vega.rd.no

Snail mailing 469 addresses

Sunday October 21, 2007

To advertise our website, www.prove.no, Francis and I decided to mail all of the driving schools in Norway. The contents of the package was the following;

• A letter introducing us.
• A business card holder with our logo.
• A set of 100 business cards telling about the free tests you can take at our website.

Sounds simple, right? Not so much.

Preparing the materials

We had to get 500 envelopes that would protect the card holders during packing. He had to take two trips to the Office Supply store, since they ran out of the envelopes we needed the first time he was there.

I went to a similar store in Trondheim to get decent paper to print the letters on, and lots of labels that we could print on. I used my duplex color laser to print the letters (on both sides, that’s why the duplex part was important).

We used our comprehensive database of driving instructors in Norway to figure out who to send to. There were a few that didn’t have addresses, some instructors shared offices, so we only sent to one of them, and a few were just plain wrong.

We ordered 500 card holders and 50 000 business cards from a local printing company. We got a discounted price through a guy we know.

Assembling and packing

Then I left for Bergen this weekend, arriving on Thursday night. We started putting the labels on envelopes, and we could do about about 200 labels on 100 envelopes in 15 minutes when we got the hang of it.

We started folding the letters in half, so they would fit in the envelopes. Folding 500 letters by hand isn’t easy, so after we had done a hundred, Francis’ landlord showed up. He told us he had a automatic paper folder at work. At 7 minutes past 7 the next morning, we got a text message saying he had folded all the remaining 397 letters; total time taken was 3 minutes.

To get the card holders up and running, we had to fold them, put some glue on them, and then let the glue dry for at least 15 minutes, before we could put the business cards in. We used rubber bands to secure them, and then add a letter, and put them in a pre-labeled envelope.

Lessons learned

• Shipping stuff is hard. We discovered that we probably wouldn’t do this again without some extra hands. Luckily, we won’t have to do this again.
• Breaking work into small batches is quicker. We worked the fastest when we had really small tasks that were very repetitive. I could fold everything in a card holder in less than 10 seconds when we were done.
• Changing tasks are important. We did small batches of very monotonous work for a while, and then switched, to reduce the boredom. Also, we only had enough clothes-pins to do 47 card holders at a time, which naturally limited our batch size.
• You are more motivated when it is your own company. I would never have worked so hard, nor so fast, if it had been for pay. This was something we had to do ourselves, and the quicker we did it, the earlier we could go do more fun stuff (like celebrate Francis’ birthday).