[andygcook]

I've been using the Bootstrap 4 beta for a couple weeks building a side project (https://nanagram.co) and I must say, it's been great to use. The built in utilities for responsive views and spacing are especially useful. Made optimizing the homepage for multiple screen sizes super fast and not painful at all. The Beta 1 had pretty good documentation and seemed pretty mature as well. Looking forward to upgrading to the Beta 2.

[Dowwie]

Have you considered using a guilt-driven pricing schedule?

"Emotionally Distant Grandchild" , "Good Grandchild", "Nana's #1"

[andygcook]

This comment actually made me laugh out loud.

We didn’t put much thought into the pricing plan names to be honest. Will pitch this to my brother, who I built this out with over the last couple months.

[aacook]

Haha, yes. They were placeholders that ended up going live. Premier is named after our Grandpa, who calls things he loves "Premier". His friend he was in the Boy Scouts in during the 1940s is the Grandfather of Andy's best friend. Anytime my Grandpa talks about Andy's friend's family he calls them the "Premier Family of Weymouth" :)

We'll probably keep the Premier plan but need to rename the others.

[KGIII]

Bampa and Bumpa are sometimes used for grandfather. Meemaw and Mimmie for grandmother.

I noticed your changing text of names. If you do international, the choices are huge.

My kids haven't seemed to figure out how to make babies. I've even tried bribery, to no avail. So, I'll send your link to all my old people friends. They can then send the link to their children and guilt them into using your service.

Maybe a HN launch would be good? Pardon me, if I missed it and you've already done it. Still, I'll forward it to the appropriate old folks for you. Good luck! It looks like a brilliant idea and the name is fantastic!

Edit: Also, the price for 100 is really, really low. I don't know about the math, but that's impressive. If you're able to profit at that amount, great. However, I expect a much higher price for that number and, if actually wanted, would pay more - assuming the pics are on good quality stock and well done.

I could also see some value added services. Touch ups, fancy text, maybe frames at holiday season, border themes, things like that.

For fancy text you may need to license fonts, by the way.

Edit again: A second opinion says your top two package prices are too low and she says the price 'makes her suspicious.' I asked why and she says it makes her think they are of poor quality.

I asked her about pricing she said, "The first one is $0.79, so $0.69, $0.59, $0.49. Something like that."

That's official Old Lady pricing suggestions. In other words, your highest package would be closer to $49.99 per month. I kind of agree with her - it would be more valuable than the price listed, of only I had a use.

She also suggested marketing it to the grandparents. Here is her quote, "Just market it to the grandparents. They will pay to have their kids send them pictures. It would be even better if they could choose a big package and let all their children send in pictures using the same account."

That's close to verbatim. The grandparents would have an account and their multiple kids could all send in pictures to the same account.

Err... She also suggests $X.XX/picture after X-amount of pictures. LOL It probably would have saved time to just give her the keyboard. She's very optimistic about your service.

[aacook]

Awesome feedback, thanks.

HN launch could be fun. We haven't done that yet. Andy left this comment a couple hours ago on a whim and all of the sudden we're getting tons of crazy feedback! Right now we're just focused on trying to make the service solid for a handful of people.

The feedback on pricing is helpful. I'd actually like to get the prices down to half of where they're at now. 6-month stretch goal :)

Hadn't thought about the font customization over the images. Great idea.

Thanks for sharing with your old folk friends. Best of luck with the creation of Grandchildren. I'm rooting for you.

[KGIII]

LOL I just edited my post - again. She tossed a few ideas out. They actually seem like sound ideas, because she is brilliant and perfect in every way. I like both the ideas, you're obviously not obligated to like them.

[andygcook]

NanaGram, making all your dreams come true. Well, we can't make that grandkid dream come true... but we do what we can: https://imgur.com/a/TjOQc

P.S. We called my grandmother on my Mother's side Mimmie before she passed away years ago. Scratching my head why I missed that one and thank you for the reminder.

[KGIII]

Fantastic! The missus has also already started mailing the link out to all of her Grange Hall friends. The thinking is they'd buy subscriptions on behalf of their kids.

She's remarkably interested in the product, if that is a signifier for you. We are old, in our fifties, and financially secure. The vast majority of our friends are in similar positions.

I add this because it may help your marketing choices and, while anecdotal, she does seem intrigued and excited.

[aacook]

Oh dude, good thing Mom isn't on HN.

[aacook]

Very good feedback about marketing to Grandparents. We've got some further testing to do.

On pricing, just want to confirm that you're seeing the price of $7.99/mo for 10 photos and not $0.79/mo for 10 photos?

[KGIII]

Yup. The price I'm seeing is $7.99/mo.

Sorry - I switched to a laptop, as it's easier to type this out.

Now, 10 pictures is $7.99 is $0.77 each.

To keep that in mind, and do some quick math...

Package 2 is 25 pictures. If we use the $0.69, then $17.25, which can be rounded down to $16.99.

It's not major until you get higher.

Package 3 is 50 pictures. Using the same progression, now at $0.59 per image, we get $29.50.

Package 5 is 100 pictures. Again, that's now $0.49 which works out to a price of $49.99.

If you wanted...

Package 1 could be $7.99 for 10 (each additional is $0.75)

Package 2 would be $16.99 for 25 (each additional is $0.65)

Package 3 would be $27.99 for 50 (each additional is $0.55)

Package 4 would be $49.99 for 100 (each additional is $0.45)

Something like that. 100 well printed pictures each month? That's well worth $49.99 for many of us.

That's also a lot of pictures - so the idea comes into play of having a single recipient who can have multiple authorized senders. So, the grandparent's three kids could all send pictures to the account. (There's a number of ways to decide if only x-amount get printed, perhaps the final choice is done by the payee.)

You can just email me, if you want. [e-mail] is certain to be seen and responded to, eventually.

I don't want to derail the thread too far. I'm just trying to share some quick and dirty marketing data.

If each of my kids made me a grandfather, I'd buy a package of 100 - if they can distribute it between them. If not, I'd buy two packages of 100 - and I'd do so at the $49.99/mo price, no questions asked.

I kinda like the idea of X-dollars for X-number of pictures and then X-number for each additional pictures.

I guess if you were to do that part, you should do the ethical thing and automatically charge them the less expensive price if, for example, they want to send 25 pictures in one month. If they want to send 25 pictures that month, you might as well just charge them for Package 2.

It'd be more ethical and probably encourage people to try higher packages - and then commit to keeping that same level of shared pictures.

And, as said before, there's ton of value-added services that you could toss into this.

Feel free to email, if you want. I'll throw some time at you. I wasn't doing anything better and HN is always good at helping me out when I have a question.

Edit, I typed a number wrong.

[mattsidesinger]

I signed up for your service. Do you have any competitors in this space? I thought the experience overall was very simple. Are you thinking about adding options for the prints? For example, glossy v. matte or 4x6 v 5x7?

Edit: I see you replied to someone else and I cannot tell if the service is actually live (as in my card is going to be charged and photos are going to ship).

[andygcook]

It’s live, and thanks for signing up! The photos you text in will ship in a month from now.

We’re definitly going to add other options in time. Right now we’re trying to get the MVP right with 4x6 glossy prints.

There’s a few other services that let you send postcards (expensive) or use apps to let you grab pictures from your phone. The apps tend to have more friction than just sending an MMS and to my knowledge, we’re the only ones that let you add the captions for context for your grandparent.

Would love feedback as you use it more. We’re pretth fast at building stuff and love hearing ideas from our customers.

[mattsidesinger]

Another option that would be good would be to allow to crop. I know I sent some photos in that are not 4:3 so I'm curious to know how they will print. I'm assuming they will be centered by whichever print to ship service, but others that may not understand what's happening here might have some heads chopped off in a printed picture.

[aacook]

Thanks for signing up Matt. Just sent a response to the support ticket you sent. Thanks for taking the time to let us know about that bug.

We have the ability to do matte or glossy already and I just need to get in there an add it as an option. I'll make a note to ping you once that's ready.

The service is live and ready. Your first order will ship in 30 days from now! :)

[badgers]

Your side project nanagram reminds me of a similar service, Pidgeonly, which allowed people to text photos to inmates that heard on an NPR podcast -- http://www.npr.org/2015/03/25/395238624/ex-inmate-uses-his-s...

[andygcook]

I hadn’t seen that. Sounds like an amazing story and will definitely check it out. Thanks for sharing.

[sbuttgereit]

I think you and your brother are onto a nice little business (at the very least).

I just sent your link to my wife who literally sends photo packages of our kid to her mother (who does not live independently and lives vicariously through the life of our kid).

I appreciate that you're not fully up-and-running just yet, but from the looks of it, a little operational scaling may be in your future :-)

Best of luck with the venture.

[andygcook]

Thank you for sharing with your wife and for the positive vibes. We're technically up-and-running with a dozen customer, just haven't really stepped on the gas with growth yet. Want to make sure we work out the rest of the small first kinks before working on growing. Would love to have your wife sign up if she's interested and doesn't feel like sending photo packages manually anymore. Feel free to have her reach out to me - andygcook [at] gmail [dot] com with any questions too.

[cknoxrun]

We just launched our re-design using the beta (https://www.drugbank.ca). We couldn't be happier as well.

[dannytatom]

You have a f` floating on your landing page, under the photo next to "Never miss a photo"

[andygcook]

Well, F... :)

Thanks for pointing that out. Will get it fixed.

[aacook]

That was totally my bad. Thanks for the heads up. The f` has been nuked.

[th0br0]

Love the idea! Does this ship internationally? Some FAQ/ToS/etc would be good.

[andygcook]

Thanks! And good point on the FAQs + TOS. Will add them to the to-do list.

We're beta testing the app right now with friends & family and have made our first few deliveries already. The response has been great so far from people's grandparents. They love getting the prints in the mail with the captions to tell the story of the photo on them.

We're going to be exploring international shipping soon. What country does the person you want to send photos to live in?

[edit - spelling]

[th0br0]

Germany.

Something like this also needs the ability to delay shipments - old people are more likely to be admitted to hospitals or similar.

[andygcook]

That's a good point too and something we hadn't considered. Would it work if the package was just delivered in the mail as usual and they could open it when they got home as something to look forward to?

[th0br0]

That assumes that old people live at home / have a regular mail box. What if they live in a nursing home or similar? Although 4x6 (10x15cm) is postcard format, so usual mailboxes should fit quite a number of those just fine.

[andygcook]

The photos come in a pretty much regular sized envelope that fits in small mailboxes. I do like the idea of letting people pause a delay a delivery for whatever reason they want, or maybe even redirect it at the last minute if needed. Appreciate the feedback and ideas.

[chuckdries]

Compress your images or something. I'm on gigabit and the page is still taking forever to load.

[andygcook]

Thanks for the heads up. Thought we did compress them, but I missed admittedly huge 1.8MB photo. Should be faster now.

[wmeredith]

Your hamburger menu doesn’t work for me. I’m on the latest version of mobile Safari.

[aacook]

HN can be counted on to find any and all bugs! Squashed. Thank you.

[ian0]

That is such a lovely service.

[andygcook]

Thanks, Ian! Really appreciate the kind words. Our Grandma & Grandpa love it so far, especially my Grandpa. He’s almost deaf and can’t use the phone. Getting photos in the mail from our family helps him keep in touch with what everyone is up to in life between visits.

[aacook]

The best side benefit so far is probably how it's getting Grandkids to visit their Grandparents more often. My fiance and I visited my future Grandma-in-law on the day her photos were delivered. They made plans to get together for breakfast monthly now. Good vibes!