Snail Mail Publishing for Creators brings new potential revenue streams via StampFans

Hi, I’m Nick, the creator of Stampfans. During the COVID lockdowns in 2020, I wanted to send a piece of “snail-mail” to someone but couldn’t purchase paper, ink or envelopes. Local stores were closed and Amazon was running way behind. So I got the idea for an app that would allow anyone to upload and send any PDF via snail-mail – one single form, $1.75 flat fee. By the time I built the tool, stores were re-opened in my state. I went to Office Depot and purchased everything I’d need to run this entire operation from my home. But I soon learned about a few existing “snail-mail” tools that would make this process completely hands-free for me. That was easier! So I launched the product on Product Hunt and it took off – I had thousands of people visit and use the site in the first few weeks. Some of them still use it to this day.

I had the idea for StampFans a few years later. I was becoming (and still am) a big fan of Substack, but I also love the “analog” world. I noticed that I retained so much more from Substack essays if I printed them out and read them. That was all it took, really, for me to decide I could run this same kind of model but for printed “snail-mail” – the experience with my COVID-era snail-mail tool gave me the confidence I needed to build this completely on my own.

I built an “MVP”, Minimum Viable Product, for StampFans in late 2022. A few people started using it and one of them (a friend of mine, actually) was particularly successful. This was all the validation I needed to get up the courage to quit my day-job and turn StampFans into a proper app. In October 2023, I quit that job and spent the next four weeks straight – every single day – building StampFans. I launched it on LinkedIn on Monday, December 4, 2023.