Question: when does your mobile app also need a web experience? Answer: when the app is essentially an e-commerce shop. Sesame, the recently launched mobile gifting app from Sincerely, a company known for its mobile photo postcard and greeting card applications, is now web-friendly with the debut of the Sesame online store. Like its app-based counterpart, the web store will allow users to browse through the various gift boxes for sale, including the trio of new additions for Valentine’s Day, then purchase and send them without the need to install an app on their phone.

This is a slight change in direction for Sincerely, which has been a mobile-first company in the past. Although the Sincerely website does offer users access to their past orders, account info and address book, the process of designing cards, greetings or ordering other gifts was done on mobile, previously.

Sesame, for those unfamiliar, launched just before the holidays, allowing users to browse and send themed gift boxes from their iPhone. These boxes include unique, hand-picked items packaged nicely, and centered around a theme like “Cocktail Hour,” “Game Night,” “Puppy Picks,” and more.

According to Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina, the new web store was added based on users’ feedback – they would read about what Sesame had to offer, but were frustrated that they had to download an app to even see the available gift sets, he says. Now they have access to a fully featured shopping experience right on web.

Not only is running an online store like this a change for the company, Sesame itself represents a step up from the apps Sincerely launched in the past – postcards and greetings you send from your iPhone. But so far, that transition has gone well, says Brezina. Though he declined to provide user numbers because of the app’s newness, he did note that Sesame’s holiday sales quickly passed those of its Postagram app (mobile postcards) in terms of daily revenue, thanks to the average order size being so high, as well as increased interest from the corporate gifting market.

“This has been our strategy all along,” says Brezina of the shift to Sesame’s more expensive gifting options. “We start users on the world’s simplest gift, a printed postcard, and then cross-sell other, more premium priced cards and gifts.” Once someone uses the Sesame app for a gift, their rate of repeat purchase is high, Brezina adds.

Because Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, the company has introduced three new gift sets ranging from a spicy “5 Shades of Grey” set complete with massage oil and lotions, chocolates, silk ties and more. The other two sets are tamer, featuring the traditional V-Day selection of chocolates, a card, and a plush toy (a “love monkey,” aww).

Since its launch, the company has added just one other set to the dozen or so it already had, and still plans to add around two per month going forward, including holiday gifts.

Although Facebook has also been making moves into social gifting in recent days – including with yesterday’s launch of reusable gift cards – Sesame’s gifts, in my personal experience, have been of higher quality than the early, more self-promotional efforts Facebook has delivered. Gifts was a low mark on Facebook’s otherwise solid Q4 2012 earnings this week, as Gifts product and promoted user posts functionality accounted for less than $5 million of Facebook’s overall revenue.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sincerely, the company known for its mobile photo postcard and greeting card apps, is today expanding upon its vision to become a full-on mobile gifting service with the launch of its latest application, Sesame. The new app allows users to browse, select and send themed gift boxes from their mobile phone.

The boxes include hand-picked, unique items centered around a general theme like “Cocktail Hour,” “Game Night,” “Baby Playdate,” “Puppy Picks,” and more, offering a range of items for both men and women as well as adults and children. As of today’s debut, there are just over a dozen of these boxes to choose from at price points of $29 or $49. However, Sincerely founder Matt Brezina tells me that the company plans to add new boxes every month. He doesn’t expect to ever have more than 20 or 30 available at a time, though – that would be too much to easily browse through on mobile. The company may also experiment with different price points, possibly adding boxes as low as $19 or as high as $99, he adds.

Brezina says that Sincerely has always thought of itself as a mobile gifting company. “This is something we’ve planned on doing since we started the company. Our mission at Sincerely is to help the world be more thoughtful,” he explains, “and we’re doing that by building the world’s largest gifting network.”

Although there are several app makers offering ways to send gifts, generally cards, via mobile phones (SnailMailMyEmail, Postful, Red Stamp, Postcard on the Run, and Postcardly come to mind), Sincerely introduced a feature in April which showcased its grander vision of becoming a network, as opposed to just an app. The company is helping users build up a database of friends and family members’ postal addresses – in a digital age where letter writing has become passé, such a thing is a critical step in making mobile gifting a reality. While initially, the app fills its contacts list from those saved on your device, it also uses Facebook integration and other tools to discover the addresses’ you don’t have saved. For example, Sincerely will send an email to another user asking for their address (in a very nice, non-spammy way) while your gift is on hold. After the user responds, the gift ships. That same “Sincerely Magic,” as it’s called, is built into the new Sesame app, too.

Having received a sample box prior to this review, I can confirm that it’s a step up from the brown box gifts that arrive from Amazon and other e-retailers. Sesame’s gift boxes are blue and white, filled not with peanuts, but decorative “straw,” which serves both to protect gifts during shipment as well as offer a better “unboxing” experience. The entire gift set is wrapped in tissue paper with a personalized note tucked in and items inside are tagged with clever messages like “light me” (for a candle), “taste me” (for some chocolates), etc. Another card details each item inside the box, as well.

Launch partners for the app include subscription-based commerce service Citrus Lane, which specializes in boxes of baby products, and San Francisco-based food blog Lickmyspoon.com, who helped Sincerely curate some of the available boxes in exchange for the provided exposure (but not a slice of the revenue).

But what chance does a mobile gifting company have today, not only in the face of giants like Amazon, but also with the more recent debut of Facebook Gifts? “I basically see Facebook as the Amazon of gifting,” says Brezina. “They’re going to have a larger selection than we have, but basically it’s about sending a product to somebody and it shows up in a brown box with a crumpled packing slip and an unpersonalized card. And you also knew what you were going to get because they tell you about it,” he adds. “The thing is, most people you send gifts to can afford what you’re sending them and don’t always need it. Eight to ninety percent of sending a gift to someone…is the experience of the surprise and the unwrapping.”

Another reason Sincerely might not be worried about Facebook’s move into gifts? The company is already a Facebook partner, powering Facebook’s “Mail a Postcard” feature in testing. That leaves wiggle room for a future partnership with Facebook on gifts, as well, if Facebook became interested. “Sesame gifts could potentially be a type of gift for somebody to send on Facebook, but I haven’t seen an opportunity to do that yet,” says Brezina.

Today, Sincerely has 1.2 million users across all its applications, which combined have been downloaded 5 million times, and the company has shipped products to 800,000 unique households.

With sign-ups first announced earlier this month, today the new Sesame app has gone live. Gifts and delivery are supported in the U.S. only with rush (2-day) and standard (5-7) shipping options available.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile photo-printing and greeting card startup Sincerely wants to encourage users to vote this election season, and to do so, it has partnered with artist Shepard Fairey on the creation of an exclusive new card. Best known as the creator of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, Fairey’s new card has a similar style and color palette, but offers a non-partisan plea: it just says “Vote!” To encourage users to send these cards to friends, Sincerely is now giving away 100,000 of them for free from now until the election on November 6th.

The cards are available in the company’s flagship application, Sincerely Ink. For those unfamiliar, Ink is like a more feature-rich alternative to Apple’s own Cards app. (In fact, it was there first).

“We believe that as responsible citizens, we are called to not only vote, but to move those around us to get out the vote,” says Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina of the new cards. “We have a unique platform to do just that and want to use it to the fullest.” While there are many organizations that help get out the vote, the company believes that personalized messages from friends have far more power to mobilize voters than emails or tweets from strangers.

But some right-leaning users may have a problem with sending out cards reminiscent of the Obama poster, of course. But not to worry, there are alternatives. Ink now includes a whole “Election” section with photo and non-photo cards for both political parties, and several “call to action” cards as well. All can be customized with a personal message and then mailed anywhere in the U.S., arriving in three to seven days.

Sincerely Ink is a free download for iPhone, iPad, and Android, and the new cards are available in the app now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In what could blossom into an ecommerce opportunity, Facebook is testing a new “Mail A Postcard” feature powered by Sincerely that lets you choose one of your photos and have Facebook send it to a friend as a postcard — in real life. You can add a message that will appear on the back, and also mail friends prints of their own photos. The sender is charged a small fee, and Facebook is trying out a few different price points.

Though built as a spur-of-the-moment Hackathon project, if Facebook rolls out Mail A Postcard it could give users a new reason to upload and interact with photos, plus earn the social network a little money too.

Mail A Postcard is a partnership with Sincerely, makers of Postagram, which lets you send your Instagrams through snailmail. That service is only $0.99 per card, so Facebook might be aiming at a similar price or a little higher to net it a margin. The deal could bring tons of visibility to Sincerely, which also offers photo apps Popbooth and Dotti.

The few users who are in the feature’s tester group will see a “Mail Postcard” button at the bottom of photos they’re viewing. Clicking it opens a screen to enter the friend’s address and message. Users can ask their friend or check their profile for their mailing address if they don’t know it. For now you can only mail your own private photos to friends, or mail friends their own photos that you can see. It doesn’t work for public photos or photos from Pages.

Mail Postcard could also fit in well with Karma, a startup recently Facebook bought that we suspect will soon emerge as a way to send gift cards and physical gifts to friends. Imagine instead of birthday wall post you could mail friends gorgeous postcard with a heartfelt message plus a gift card or little toy. That sounds more “connected” than a one-second “Happy Birthday!” post, but it wouldn’t take much longer to send.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sincerely, the startup behind photo and card-printing mobile apps Postagram, PopBooth, Sincerely Ink and Dotti, has partnered with Brit Morin’s latest venture,  Weduary, a service for designing social wedding websites. Through the new partnership, Weduary will now offer a special collection of wedding invitations and other wedding-related cards within Sincerely’s flagship app, Sincerely Ink.

For those unfamiliar with these two companies, Sincerely Ink is like a beefed up version of Apple’s Cards app (with a better selection of cards), and Weduary is a newly launched weddings startup that’s taking on top brands like TheKnot and MyWedding by leveraging Facebook to build more social wedding websites.

As anyone who’s had a formal wedding can tell you, managing all the invites and announcements is time-consuming and tedious process. There’s not just the wedding, but also mailings for the “save the date,” the engagement party, the bridal shower, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, the rehearsal dinner, and sometimes even more – like fittings, brunches, and other gatherings dedicated to wedding preparations. (Ugh. Also, this is why I went to Vegas.)

That’s why it’s nice to see an easier alternative to the traditional process like this, courtesy of the new collection from Brit & Co’s Weduary. I mean, let’s face it, weddings would be a lot more fun if it wasn’t for all the work involved.

Through Sincerely Ink, Weduary is now offering users some really adorable stationary, which can also be customized using your own photos, addressed via the in-app address book or the one on your phone, and whose designs are made to match up with the website designs currently offered through Weduary.com. In addition, not only is card creation and mailing simplified through “app-ification” of the process, Sincerely has introduced a feature that automates another tedious aspect to the invites issue – address collection. Users will be able to send out a custom link (e.g. sincerely.com/janeandjohn) to their friends and when the recipients add their address, the sender’s Sincerely Address Book is automatically updated with their contact info.

Cards are $1.99 for U.S. mail and postage, but volume discounts are available. The new invitations are available in Sincerely Ink now – you can grab it from the App Store here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sincerely, the startup behind a range of photo-printing and greeting card mobile apps, including Postagram, PopBooth, Sincerely Ink and Dotti, is today rolling out a major update to its Postagram product which will introduce post office tracking for its cards as well as scannable QR codes – which the company is cleverly not planning to refer to as “QR codes” (too geeky) in its communications with customers.

More importantly, Postagram is the first of the company’s apps to gain access to “Sincerely Magic,” a new feature that will help build a connected database of the apps’ users across all Sincerely products. The feature will allow users to send cards via snail mail to anyone, even if they only know their email address.

I’m sure we’ve all been the recipient of those emails where a friend or family member asks, “hey, can I get everyone’s mailing address?” Addresses used to be something we remembered, or at least had jotted down in a book somewhere, but in the post-email/Facebook era, they’re an afterthought. You tend to only realize you need a address on the rare occasion you have formal invites to send out, printed photos to share, or something else – like a gift – that needs to be sent via the mail.

There have been a lot of attempts at building an email and/or mobile photo-to-postal mail solution, including SnailMailMyEmail, Postful, Hipster, Red Stamp, and new entry (and more direct competitor to Postagram) Postcardly, to name a few. But many of these have failed to overcome the biggest hurdle in using snail mail – getting people’s addresses.

That’s why what Sincerely is doing is so clever. It automatically searches your phone’s address book (with your permission, of course), to load up Postagram with a list of all the other Sincerely users you’re connected to, filling out your Sincerely address book. For now, the app matches contacts based on email address, but, in the future, being Facebook friends will be all that it takes. The addresses will be marked with a red “S” to separate them from those you added manually.

Postagram (for iPhone) is the first of the company’s apps to get the “Magic” feature, which will roll out to all the company’s products and supported platforms in the coming weeks.

While Sincerely Magic is the biggest news in terms of the startup’s future vision, the Postagram app has also received some other notable features in today’s update. The postcards will now ship with a scannable QR code, which the company will tell customers is “just a stamp.” Scanning the stamp gives the recipient a digital copy of the photo on the card, adds the sender’s address to the recipient’s Sincerely address book, and it alerts the sender the card has been viewed.

Both parties get one free credit towards their next Sincerely purchase, too, after the scan.

Finally, Postagram has added post office tracking, similar to Apple’s Cards app. Senders are alerted as to when their card reaches the first post office center, and when it gets to the recipient’s post office.

Although Apple’s Cards app also provides notifications (via push), Sincerely’s CEO Matt Brezina says that he’s not worried about competing in the same space as Apple. Not only was Sincerely launched first, its Cards competitor Sincerely Ink offers a better selection with better designs. (That’s actually true). As a startup, they’re also able to move more quickly, he says, introducing new features and designs faster than a large company like Apple can. If anything, Brezina says that the launch of Cards was some of the best marketing for Sincerely that they could have gotten.

Printed out photos and cards sent via mobile is just the beginning for this startup. Brezina tells us he sees what they’re building as a “gifting” company, which leaves room to move into other types of gift options via mobile in the near future. While he wasn’t ready to discuss details, some obvious gift options could be flowers or gift cards, perhaps.

Sincerely is backed by $3 million in funding from Spark, First Round, Charles River, and SV Angel.

The updated Postagram app for iOS and Android is rolling out today. (Note that “Magic” is iPhone-only for now).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sincerely, the maker of mobile apps that let you send your photos as print postcards, is pushing out a new version of its Sincerely Ink app today. The main change is that the theme now features Valentine’s Day cards, as well as other themes like Birthdays or New Year’s. Not huge news in and of itself, but get ready for many more updates like this — the Christmas season went so well for the company that it’s doubling down on holiday editions

Its largest mobile app, Postagram (a regular top app in the iTunes photo app category) saw 39% of its users also install and send a card using the Sincerely Ink app, founder Matt Brezina tells me. Postagram also lets you mail high-quality print versions of phone photos, and it could theoretically also be used during the holidays. So, the cross-promotion number means that lots of users are serious about themed cards for special occasions, and that Sincerely’s theme changes are hitting home with them.

The Ink app includes 20 Valentine’s Day-themed cards, although there are also new Thank You and Birthday cards available now. Brezina says they’re adding more designs all the time without the app itself needing to be updated. Customization options include photo filters and a section for including a personalized message. Cards cost $1.99 for a glossy 5

Thanks to services like iCloud and Google+, snapshots flow like water between mobile devices and the web these days. But many of those photos never make the jump from pixels to paper. And, as it turns out, people still love to stick photos and cards to their family refrigerator.

That’s where Sincerely comes in. The company builds products that revolve around easily creating and sending physical, real-world postcards at a low cost. And today it’s announcing that it’s raised a $3 million Series A funding round led by Spark Capital, with Spark’s Bijan Sabet joining the board. Other participants in the round include a strong roster of investors: First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Chamath Palihapitiya, Drew Houston, Paul Buchheit, Adam Smith, Ariel Poler, Shan Sinha, and Paul Freedman.

So far Sincerely has built three products. The first is Postagram, an app available for Android and iOS that lets you snap photos with your phone’s camera and quickly shoot off postcards to friends and family. The second is Sincerely Ship, an iOS library that lets other developers quickly bake Postagram-like functionality into their own apps.

Finally, Sincerely is announcing a new product today: Sincerely Ink, which will let you create and ship holiday cards personalized using your own photos, which can be inserted into one of 40 professionally designed templates. These holiday cards will begin at $1.69 apiece including postage, and will be printed on 5

When it comes to photo apps, some of the first to hit involved recreating old school photo booths. It was (and remains) an awesome, if not obvious, idea. The proliferation of front-facing cameras on smartphones only accelerated this trend. But those apps tend to come up short in one very important way: you don’t get the actual print-outs of the pictures you take! With PopBooth, that’s exactly what you’ll get.

PopBooth is the second app the Sincerely team will be releasing soon (in a couple of weeks). You may recall Sincerely as the team behind Postagram, the brilliant app that turns your best Instagram images into postcards on the go. PopBooth takes what they’ve already learned about printing out pictures and transfers it to this new concept.

Here’s how it will work. You download the PopBooth app on your iPhone or iPad (2,

In the digital world we live in, there’s still something nice about postcards. They’re tangible, yet cheap. They’re meaningful, yet simple. But like most physical mail, they’re dying. Before that happens, Postagram has a digital spin on them.

The service, launching today, allows you to take any picture you’ve captured on the hot photo-sharing service Instagram and send it in postcard form for a mere $0.99. Yeah, I’m going to use this all the time.

Screw the canned picture of the Eiffel Tower or a Hawaiian sunset, sending your own Instagrams in postcard form is at least 1,000 times better. And co-founder Matt Brezina knows it. He anticipates people not only sending Postagrams to loved ones and friends, but to themselves as well as cheap keepsakes.

And the key to all of this is mobile. Postagram is an app that allows you to look at your Instagrams (via their API) while on the go and quickly send them to anyone you want to from your iPhone. All you need is a