This Bengaluru startup is helping people send personal postcards to their loved ones

Suman Hiremath, a software engineer with a Bengaluru-based startup returned to India, after a five-year stint in the US.

The 28-year-old techie was missing her friends back in the States and had been for a while trying to get everyone on a conference call. But owing to time differences, that never happened.

But Hiremath, soon found a way to send them her greetings, when she came across Dearpost, a portal that let her upload pictures of their time spent together, with a personalized message.

“I had postcards from my travels which I had meant to send. But the hassle of going to a post office always deterred me. But this was the easiest thing to do and my friends were thrilled, when they received them,” she says.

Dearpost, started as a hobby project for three friends Elayabharath Elango, Nagappan Nachiappan and Swetha Kanithi in 2017 January. The idea came when Elango and Nagappan were thinking of building a chatbot as a weekend hack.

“Postcards were easy enough for chatbots to understand. We had a printing shop next door. We decided to build a platform to send a postcard anywhere in the world over the weekend,” says Elango.

They reached out to Kanithi, who is passionate about postcards. While they initially didn’t think the idea would fly, they began to realize the potential, as business started to pick up in February this year.

While the basic platform of Dearpost took a weekend to put together, the entire platform with a proper website, a pipeline to collect photos, to print and send, took three months to put together. Now Dearpost sends out about 1,000 postcards every month. Top cities in India that they get requests from include Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chennai along with orders globally.

“Our target audience is the digital-first generation who haven’t really sent or received a postcard in their life. They usually don’t want to take the trouble of printing one and going to their nearest post office. We help them experience the delight without going through the trouble,” says Elango.

While photos as postcards, is their most popular segment, the startup is also collaborating with artists, to weave in their artwork into these postcards. Elango takes care of building the platform and artist onboarding, while Nachiappan handles printing, posting and operations and Kanithi looks after community and artist outreach.


Anamica Jain, a social media marketer and member of Postcrossing Society of India, until recently had been sending postcards, using the traditional method. An avid post crosser for the last four years, she recently sent a postcard through the platform and felt that it indeed cut down the time in sending out one.

“Platforms like these help people in adding memories, without any hassle. It took less than three minutes for me to send a postcard out, which was great,” Jain adds.