Postmaster General: ‘The American Citizens Aren’t Our Customers’

[donnay]

Postmaster General: ‘The American Citizens Aren’t Our Customers’

By: Joel Gehrke (Washington Examiner)

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe doesn't regard the American taxpayers who subsidize the U.S. Postal Service as the agency's primary customers, according to a new report from Inside Sources.

"You disrupt my service and we will never work with you," Donahoe told Outbox founders Evan Baehr and Will Davis. “You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers — about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”

It's hard to believe that Donahoe would say that, as Baehr and Davis told Derek Khanna. The USPS refused to respond to Inside Sources' request for information beyond a boilerplate statement that said, among other things, that USPS would "continue to monitor market activities to ensure protection of our brand and the value and security of the mail."

http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/04/29/postmaster-general-%E2%80%98-american-citizens-aren%E2%80%99t-our-customers%E2%80%99

[satchelmcqueen]

well ill just stop mailing stuff with them.

[angelatc]

More on the story here: http://blog.outboxmail.com/post/74086768959/outbox-is-shutting-down-a-note-of-gratitude

They were in the business of digitizing mail. Their customers would have their mail routed to their company, and the company would deliver it in a digitized format.



Although an early test with the USPS that let users redirect their mail to us showed signs of success and operational simplicity, an interview by CNBC triggered a request from the Postmaster General himself to meet in Washington, DC. In one of the most surreal moments of our lives (listen to it in an NPR interview), we had our very own Mr. Smith Goes to Washington encounter where the senior leadership of USPS made it clear that they would never participate in any project that would limit junk mail and that they were immediately shutting down our partnership. This 30-minute meeting was the end of our business model.

It is pretty easy to see why the USPS would object to this. If Outbox could get people used to getting ALL their mail in their email, the USPS would have no reason to exist at all.

Interesting side note: Peter Thiel was an investor.

And it wasn't the refusal of the USPS to partner with them that killed them:


After raising $5m in June of last year, we set out to onboard the 4,000 individuals we had amassed on our central-San Francisco waitlist. We projected converting a large percentage of these individuals, and planned to scale our marketing efforts at a projected cost of $20 per acquisition.


However, after an extensive email marketing campaign to our waitlist, total yield from the waitlist was under 10 percent. And as we started marketing outside of this network, we had difficulty finding a repeatable and scalable acquisition channel. Across all of our efforts, our acquisition numbers were over $50 per lead.

[donnay]

Flashback:

The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse
By Devin Leonard May 26, 2011

Phillip Herr looks like many of the men who toil deep within the federal government. He wears blue suits. He keeps his graying hair and mustache neatly trimmed. He has an inoffensively earnest manner. He also has heavy bags under his eyes, which testify to the long hours he spends scrutinizing federal spending for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency where he is Director of Physical Infrastructure Issues. As his title suggests, Herr devotes much of his time to highway programs. But for the past three years he has been diagnosing what ails the U.S. Postal Service.

Continued... (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_23/b4231060885070.htm)

[Uriel999]

Well, let's be honest...Nobody needs to use the Post Office anyways when FedEx and UPS give such better service anyways. Wait you mean you're cheaper and faster than the USPS? LOL, why would anybody use the USPS.

[heavenlyboy34]

Well, let's be honest...Nobody needs to use the Post Office anyways when FedEx and UPS give such better service anyways. Wait you mean you're cheaper and faster than the USPS? LOL, why would anybody use the USPS.
USPS is too big to fail! ;)