Matt Brezina, the entrepreneur who co-founded the Y-Combinator-backed email management company Xobni, has returned to the startup game with the launch today of his new company, Sincerely.
Sincerely’s business is simple but ambitious: make it easy for users to make physical copies of photos taken on their mobile phones.
Postagram, Sincerely’s first product, enables users to send postcards made from the photos they’ve taken with Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app for the iPhone. Postagram, which can be downloaded on the iPhone or on the web, integrates with the Instagram API and allows users to turn their Instagram photos into pop-out postcards with short, 140-character messages. For 99 cents including postage, Postagram will print and mail the postcards anywhere in the world.
As clever as Postagram is (and I think it’s really clever), basing one’s business on a third-party’s software API is never a smart bet for the long term. Twitter developers have learned that the hard way. Brezina is quick to emphasize that Postagram is just the first of many photo printing products Sincerely has in the works for various photo-sharing programs and mobile platforms.
What I love about Postagram is that it makes it so easy to bring your photos back into the physical realm. Since I started using a digital camera in 2005, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually had any photos printed out. Sincerely aims to bring back tactile photo sharing, the kind we used to have with picture frames and scrapbooks. For all the perks of digital photography, there’s still something special about having hard copies of certain pictures.
Brezina, who left day-to-day operations at Xobni in 2010, co-founded Sincerely with Bryan Kennedy, another Y-Combinator alum. The company isn’t saying who their investors are or how much money they’ve raised, but Sincerely’s 5-person team is working out of the San Francisco office of First Round Capital.
In this short video clip, Brezina gives us his Sincerely elevator pitch and explains why he cut his post-Xobni travels short to come back to the startup “gold rush.”
Watch this video for free on GigaOM
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
- Did We Really Learn Anything From the Dotcom Crash?
- Cleantech Was a Market Leader in Q4
- What the VC Industry Upheaval Means For Startups
