By working with a home delivery courier company that they say will pick up and
deliver parcels more cheaply than Royal Mail, they have managed to remove
the unreliable state-backed giant from the equation.

This, in one well-wrapped package, is SendSocial.com, which launches to the
public tomorrow.

As Cumbrian-based chief executive Glen Richardson, 27, puts it: “Why take
a parcel down to the local post office, sit in the queue and pay £5 when you
can sit in front of your computer and have a courier turn up at your door
the next day?”

SendSocial’s pricing starts at £3.99 for parcels weighing up to 2kg, rising to
£7.99 for one weighing between 5kg and 10kg.

The service works by letting the intended recipient known that someone wants
to send them something. It asks, via social messaging site Twitter.com or
email, whether they want to receive the parcel and, if they do, where they
want it delivered. All this information is stored securely on SendSocial,
using the Verisign system of encryption.

The sender is then given a barcode address that tells the courier where the
parcel is to go but does not reveal any address details to the sender, who
will need a printer to print out the barcode label. The next day the courier
turns up and between three and four days later the parcel is delivered.

How SendSocial came to be is a tale of the times: an idea posted on an open
blog in March by serial British entrepreneur Ben Way, 29, who is now based
in Florida; then some furious online collaboration involving entrepreneurs
who did not meet physically or even know each other particularly well;
finally some viral marketing on Twitter with the neat twist that the first
100 people who agreed to spread the word were given free profit-share stakes
in the company.

The initial stumbling block was over the ability of an internet start-up to
physically handle such a volume of parcels. But this was overcome when the
now eight-strong team realised that if they could find a courier partner
prepared to alter their logistics systems to cope with “address-less”
packages then SendSocial could concentrate on building the software and
becoming a secure repository of customer addresses.

They spotted a press release from courier myHermes, which was launching a
competitively priced national door-to-door service, and things went from
there.

The team, which includes Viapost.com chief executive Simon Campbell and 18
year-old Newcastle internet entrepreneur Jonathan Grubin, all operate from
different locations and worked on the project using Google docs.

Richardson thinks SendSocial’s potential is enormous. While the initial target
is social media users, the system should appeal to mainstream retailers and
direct marketing groups looking to provide a better customer experience.
Some large companies are already recognising this potential. Richardson says
greeting cards are likely to be next in their sights and early next year, a
large US courier company is likely to send SendSocial global.

The Brits *always* come up with fabbo ideas. How deceptively simple this is — insight being that we never have people’s addresses to hand when we need to ship them something.

Can’t wait for this to arrive in America. Maybe they’ll be able to do it using phone numbers too?