“So we’ve had to take a hard look at the different things we do in the businesses and ask ourselves: are we doing this because it’s better for our customers or making us money? Or are we doing “x” because we’re “supposed to”? If the only answer is “we’re supposed to”, it gets cut.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

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This Interview was made possible by our friends at

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Anthony Morales and Kristen Carney Co-founded ThankThank Notes, a company that sends hand written notes on behalf of others.  The pair are also Co-founders of Cubit Planning, a company that provides technology that provides cut-and-paste ready demographic data in seconds.  Anthony has a background in web design and has been a freelance designer/developer for twelve years.  His portfolio includes numerous tech startups as well as a Fortune 1000 company.  He’s held a variety of technical positions with companies such as Hoovers, Deja.com, University of Huston, University of Texas at Austin and a privately held oil and energy company.  Anthony is professional martial-artist. He holds a 3rd degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won, and has taught martial arts to kids and adults since 2002.

ThankThank Notes started in 2010 and is a service that handwrites your notes and puts them in the mail.  In the electronic age, handwritten notes are truly remarkable.  The company was designed, built and launched in 8 hours.  Within a few weeks and a few more hours of effort, the first sales began to come in. 

MO:
We all know the amazing feeling when someone takes the time to write us a hand written “Thank You.” Where did the idea for ThankThank Notes originate?

Anthony:
We send all of our Cubit customers handwritten thank you notes, and our customers love the notes. As Cubit grew, we were writing more and more notes – a great problem to have. There were days when I had a stack of blank notes waiting to be sent several inches high. It was my job to send them, and I was getting behind. We’re automation nerds, so we thought there should be a way to automate sending the notes so we wouldn’t get behind. We used services to automate all sorts of other stuff: hosting, source code management, email, etc. Our web app sends automated welcome messages, password reset messages, why not thank you notes? We thought it was a great idea, and since we couldn’t find a service to do it, we decided to build it ourselves. Then we thought other businesses could benefit from a setup like ours.

MO:
The company was recently launched and you had some customers. What reactions have your customers had to the service? What reactions have they received from their customers that are receiving the hand written notes?

Anthony:
The reaction has been amazing. We don’t have to explain the value of personal communication and many of our customers already send handwritten notes to their customers. They’re really excited about optimizing the process of sending notes.

MO:
While obviously some great customer relation gains can be made here by entrepreneurs and businesses, have you found anyone leveraging your service for personal reasons?

Anthony:
We have a few people sending personal notes. Some have expressed interest in sending thank you notes for wedding gifts, baby shower gifts and the like. One guy did ask to send a note to his mom, a heart-felt one too, but he decided against it. He said his Mom would probably recognize the fact that the note wasn’t in his handwriting.

MO:
Are there any specific requirements or limitations for handwritten notes? Can customers choose note cards or stationary?

Anthony:
To keep things simple, we offer one style of card on the site. However, we’re happy to use cards our customers provide if they have branded stationary or a favorite. The only limitation is the number of words on each card which is 75.

In the future, and if our customers ask for it, we want to offer different card designs. We’ve tossed around the idea of short runs of cards by featured designers.

ThankThank Demo 10.19.2010 from Kristen Carney on Vimeo.

MO:
An amazing part of your story is that the business was essentially launched in 8 hours. What process did you go through to do this and what was the driver behind the 8 hour time line?

Anthony:
We already had one startup, Cubit. The ThankThank Note idea was born from a pain we felt in running Cubit. It was sitting in our “quiver” waiting to be fired. But we were really busy. On a lark, I suggested we take our day off and spend some time working on ThankThank – if we didn’t dedicate and commit some time to it, we’d never get it done. So we decided we could spare 8 hours on our day off. The first hour or so was spent setting goals and determining scope. We had a lot of ideas of what we could build. One of us would say something like “what if we…” and the other would say “NO. We can’t build that in 8 hours.” After an hour or so of saying no, we knew what we wanted to do: build a site where people could order and pay for handwritten notes.

We could have sat down to custom design and code the “perfect” website. But we didn’t. Instead, we bought a WooTheme (a professionally designed website), setup a WordPress site (a free CMS), hooked up a Wufoo order form to PayPal and voila! In a few hours, we had a professionally designed site with a built-in order/purchase process. We spent the remaining time adding content to the site.

After that we kind of forgot about it as we got busy with Cubit. At lunch one day, my co-founder, Kristen, submitted ThankThank to a few startup directories. With that additional hour of work, we made our first 3 sales.

MO:
What are the challenges in starting a second business while running an existing and demanding business such as Cubit? How do you manage those challenges?

Anthony:
Running one business is hard enough. Running two businesses is crazy, but there have been some unexpected benefits. ThankThank Notes has forced us to focus our activities more than we had been doing. Every moment is valuable in any endeavor, but we have fewer moments to spare so we try to squeeze maximum value from everything we do. So we’ve had to take a hard look at the different things we do in the businesses and ask ourselves: are we doing this because it’s better for our customers or making us money? Or are we doing “x” because we’re “supposed to”? If the only answer is “we’re supposed to”, it gets cut.

MO:
What advice do you have for finding customers or clients for a new product or service? What hurdles have you faced?

Anthony:
So far, there have been 2 marketing/sales tactics that have worked for ThankThank Notes. The first tactic is online PR. After we built the ThankThank Note web app, my co-founder submitted the site to different start up directories. Just by submitting the site to start up directories, the website got 2,600 unique visitors in our first week. My co-founder wrote a blog post http://www.thankthanknotes.com/blog/startup-directories detailing how she submitted to start up sites.

A second tactic that has resulted in sales from ThankThank Notes is attending business networking events. One benefit of being in Austin is that there are business networking events morning, noon and night. Our goal is to attend at least 1 networking event a day.

So our current sales are split about 50/50 between coming from online PR and in person networking. The good news is that online PR doesn’t cost money, but it does take a lot of time. One interesting note is that the sales from online PR have been significantly smaller than the sales we’ve gotten from attending networking events. However, by submitting to online directories, we’ve been approached by several other businesses about potential partnerships and were featured by Thrillist and MSN Money as well as got a link from the New York Times.

We try to write a blog post a week about any crazy sales and marketing tactics that have worked for ThankThank Notes on our blog at http://www.thankthanknotes.com/blog