"Emotionally Distant Grandchild" , "Good Grandchild", "Nana's #1"
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.
We'll probably keep the Premier plan but need to rename the others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. [email protected] 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.
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).
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.
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! :)
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.
Thanks for pointing that out. Will get it fixed.
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]
Something like this also needs the ability to delay shipments - old people are more likely to be admitted to hospitals or similar.