob in July 2013. Having done a lot of startups, I knew there was probably a hamster wheel powering everything behind the scenes, but they did a good job fulfilling some rather enormous orders with grit and professionalism. Looking forward to sending out a bunch of prints this fall. Hopefully, they are now powered by a massive grid of hamster wheels.

Last Christmas I used Lob.com to easily create an app that converts email into physical mail for a relative who has no email access. Between Lob, Mailgun, and some open source PDF software it was a fun 24-hour project. The Lob API is head and shoulders above the competing mailers.

The code: https://github.com/wanderingstan/email2post

I first heard about them when they hired me to do some tight-deadline code contracting last fall. Leore was great to work with so I'm not surprised they've attracted a good team. Congrats guys!

Great work guys. Lob's a great service and I wish you all the best.

Certainly rings a lot of bells here at Pwinty as we both launched about the same time.

Our first ever order arrived sooner than expected and was fulfilled by me running down to the local photo store with a memory stick and them over to the post office. Then spent a few months with a commercial photo printer living in our dining room. We'd drape a blanket over it when guests came over for dinner, but it had a habit of whirring to life at the most inopportune times.

My wife tolerated this wonderfully for a good few months until we had a better alternative!

Check out that hockey stick graph!

What was the big change that bumped up order volume so much?

Not sure what the impact is to Lob, but Ubiquiti's meta-ISP marketing (https://www.goubiquiti.com/) uses Lob to sent postcards on behalf of lots of small-medium internet providers AFAIK starting in January.

Their area/rural route sending is something that I've used from other vendors for my marketing in the same vertical.

sure looks impressive, but without a Y-Axis, it's really hard to judge how much of a jump it really is...

Exactly. Any graph is a hockey stick if you scale the Y-Axis right.

I too would love to hear this. Leore?

Personally I found integrating Lob very easy. I did run into some glitches which were not documented since its not used by a lot of people. I used it to send postcard reminders for my site http://helloreminder.com and when there was a delay due to an issue on their part they gave me few credits for the inconvenience. Overall recommend them if you want to send anything related to printing/mailing and happy anniversary to them!

We use Lob for Amicus Post (http://amicushq.com/nytm) and have had a great experience so far. It's such a delight to be able to focus on improving our product and not on the logistics of fulfilling the printing & mailing part. Lob reminds me a lot of Twilio in this regard.

This is why I invested in Lob (and twilio)

Im dying to read the story of going from manual printing to it getting automated, that sounds reallupy interesting.