Welcome to our ‘Start-Up Junkies’ blog!

10 Responses to “Welcome to our ‘Start-Up Junkies’ blog!”

1. Question on January 25th, 2008 12:33 am

   with more and more companies going “paperless” with their billing, arent you a start up moving into an industry that will soon be obsolete?

2. Paul Mobley on January 25th, 2008 9:29 pm

   As a fellow startup-junkie I like innovative ways to bridge the traditional and internet divide. My initial objection to the idea is the way that the PO Box address are provided. It would be great to create a PO Box that is both unique and also allows you to have your choice of a city. Think eFax meets PO Boxes. That would be cool! Your uniqueness could be in the ZIP Codes. I imagine that you would need buy-in from the Postal Service for such a method. If a university could get it’s own zip code in theory you could to. This would help overcome my objection as the address would be more like the status quo with the backend system hidden.

3. Ron Wiener on January 26th, 2008 11:51 am

   To the question of whether mail is becoming obsolete… this is an excellent question, and believe me we spent a lot of time researching it before we put our skin in the game in such a big way.

   The adage is that “we’ll have a paperless office when we have a paperless toilet.” The prediction of a paperless society first made thirty years ago has only been disproven by annual increases in the consumption of paper and the increase in mailstream globally. In the US our mail volume increases by 3 billion pieces per year.

   The average household has more mail - not less - with each passing year. Of course the majority of it is now advertising mail but for high-pain customers, such as expatriates, soldiers, road warriors of every sort (both lifestyle and workstyle), overseas business doing business in the US, and for our corporate and government clients, our solution gives them a far cheaper and more convenient solution versus how they have to deal with their postal mail today. Hence our growth rate in adoption all over the world, and in every sector of business and numerous consumer sectors.

4. Ron Wiener on January 26th, 2008 12:04 pm

   To Paul Mobley’s question:
   We’ve deliberated over this issue for four years now, and as you might expect the USPS is not going to go out of their way to design something like this just for us, or for any customer for that matter. The PO Boxes are definitely sub-optimal but they get the job done, for now, for clients who desire to have an address in their own state.

   As you’ll see in later episodes of Start-up Junkies, after we raised our venture round we began the roll-out of physical addresses in the major North American cities. Most customers want a street address, either for image reasons, legal reasons, or for the ability to receive FedEx, UPS and DHL packages. (Although rumor has it that the USPS may soon allow these competing carriers to deliver to PO Boxes.)

   We’re currently working on opening retail storefront locations in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and 15 other cities. Our first retail site just opened in Seattle. We’re only selecting sites where we can have extraordinarily long-term leases, so that our customers can use these addresses with confidence knowing that they won’t have to change them down the road if we moved.

   Our processing hubs are located at different addresses and can be moved as we grow our capacities, without affecting our customers (i.e. they won’t have to change the address that others send mail to them at).

   These “retail” storefront sites do double duty - they serve as a lifetime permanent address for our customers, and they also give us a local office where customers can come in to ask questions, fill out new-account paperwork, etc. We never actually receive any mail at these addresses as they are placed on “firm holdout” with the USPS. What this means is that we pick up the mail at the branch that serves each location, usually in the very early morning hours, and transport it right to our processing hub which is typically located nearby. Only parcels are received at the storefront locations, and then transported to the hubs for storage and forwarding.

5. zdperez on February 4th, 2008 11:25 am

   Ron Wiener:

   This is my first blog so I am not to sure how it exactly works but I have an idea. My question is when or if, Earth Class Mail will be openly traded on the stock market. I am very curious to investment opportunities I can endure. I know that you can’t release information like that, but is Earth Class Mail pondering the idea of going public in the near future?

6. Ron Wiener on February 6th, 2008 5:28 pm

   zdperez:
   Thanks for your expression of faith! As you correctly noted, SEC regulations would prevent us from promoting investment offerings in a public forum. That said, we have no firm time table set for an IPO at this time.

7. markdjones82 on February 9th, 2008 11:41 am

   Just got done watching the first episode. Looks like a very interesting idea that could be quite successful! I am an IT professional and was wondering what kind of IT infrastructure you have. Do you have specialized applications that have been built for the company? Do you have one large data center? Do you believe that IT is more of an enhancer or a cost center?

8. Ron Wiener on February 9th, 2008 10:10 pm

   Mark,

   [Response from our “rock star” VP Engineering Paul Irvine:]
   We’re a Microsoft Partner and pretty much use their technology throughout our Product Development, our Mail Operations, Customer Service and our corporate IT infrastructure.
   We have indeed built specialized applications for our online services and mail management, but those are subjects of patents – they are the ‘secret sauce’ that help us scale beyond simple scanning of a few pieces of mail, such that we can operate for large enterprises and national post offices.
   When you ask about IT, I assume you mean corporate infrastructure. Systems that keep the lights on? In that sense IT definitely costs money to run. It is a cost of doing business. What you implement and spend money on has the potential to increase the organizations’ efficiency, and directly affect revenue. The important thing is not how you view the costs, it’s ensuring that the investments are made in the places that support and enable the business. There are no ‘IT projects’ as such. There are only business projects with business goals, that are implemented using information technology.

9. san diego real estate on April 2nd, 2008 11:09 pm

   I just want to say that I love watching your show on Start Up Junkies / Mojo!!! I am not in a position or in need of a service like you have but I am friends with several guys in the military. I have suggested to them that they check out your service and one of them said he signed up and really loves the service. Anyways, I wish you guys all the success in the world!!!

   I would also suggest that you do a few more blog entry’s because this blog will drive a lot of traffic to your website. I write 2-3 articles per week and get 4-5K visits every month to our blog from all of the different articles we write. A site like yours could easily receive thousands and thousands of visitors to your blog every month!

   Anyways, keep Earth Class Mail going strong!!!

10. Ron Wiener on April 5th, 2008 1:07 pm

    Thanks [San Diego Real Estate] for the positive feedback, and for passing the word along to your friends in the military. In fact our sales team just returned yesterday from several meetings in Washington DC with the DoD and Pentagon, and we’re expecting to start piloting our system within the US military in the very near future.

    There is indeed no better ROI case for Earth Class Mail than when you consider the almost-unfathomable real cost of delivering mail to our men and women on the front lines in Iraq and other active operating areas around the world. In some areas the costs include more than just treasury - timely mail delivery affects morale, and - when convoys have to be escorted through hot zones - can cost real lives. As your friends probably told you, it is not terribly uncommon for letters to take two to six weeks to get to them, if they ever arrive. Our motto: “We get the mail to the soldiers before their bullets even arrive.”

    After serving members of the military as individual customers for almost two years now we’re extremely excited about the prospect of potentially deploying through the DoD for all personnel as well as official mail to these deployed units, not to mention the rest of the mil org.

    You’re absolutely right about blogging, too. We’ve just been so busy responding to so many new customers, candidates, media, etc. (thanks in part to MOJO and Startup Junkies!), that we’ve been unable to find enough time to write and respond on the blog. This is going to change as we’re now opening up blog accounts for all our employees, not just a select few.

    Thanks for your strong encouragement, and I’m very pleased to hear that you enjoy the show.

    Cheers,
    Ron

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