I built an online service that prints PDFs through ClickSend. It also sends fax.
I stopped owning a printer years ago because it bothered me seeing it on the desk. The thought I might run out of ink scratches my OCD bad enough that I don't print stuff.
This is one of the top five unsolved problems I had over the past decade+. I drove to Kinko's soo many times to print stuff, brought the USB with the ext3 filesystem and had to drive back to reformat to vfat, or forgot the name of the file I uploaded on my webserver. Now I live in NYC. When my local print guy shut down, the next closest one is 15 mins away of walking in the freezing cold to print a flight itinerary.
I used Staples.com for a while for prints (small fonts in their UI but it works) until they jacked up their prices. I had put in (quite) a few orders with them for 1-2 pages, paid ~$1 each, and had the pages shipped in boxes! Once I asked them to ship to a PO BOX (some insurance form I had to send) and a very nice lady from Staples left me 3 voicemails to tell me they couldn't do it.
Meanwhile I was using hellofax.com. Asking me to get an account and plan for a 4 page fax was annoying. I'm not a business. I'm a consumer. Without a printer or a fax.
I want to reduce the prices and initially built this over Lob until I learned Lob always adds barcode watermarks on their prints. Lob can't print and mail a blank page. It targets businesses.
Then no search engine got the site indexed. Posting on HN triggered the filters. So 0 users. Got a bit bored, so I lurked on /r/pdf to get ideas and started writing scripts for people to do some of the weird things they wanted done. This turned into the LLVM of pdfs for consumers. Yesterday I saw fax has more hits on Google Trends than mail, so added that.
Love to get your feedback.
edit: Today I learned hellofax was bought for $230m. Is there some ratio of business/consumer to estimate how big a consumer market could be?
