I’ve been working with this company for almost a year and a half now, and I love the concept so much. Our customers also love the concept as well. Thank you for the attention and support.

Ummm… that is not the truth at all. I’m sure there are vets in the mix, but not ALL of their employees are vets. Sorry bud.

zman@netapp.com. Take care

Rick Z.

Regards,
Rick Z.

The fact is most people can’t afford Neiman Marcus, Business class seats, and other high end stuff put the people who do surely make up for it.

The fact is; MOST people won’t want to part with $10 a month for someone else to manage their mail.

Do the math: it takes the “average” person no more than 10 mins a day to organize (remember you still have to “deal” with the mail - pay the bill, reply, etc, regardless of the service). Some days people will only have flyers to recycle and it takes 5 mins. So we are talking about $1 per min for 10 min so for most people you are paying a service $60 an hour to “organize” your mail.

Not a good value proposition for most people.

Best of luck with your plans.

Our technology is all about giving mail recipients *choice* in how each piece of their mail is handled. When we receive new mail we image front and back, in hi-res color, and present it to our customer on the web. From there the user clicks to choose whether something is to be open-and-scanned, recycled, shredded, forward-shipped, transferred to someone else, or archived. Shortly we’ll be adding a feature to deposit checks found in the envelope directly into their own bank account at their own bank. We *don’t* open and scan every piece of mail - only those items which we are instructed to scan. This ability to cache the physical mail until a choice is made by the customer is what makes us absolutely unique in the world (no European post office offers this service or anything like it, contrary to the other commentator).

Let me clarify our employment policy. When your confidential documents sit at a mortgage company or a law firm or hospital, practically any employee can get access to them. The last paralegal to turn the lights out at the end of the day can rifle through any file cabinet. 90% of information theft occurs by employees who have access. Those employees do not go through anything like the security screening that ours are required to. We start with veterans (usually disabled - this is part of our corporate commitment) who previously held DOD clearances in the past (DOD clearances are invalid after they leave the military) because it’s a good starting point… but we repeatedly conduct our own civilian equivalents of those clearance checks every six months, and then add things like credit check and other background screens. They are bonded and insured. They sign very robust non-disclosure agreements. They are very closely monitored by supervisors and by the software running on their workstations. I assure you that the $8/hr clerk behind the counter at MailBoxesEtc did not have any such screening, and neither did the many thousands of temp employees of the USPS hired during the holiday rush.

More importantly, all scanning is performed in a “clean room” environment. The employees wear special pocketless uniforms, like casino workers. They cannot carry any personal items into the clean room - no cell phone, no pencil and paper, no USB drive - nothing to record with. They are in an isolated work cell - one worker at a time, one open piece of mail at a time. There isn’t even a phone or picture of the family on their desks. So even if they could notice a social security number in the process of scanning a document they’d have no way of recording it. Everything they do is under surveillance. In the near future we’ll be introducing a feature called Documentary(tm) which will allow our customers to view their own documents being scanned. In your business would your employees agree to wear pocketless uniforms instead of their nice clothes, and sit in front of a camera all day not speaking with any other co-workers? Not very likely.

Any mail that is so confidential that a customer would not want even us to open it can of course be forwarded, still originally-sealed, to the customer.

You say that the service “adds costs” but you do not explain how this is so. Perhaps you haven’t considered the true costs of renting a MailBoxesEtc box (much more than our entire bundled service plan costs) and that of driving cost and the value of your time to drive there. Or for a London-based company to have to have an office and admin in NY just to receive mail in NY when they could instead just use our address, a VoIP phone and a website, efax and email to fully serve New York clientele remotely. If you’re talking about enterprise we slash a massive amount of cost out of the entire paper life cycle by converting paper - expensive to push and store - into electronic form, before it ever has the chance to clutter the company premises. See our website for more information on cost savings if you’re so inclined, but like I said to Mike, if it is “expensive,” then compared to what, exactly?

Contrary to Mike’s choice of title for his article on us, we are not out to “kill snail mail.” NI bet you’d be surprised to know that every year postal mail volume in this country grows by 3 billion pieces. People have been predicting it will “go away” since the invention of the word processor, yet look inside your mailbox.o one and no thing - not even email - has put a dent in postal mail volume yet. The average person only gets more mail every year, not less. Our service allows customers to cut that back, and recycle 100% of mail they discard (the national average is about 20%), and shred - with a mouse click - what might otherwise be stolen by an identity thief.

The key thing to keep in mind is that we did not design this service for every person and business out there. Our target market is big enough will all the baby boomers (multiple homes, RVs, boats, airplanes), deployed military, road warrior consultants, hollywood crews, energy workers, expats, foreign based companies, large enterprises and government agencies we serve, to give but a small sample of our customer base. 15% of American households get their mail in a USPS PO Box… that alone is a huge market to serve, and we have virtually no competition going after it because of the immense technology that is required to make this entire process scalable. Our competition is in the form of more expensive and inconvenient alternatives which are in use today. When our target customers learn about us they often comment “wish you guys invented this ten years ago - but i’m thankful you finally did!” We’re happy with that… we don’t need Earth Class Mail to be used by every person on the planet to become a $1B company.

Thanks for listening. -Ron

Has anyone actually used the service here, & could make a recommendation one way or another?

Actually, why not outsource it to rural China? If people don’t speak English, that is as secure as it can get.

Just if I would scan Chinese letters

IMO, snail mail will still exist for a very long time. saying snail mail will disappear is like saying we wont be using paper anymore because we have computers.

I see some very major problems with this model:

1) Privacy - Department of Defence certified? My gosh, privacy issues are primarily about a citizen’s privacy from the government, not some random guy in another city.

2) Confidential mail - cant be opened. Refers back to standard snail mail.

3) The service is adding more cost than it is adding value to an already lean postal mail formula. I can use my standard postal carriers carrier’s premium services for anything extra. If there’s something to kill snail mail, it’s e-mail, although it’s got it own problems.

This business might have an opportunity in delivering mail in poor countries where there might be sufficient internet infrastructure but postal mail doesnt work due to bad address, PO boxes, etc. I can think of a few countries like that. But they’d probably never get around government control of postal mail in and out of those countries.

Blah…. doesn’t look good.

Thanks for the PR – always nice to have the traffic – but by leaving out some simple facts about our business it appears that in a vacuum all kinds of fantastic assumptions have been made by some of the commentators here, and I’d appreciate the opportunity to set them straight.

BTW, much has changed here since you and Cameron and I sat down at a Thai restaurant in Portland Oregon three years ago (before you hit on the phenomenal concept for TechCrunch) and you thought the idea of “Remote Control Mail” was so brilliant that you considered moving to Portland to help us launch the company, and as I recall you said you would have liked to be the first investor in the deal. [for the record, Arrington is NOT a shareholder in the company.] Fast forward… we’re 73 headcount and growing fast, customers in 130 countries, raised yet more capital from top-tier investors, have a strategic partnership with Microsoft, in discussions with 18 countries to potentially deploy this platform through their national posts, and we’ve been exclusively selected for an eight-episode TV documentary just about our company. We’re just trying to hold onto the nose cone. To all the naysayers out there, the proof is in the pudding… having real customers, even including a Fortune 50 company (watch the show).

Let’s first set the record straight on one thing… you accuse me of posting shill comments, which is simply not the case. In fact I was in solid meetings all day and by the time I heard about the TC posting, the shill comments and the anti-shill comments were already out there. With 73 folks I can’t be out there containing the misplaced enthusiasm of every employee, especially new ones. In full disclosure… we immediately inquired internally and found out that two of our sales reps had indeed posted shill comments (not me). They should have known better, and in fact they violated a published tenet that no public posting ever goes out without three executive sign-offs… trust me, they’ll never do it again. Of course we take full responsibility for their actions and we apologize for the transgression. I think it’s obvious which ones they posted, and which were posted by actual customers.

As for the show, I agree the marketing copy from the network which owns Startup Junkies (Comcast MOJO) is not of the same tenor that we would normally use in our own marketing communications. The show itself, however, is more of a documentary than a “reality” show, and is unprecedented in its frank depiction of what really happens at board meetings, investor pitches, etc. We don’t end each episode with a faked-up heated argument and an employee termination. The production company that produced the show is award-winning for its documentaries (Screaming Flea Productions), and blew us away with the rough cuts we got to see… it may not be The Apprentice on the budget they had to work with, but it is certainly better than the movie startup.com, and I think you would be very impressed by it.

In fact, I’d like to invite you, Michael, and any other Bay Area member of the media, venture capital community or startup management team to join us next Tuesday, January 15th, for an exclusive pre-screening of Episode One of the show. It will be held at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus in the Galileo auditorium. There is also a Seattle pre-screening the following night, January 16th, to be held at Microsoft’s Redmond campus in the Kodiak Auditorium. There’ll be refreshments, networking, etc. We only have 300 tickets to give out for the Bay Area and 400 for Seattle, so if any of your readers want to join they can email jessica.grimes@earthclassmail.com for an invitation and to RSVP attendance. First come, first served… they’re going fast.

To the question of our security and confidentiality assurance methods, I’d invite TC’s readers to check out http://www.earthclassmail.com/security. We are doing work for major enterprise accounts, law firms and medical practices who have consistently told us that our security measures –in terms of personnel screening, operational methods, and security technologies – far exceed their best practices. This is something we’ve worked extremely hard to accomplish and are very proud of, and it has led to numerous government agencies including DHS to evaluate our service for the most sensitive mail imaginable. Consumers and small businesses get the benefit from all this infrastructure we’ve developed for the most demanding enterprise customers. And we’re certainly safer than leaving your credit card offers and other juicy items sitting in your mailbox or recycling bin for thieves to abscond with – as they do every day, everywhere in this country.

You again make the claim as you did when you covered Earth Class Mail previously, that we’re “expensive” - but compared to what, exactly?? When VCs were in due diligence and calling our customers for feedback they were apparently told quite often that our customers couldn’t believe how much less expensive our service is than the alternative methods they’d been using in the past to get a remote address and have all their incoming documents digitized. http://www.earthclassmail.com/.....native.php has some comparison info on true costs of our service versus the alternatives available (executive suites, hiring admins, etc.). We’ve continued to offer lower and lower prices as we’ve made greater investments in high-speed automation and as our volumes increase… our lowest cost plans now start at only $9.95/mo, all-in. That’s cheaper than an efax account.

Several people asked why we needed to raise so much money. The answer is simple. To grow our business we have to add production capacity in more geographic markets. Just a single mail sorter costs several hundred thousand dollars. We’re rolling out 18 cities right now, starting with NYC, SFO, LAX, and DCA… about one location per month. Expect we’ll raise a B round to open up Europe once we get North America’s major cities up and running. Like a FedEx or UPS we are building a worldwide network because our business opportunity is global. People who’ve comment about “how dumb an idea this is” are apparently not aware of the fact that postal mail is a $1 trillion dollar industry (with a “t”) employing 9 million people worldwide and processing a half-trillion transactions a year… and that post offices are typically the largest employers in their countries. We’re the only company in the world to have created a system so scalable that a national post office could deploy it. That’s why our Beaverton processing facility is literally the size of a football stadium and can hold 50 million pieces of mail at a time… there is real hardware automation in this deal, not just a web service… a lot more meat on the bones and real IP than this week’s flavor of a social networking company. Mike, I’d like to invite you to tour the plant yourself anytime – or, if you’re too busy, watch the TV show for a glimpse of our inner workings.

Thanks for the air time. I’ve admired your continued success with TechCrunch, as you know, and thank you again for the coverage on Earth Class Mail.

Cheers,
Ron

There are varying degrees of DoD security clearances. Not all of them are of the level you speak of in your post, and the employees making upwards of six figures are usually performing jobs that would have earned them 80-90k in the general market w/o the security clearance.

You think the guys at the local Postal Annex or Mail Boxes Etc. stuffing mail in your p.o. box for $16/hour are any better?

All the privacy grousing reminds me of the early days when all the brick and mortar stores threw all that FUD at Amazon. I can’t believe that meme is cropping up again. They’re going through pretty big lengths to be secure as is, and really it’s not too different from already existant bill-paying services.

My favorite part about Mail Boxes Etc? That they would ditch all the non-first class mail (i.e. junk mail) for me. That strikes me as the best part about this service, along with the road-warrior aspect. I clocked 100k miles a year for three out of the last five and would have KILLED to have had this service then. I wish them luck.

Their mail handlers have DoD security clearances? I call bullshit.

The salary value of DoD security clearances is UPWARDS of $100k/year. Hell, some companies will hire clearance holders just to get access to the clearances.

So either they’re lying about their mail handlers, or those handlers have made some really bad career choices and are in desperate need of quick cash.