A friend of mine is doing the software behind a startup web company with a brilliant, yet simple idea. You enter your contacts (with addresses) once, choose a greting card, write a customized note, and then setup the time (birthday, anniversary, holiday, whatever) for the card to go out. So, they sell greeting cards, but the real value is the service of sending the cards to the right person when you want them sent. I can see people setting up their card orders for everyone once at the beginning of the year in one big frenzy and then forgetting about it.
The name of the company is GreetQ (get it, greeting queue?)
It’s sort of like Netflix meets Hallmark. But the cards aren’t the standard lame Hallmark fare, they are gorgeous cards from boutique presses such as Flaunt, Egg Press, and (my favorite) Hello!Lucky.
If you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a queue, or you want to hand-deliver your cards, you can just buy the cards and have them shipped to you immediately, without any personalization.
While most customers won’t care, the software behind it is really cool. It’s a ground-up, from-scratch project focusing on code qualities and testability throughout. It’s designed for maintainability, so they can add new features or change existing ones safely and easily.
