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 5×7 inch postcards. If that sounds up your alley, the first 200 people to sign up at www.sincerely.com/ink with the code ‘TC’ will be able to send their first holiday card for free. The app isn’t out just yet, but will be released for iOS and Android shortly.
Of course, Sincerely now has another, very large, competitor: Apple. The company introduced the Cards app for iOS, which also lets you send real-world postcards letterpress greeting cards to friends and family. Apple’s offering is significantly more expensive though — it’s charging $2.99 to send a greeting card to someone in the US, and $4.99 to send it anywhere in the world. Postagram’s price? 99 cents wordwide for its standard postcards, and $1.69 for greeting cards.
