Imagine paying less for everything you use the least and more for everything you regularly consume or buy in volume.

I was in the direct mail business but we sent First Class because it tends to get opened better than bulk. I sent out over 1.5 million pieces of mail using first class and suffered through 4 postage increases before closing the door on that business.

Most of the mailers I sent was 10,000 pieces. Few individuals if any will ever send that many first class letters in a lifetime. The postal service IS CURRENTLY look differently at their model and changes are coming down the pipe at this moment, but economy of scale must remain in their model now and forever in the future as far as I see.

It is the bigger businesses, whether they are sending advertisements or invoices who make it possible for you to have the luxury of someone coming to your house and carrying your letter for you to anyplace and delivering it to anyone you can describe on the outer envelope, all for a grand total of 42 cents.

Still, your post does make one think, at least it did me

In a way, something like business reply mail is already there:

http://www.usps.com/replymail/business.htm

Any ideas? What could another business add on top of what the USPS already delivers? What would you do with a “white label global physical delivery network”?

I also fully admit that this is a half baked idea that came to me before falling asleep last night. Not my most lucid moment but I think Ethan is on to something. What if you extended that service into a platform (taking a page from Microsoft)? what other services could you fulfill? Could you open source it? hmmmm

Imagine paying less for everything you use the least and more for everything you regularly consume or buy in volume.

I was in the direct mail business but we sent First Class because it tends to get opened better than bulk. I sent out over 1.5 million pieces of mail using first class and suffered through 4 postage increases before closing the door on that business.

Most of the mailers I sent was 10,000 pieces. Few individuals if any will ever send that many first class letters in a lifetime. The postal service IS CURRENTLY look differently at their model and changes are coming down the pipe at this moment, but economy of scale must remain in their model now and forever in the future as far as I see.

It is the bigger businesses, whether they are sending advertisements or invoices who make it possible for you to have the luxury of someone coming to your house and carrying your letter for you to anyplace and delivering it to anyone you can describe on the outer envelope, all for a grand total of 42 cents.

Still, your post does make one think, at least it did me

http://aws.amazon.com/fws/

USPS has some monopolies/differentiators, there’s got to be a way for them to platform-ize all that physical infrastructure.

It’s like: what would you do if you had access to a bunch of mailboxes and, literally, an army of door-to-door deliverypeeps?

I agree that you wouldn’t be able to emulate the structure exactly but I think you could flip the model, getting more efficiencies. It would require a complete restructure of their org structure of course.

- depends on the demand elasticity for “direct mail”, a good person to ask would be http://www.unstructuredventures.com (he used to be w/ COF). I’d be really surprised if USPS hasn’t modeled this to death to optimize pricing.

- The thing with freemium is that for a “virtual” good the marginal cost for the extra features is nominal (or nonexistant) and the margin is huge. Not sure if that would work here. Paying for premium gets you extra features; not sure what the premium feature would be for the “power user” is in this model. In the status quo, the “power user” drives economies of scale, so they get a price discount. Maybe if we all banded together to negotiate a better price on postage that would work (“we promise to send X letters/year if you drop the 1st class stamp to $0.10)

Thanks!