When Santiago Prieto walked into his hotel room while on a business trip to find a ‘Good Luck’ greeting card with a handwritten message from his wife, Alexis Monson, on the pillow, he was left “speechless, filled with emotion and awe”. Having spent most of his life in Mexico, where the postage system is a mess, Santiago was completely unaware of the greeting card tradition. This experience got him thinking about ways of making such handwritten greetings part of our everyday lives.

Together, Santiago and Alexis left their prestigious jobs at IDEO and Brit+Co respectively, and launched Punkpost to turn their concept into reality.

“Greeting cards are still the best type of communication to amplify and affirm your emotions,” says Alexis. “And, ironically, thanks to Facebook, handwritten cards are more relevant than ever because we’re more connected than ever. So an idea of an app that saved time on going to the store, getting stamps, writing and mailing a card was a great start. However, prototype testing clearly showed that simply automating the process wasn’t going to work. So, we also started building a community of writers who could make each message look like a little piece of art and launched our app in 2015 that made it as easy to send those pieces of art as sending text messages.”

Starting the Business

What makes Punkpost so unique in the industry?

This community of writers and artists powering Punkpost is very unique, and we are really proud that we were able to build it in such a short amount of time. We work with lots of hip artists who’ve designed for the likes of Tory Burch and Vanity Fair and they help us regularly update the exclusive card collections with hip and edgy cards which are part of our brand. As for the writers in our community, they play a huge role in making our business really unique as they put so much effort and care into executing every single order and turning it into a piece of art. Unlike cards you might be sending through other services, all Punkpost cards are handwritten by humans who are really creative individuals and simply love lettering. We still get emails from such people daily, and they write us to offer help with Punkpost orders and participate in driving this “slow communication movement.” They send us lettering flirts as samples which are amazing and often inspire us to try new ideas within our writers’ community!

What were the toughest challenges you faced when starting out?

When it comes to all things tech, there are never-ending bugs to work on. APP CRASHES galore. You just have to hang your head. Talk to your users and apologise and thank them for being patient and understanding (which they usually are) and then fix it and move on. Sometimes you literally feel like someone punched you in the gut. But you can’t just lay there. You just have to be like… well that happened. Let’s fix it and move on.

What do you wish you’d known when starting out that you had to learn the hard way?

Know how to properly test an app. When the app first launched, we got a really good piece of press that gave us over 600 downloads on our first day… Unfortunately, the app was crashing left and right. So it was this weird excitement of people checking out the app, but not being able to check out the app… We realised that we should have tested the app a lot more before launching it and got back to work that same day to introduce a quick update with the needed fixes.

What do you find is most important to remaining at the top of your industry?

Offer a unique product that really makes peoples lives easier and continue to perfect it. Preserve the quality people rely on and the brand identity. As the founders we believe in our product and the idea behind it. We stick to what we know we have to do and the messaging. We try to never falter on what the core business is.

Looking to the Future

How do you see the industry changing over the next 5 – 10 years?

We like to call ourselves “The Millennials’ Answer to Hallmark” and we are really excited about making the tradition of sending greeting cards relevant for the young generation with the help of easy tech like Punkpost. When it comes to greeting cards there’s an unspoken truth that people aren’t willing to part with. “You matter to me.” “I thought of you.” “I took trouble to share with you this thing I like.” We believe more and more people will want to connect to each other in a really personal way, but they don’t really have time to shop for cards or don’t care for e-cards as much as they were expected to — that’s why we feel like Punkpost is ahead of the pack already helping people send handwritten cards as easily as texts.

So Punkpost is the company bringing about that change?

Exactly. For us the challenge is international expansion and growing our writers’ community around the world to deliver people’s messages as quickly as possible. We’ve already sent thousands of Punkposts to over 60 countries and have many customers abroad. We’d love to start growing our international writers’ base for faster delivery of those handwritten messages. For example, having writers in Australia would be super rad!

What is your vision of ultimate success?

Not just making Punkpost successful, but also creating a culture where this success is shared with our team of writers and the artists’ community. And if more people get into the habit of sending personal handwritten notes and love letters instead of texts and emails we’d also consider our mission to be successful.

Finally, do you have any advice for entrepreneurs looking to follow in your footsteps?

To make your new business take off, you’re probably going to have to quit your day job and focus all of your energy on your big idea. And you should feel confident in this choice. I was recently talking to Gloria Cortina, a successful interior designer in Mexico City. Not long ago, she launched a furniture line. She said to me, “I truly believe that you can make any idea, service or product work if you’re willing to put in the time.” I completely agree with her. What is the number one reason for small businesses failing? It’s a lack of time and focus. If you truly believe in your idea. Then buckle up. Quit your day job. Do all the things!

For more information on Punkpost, and to get the app, visit the official website at punkpost.co

Entrepreneur Insider: Punkpost

Starting the Business

Looking to the Future

The 8 Percent

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