Category Archives: Uncategorized

Helllllooooo, Home Delivery!

order-prints

Go ahead, make someone’s day. We dare you.

We all know the famous American playground rhyme:

First comes love,

then comes Kicksend,

then comes more love,

which we obviously all crave

like the bundles of neuroses we are. 

Awwww. You knew our name sounded familiar for some reason! And yes, that is indeed how we named our startup.

Anyway, if it’s love (platonic? familial? romantic? bromantic?) you’re after, you need look no further than Kicksend.

We started out by allowing you to send tons of digital photos to your loved ones. Next, we helped you order photo prints for pickup at your local store – and the feedback from our community has been a pleasure to behold.

We also began to notice a theme.

“I love the application. I am recommending this to anyone who has an iPhone and looking for an easy way to send pictures for easy printing. I sent pics to my parents’ local pharmacy in their town. Easy peezy!” – Dave T.

“I realized that [Kicksend] would be perfect for sending photos to my elderly parents who live clear across the United States in Pennsylvania. I love the idea that that I’ll be able to send photos to their local CVS and they can pick them up.” – Carolyn G.

“I was looking for an easy way to send pictures to a variety of stores near me and the fact that I can send it to stores across the country for my family and friends to pick up is super.” – Barbara A.

“It’s amazing to be able to send photos to my family since they all live a few states away and my grandma loves getting prints of her great grandchildren!” – Rachel C.

(We love that our customers are the kind of people who say “easy peezy.”)

Our customers adored that they could send photo prints to be developed at a store anywhere in the country, so their relatives could pick them up thousands of miles away. We loved hearing that they were keeping in touch not just with digital photos, but with actual physical prints.

We just took the next logical step.

Our newest feature, Home Delivery, allows you to ship photo prints directly to your loved ones, straight from your phone or computer. 

We’ve done research, backed by science, showing that receiving photo prints is the #1 way to make someone’s day. Seriously, you know it’s the best thing anyone will receive all week, short of finding you in their mailbox. (Trust us,  our next feature is a teleportation device. “Kicksend: Send You To Your Loved Ones.”)

OK, you’ve sold me. How does Home Delivery work? 

1. Open the newest version of our app on iOS, Android or the web.

2. Select your photos and choose a size (4×6, 5×7, 8×10 or 4×4.)

3. Enter in the addresses of all your favorite people.

4. Pay with our secure checkout. (Bonus: if you order 10 prints, you get free shipping!)

5. Sit back and wait for the adoring phone calls, emails, texts, Facebook messages and carrier pigeons to roll in.

But don’t take our word for it! Home Delivery has been out in beta for a little bit and we’ve already had some heartwarming stories roll in from our customers. Like this one, from the lovely and charismatic Michele V.

“My grandma LOVED the photos. It just so happened they arrived on her 91st birthday. We will be using Kicksend quite a bit!”

fern

The birthday girl, Fern, with her great grandson, Holden.

Woo-hoo! Thanks for sharing, Michele!

So anyway, what are you waiting for? We bet you know someone who’d be ecstatic to get photo prints in the mail from you. Go ahead, make someone’s day. We dare you.

In fact, we think they’ll be so happy to get your gift that they’ll probably turn right around and send photo prints to someone else, thus furthering the cycle of love. Good job in advance, you! :)

P.S. Use the coupon code, “HIPPOS” at checkout to get 15% off your Home Delivery order!

Announcing the iPad Giveaway Winner

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the Kicksend iPad giveaway we ran last month.  Ken Carlos is our winner.  

Big thanks to everyone who entered and keep watching our blog, Twitter and Facebook feeds – we’ll have some more giveaways coming up over the summer!

Use Kicksend to Share your Easter or Passover Family Pics!

Spring is in the air!  Birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and it’s staying light out later and later.  At Kicksend, we love this time of year.  

If you’re anything like us, the weekend ahead will be spent hanging out with extended family and taking *tons* of pictures and videos.  And sure enough, every family member will want their own copy of this year’s family portrait.  Taking your son or daughter to see the Easter bunny? You know that picture is going to be in high demand! 

Istock_000003213925medium

We built Kicksend to make it easy to send photos or videos to the ones you love.  Just click on the “Lists” button and set up a list for family.  You can send Aunt Susie, Uncle Paul, Cousin Frank, and Grandma those adorable family pictures all at once!   

This weekend, to celebrate Easter and Passover with our Kicksend families, we’re offering a free month of our Plus plan.   

Happy holidays! 

- The Kicksend Team

Win an iPad from Kicksend!

Are you as excited about the newest iPad as we are?  At Kicksend HQ, we’re simply giddy thinking about all the photos, videos and files we can send from those shiny devices.

We’re kicking off a contest in conjunction with the friendly folks at Punchtab to give one lucky winner a brand new iPad.  Enter today!

Ipadks_crop

How we decreased sign up confirmation email bounces by 50%

Kicksend uses the tried and tested pattern of sending our new users confirmation emails to verify their identity. With that, there will always be emails that aren’t delivered successfully, which we care about a lot.

A bounced confirmation email means that our new user wouldn’t have been able to activate their account. So they’ll either have to either sign up for a new account, or contact us to change their email address. These are steps we don’t want to put any user through.

So we recorded and setup detailed notifications for every email bounce, to make sure that we are always aware of what’s happening (thanks Mailgun!). And we soon started to see patterns.

People would misspell their email addresses and be unaware of it, resulting in a delivery failure and a lost user. And it got even more interesting – most of these invalid email addresses were a result of a misspelled domain; “hotmail.con”, “gnail.com”, “yajoo.com”. A clear opportunity for improvement.

Example


Taking a leaf from Google, we created a quick plugin that suggests the right spelling of misspelled email domains. After launching it, we saw bounces drop by 50%! Little prompts to guide the right user behavior always goes a long way. Give it a try.

And we have open sourced it. Mailcheck.js, the jQuery plugin that powers our spelling suggester, is now available for forking on Github: https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck. Enjoy!

Catch me on Twitter @derrickko.

Introducing Verified Delivery for your Files

At Kicksend, we make it incredibly easy to share files with the people you love.  But sometimes you want to share files with people you like. Or people you barely know. And you want some assurance that they are getting to the right place.  

Like all things at Kicksend, we’ve made it super simple – just check a box and indicate that you want us to take special care of your file and we’ll only deliver it to a registered Kicksend account. Think of it like the little “signature required” checkbox when you go to send a FedEx package.

We’ll send an email to the recipient and ask them to sign up with Kicksend. Your file will only be delivered after they’ve gone through a sign up process and verified their email address.

Verifyrecipientscreenshot