So I wanted my outreach to stand out, so I started printing physical mail to send into the world. But why stop there, so I started wax sealing them. Yk, real premium Victorian feel, and I was having a blast. The problem is that wax sealing takes forever, but I found that if I use a Peltier device (makes one side of a plate hot and the other cold) with ice water flowing over it, I can freeze the wax in place and move really quickly.
Anyway, I wanted to test if this could be a WSAS (Wax Seal as a Service). It would be so cool to have an excuse to build an end-to-end automated process for custom wax sealing. Please hit me up if anyone wants to try sending out a few, and I'd love to help.
Why use AI generated pictures for the letters? Lot of the site wording is clearly AI too, but the pictures of final product are the most important aspect.
I'm genuinely asking, since it just makes the site look untrustworthy. The only thing balancing that are the real pictures of the peltier stamp process.
From an old Mack Reynolds short story. The recipient is receiving a message from an alien space station, but doesn't have the alien's message machine, just a decoder.
Seal Ready
Stamp-Emblem Ready
Number One Paper
Strike: Embossing Master Emblem Number Two
**** Border
Begin Message
From: Commander Space Fortress Ironclaw�
To: Commander Unidentified Damaged Warship
Sir:
Your ****-signal received and acknowledged herewith. This is the correct
signal for the ****. However, we require the following information:
1) Who are you?
2) What is the name of your ship?
3) What are the circumstances surrounding the **** of your ship?
This information must be forwarded at once, or we must refuse entry.
Stand off while replying.
Cordial claw-claspings,
Gratz Ialwo,
Commander Space Fortress Ironclaw
Fold Message and Glue Shut
Stick Seal
Stamp Great Claw on Front
Eject
Cool idea. I can see you guys doing well in the wedding industry. The price seems steep, but I appreciate the transparency of your pricing. It's refreshing.
I think you're right about that. I was coming at it from a b2b saas perspetive, but not everything should be shoved into that box. I guess I spend too much time on x. What do you think is a fair price for something like this?
I charged that much to gauge interest and considering it's a very manual process rn, but I think I can get it down with some automations.
I think the price would need to be closer to $4 or $5 per letter for me personally to recommend it or consider it. My SIL just sent out wedding invitations with stamped seals, and I think she would have paid $5 per letter to mail 50 envelopes. But at $8 a letter, I start thinking about how I can pay someone to print the cards and I can buy a wax seal at Hobby Lobby myself.
> but I appreciate the transparency of your pricing
I appreciate a different aspect of the pricing page. I love that the "what's included in every letter" feature table includes a checked listing for "hand-applied wax seal". The whole site is very clear that this is the selling point, so in some sense the listing of this feature feels "obvious". But I like the emphasis. It has a similar feeling to Led Zeppelin giving a concert and choosing to include Stairway to Heaven.
How do you center the wax consistently? How about regulating the amount? I used to send wax stamped envelopes as new years letters to friends but have stopped because both the pour method and the glue gun method don't ever seem to produce consistent amounts or proper placement of stamps. Maybe I just haven't made enough to get good at it...but there must be a better way.
I think that's the problem with cold outreach in general. It's just a spam fest. It's so hard to get through even when you're trying to make something valuable. How do you ever find actully good products? Is it ever cold outreach?
Ig personal connections are becoming more and more of a moat
I didn't know the history there, that's cool! The functionality has kind of always been there, but it never felt like something you’d recommend to a normal person.
I've been thinking about a project to make setting up a Tailscale-like setup dummy easy. Ik it's easy now, but trying to make it nord vpn easy. Considering you know what you're talking about, do you think this is a bad idea? It's niche enough that convincing people it's something they want will be a pain, and techies who know they want it, could just do it themselves. Am I being stupid here?
>it never felt like something you’d recommend to a normal person.
Thanks for the recommendation, and the compliment ;)
Well, I'm no expert and way out-of-date but I just looked at today's "VPN routers" and on first glance they don't look like quite the same animal. It's been about 30 years after all.
These modern versions look like they are for millions of people who have censorship problems on their home ISP, so they are intended so any traffic from their local network gets encrypted before exposure to their ISP, and everything that reaches the internet is all through a paid external relay service like NordVPN. Also to the rest of the world your actual home/office IP address and location are not revealed, a provider like Nord uses its own selected address and location as a substitute to interface you to the world instead.
Kind of like a solitary laptop user would install NordVPN on the laptop then have the same encryption/protection and substitute address/location. And actually appear to the world to always be coming from that same substitute Nord location regardless of what hotel room you are in when you fire up the laptop.
The antique VPN routers were more like office machines where censorship was not the issue, but still concerned with confidentiality and security. Mainly you just wanted authorized remote PC's to autologin to the home office and act like you were back there in the office. The home/office public IP address was not concealed from the internet, and "normal" traffic from the local office network through the router to the ISP was not encrypted. When the VPN function in the router was enabled, it then laid in wait for you to log in remotely from your preconfigured authorized laptop(s), and all traffic between the router and the remote PC is encrypted through its own private tunnel. Remotely like this it's like being right there in the office so you have access to the same local resources, and you can be actually accessing the general internet through the home office router using the ISP and services you are already paying for. With no other restrictions or additional payments needed. And the remote hotel ISP sees nothing but encrypted traffic this way too.
Maybe the modern VPN routers are actually capable of doing the same old thing but it's not nearly as popular as paid services any more?
If so, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a turnkey routine like a dashboard that's foolproof to configure a remote device, so it properly interfaces with the modern type home/office router over the internet, IPv4 and/or IPV6. The hard part is that this may still depend on manually configuring the VPN router to act like the old kind as much as possible, since you need your router to act as as the VPN server in place of a Nord server for instance. Rather than act like a commercial-VPN client that these newer routers seem to default to (and might only be capable of?).
Otherwise you would need more than just the dashboard app for the remote PCs.
You've got to have a local solution for the home location too.
Alternatively there are Wireguard-capable routers that can be made to behave the old way. Setting them up could still be the hard part and could require some tech effort, but you only need to do it once. And once that's accomplished according to some reliable guidelines, then it should be a quick and simple breeze to authorize a remote device having Wireguard installed, when needed by manual entry of approved credentials beforehand (or on the spot), without need for Tailscale.
If everything fell into place, the same bone-simple dashboard app would work to reach various VPN server scenarios.
Yeah I see that. But for me it’s more about everything just working. What kind of firewall rules do you have? Maybe that's not the best question to ask on the open internet haha.
I'm coming at it from a more basic NPC angle after ChatGPT started blocking VPN IP traffic. So I'd love to hear a more nuanced angle.
The part of my firewall setup I most wanted to extend to my smartphone was my policy of whitelisting outgoing communications. I don't want applications to be able to talk to the outside world without me explicitly allowing it, so I block all outgoing communications by default and whitelist specific things as needed.
Anyway, I wanted to test if this could be a WSAS (Wax Seal as a Service). It would be so cool to have an excuse to build an end-to-end automated process for custom wax sealing. Please hit me up if anyone wants to try sending out a few, and I'd love to help.
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