unopost.com.au

Earlier this year I wrote a post about launching Unofax. That was a team effort with my partner. I did the first 20% and she did the crucial 80%. Since then, we've launched another business: Unopost.com.au. It's a similar idea applied to a different market: postal mail instead of faxes.

When I say "we" I give myself entirely too much credit. I've contributed about 5% to Unopost. The idea comes from impatience. I don't have to do it often, but I really don't like standing in line at the post office. People always act like it's their first day on Earth when they're at the post office, the places are under-staffed and it's generally a slow, boring experience. I figured there might be people out there willing to spend a few dollars to avoid all that. What Unofax taught me is that my intuition is a poor approximation of reality and that there's little downside to "just building it", so we did.

...and it's going alright! It will never be enough to retire from my day job, but there's something quite satisfying about having a "real world" business. Sending faxes was a nice first taste, but it's still more or less entirely digital. Sending post meant having to buy a laser printer, buy a whole lot of prepaid envelopes, printing things out, getting them to the mailbox on time each day, etc. It's actually quite therapeutic and gives us an opportunity to leave the house. It's likely a business that I will hand over to my retired (and restless) parents so they can still be useful and earn some money.

Of course we went overboard and built a wildly over-engineered admin panel, but what does "over-engineering" even mean nowadays? It cost us some tokens, and it reduces our manual toil to the absolute minimum required. It's also fun to watch the revenue go up and to the right, even if it's no hockey stick... yet :)

Launching Unopost has given us exposure to a new customer base and the types of problems they have. It has directly lead to the creation of a third business, which we just launched and I will write about soon (it involves even more real-world stuff, which is fun!). I can already feel the flywheel effect of these entrepreneurial pursuits and it's quite invigorating. I'm genuinely surprised by how much faster we could build Unopost compared to Unofax. We've learned a lot. Surely it will be diminishing returns on the third and fourth micro-businesses, but I'm keen to see what happens.