One Pastime Meets Another. Digital Autographs and the Future of Mobile Communications

A reporter covering our announcement of partnership with the MLB Players Association recently asked me what's the real story with lettrs? How does a messaging app effectively do an unprecedented collective bargaining agreement with one of the most respected and largest players unions in the nation? So here it is...

TIME: We started lettrs as a quality messaging app that required people - by design - to spend at least a minute on their message https://about.lettrs.com  lettrs messages as a digital communication or media object would not exist without the fundamental ingredient of time. We even patented the idea.

We did this because we believed that original and lasting digital messages one day would become media, the same way handwritten letters did.

But not every message in mobile would be the same, only "the messages that matter," the digital shoebox of our lives, which is why I created lettrs and astonishingly Millennials love it. Over 80% of our users are Millennials or younger.

QUALITY: At the time, it was a very contrarian view to require the one minute minimum, challenging people to actually think about what they write, to give their message the same aspiration of longevity as we once did with physical letters. Once over 500,000 lettrs were published or delivered privately we removed the 1 minute minimum to see what would happen, and to our discovery of Millennial preferences, the average creation time actually increased to 3.5 minutes. 

People came to an app where they saw what the world’s letters could look like, and it was a beautiful thing. It pointed to a new class of media, of digital memorabilia, that brands would eventually embrace as next generation mobile fan mail. 

No letter looked alike as we provided stock mobile “stationery” with various imagery to give each letter its own look. We even published a book Poetguese, with acclaimed author Paulo Coelho, using the many signed and digital letters from the network. All letters were in fact written by teenagers on their smart phones...imagine that.

MEDIA: We then created mobile media postage via our FanStamps, around holidays, events, people, emotions, etc.  The stamp was in fact the original "contextual content" in mass communications. Our FanStamps have different classes on the app, too, and all carry meta data for measuring consumption, engagement, and commerce. They can be gif, jpg, and soon will enable some audio and video contextual media…but always attached to the letter they were delivered with. 

We are beginning to enable digital stamp collections that are games, sweepstakes, and collectables - just like stamp collecting of yesteryear but directly in the sweet spot for Millennials. 

Applications of these mobile stamps can me done with “fanmail” for sports, movies, entertainment and even politics. Think of them as stickers, just smarter and more potent for brands. Your media assets would find a new distribution and portability as the concept of mobile postage grows.

ORIGINALS: Once we successfully patented the mobile autograph on any media and digital communication, we quietly launched www.autografs.com with the first partnership of the MLBPA. Here the autographs can be generated and distributed for profit, charitable causes or as we see it, a new class of digital memorabilia that brings letters and autographs into a completely mobile and digital generation. 

Over the next several months we will be activating athletes, actors, singers, authors and others to monetize their mark - for their brand of course - but also for inspiring letters of the next generation .

lettrs is admittedly an outlier, an arrow against the grain of utterly disposable media and infinite chats that disappear. Even how lettrs was funded is a bit contrarian. NYC made and veteran founded company, over 60% of lettrs funding came from private investors who themselves are military veterans.

We are just now talking to the top tier VCs about a monetization layer of autographs that opens up a $12B market...quickly.

Advice along the way for our evolution of mobile fanmail has come from a cross section of minds like Vint Cerf (Google), Mark Holtzman (Yankees), Karl Ravech (ESPN) and Bernie Gershon (Gershon Media), to name a few.

In order to predict the future of communications we simply needed to better understand the past - and what made those messages matter - that eventually became their own class of media. The autograph is not dead, just reimagined for a mobile medium altogether.