CEO and co-founder Matt Brezina said Sincerely is starting with three non-profits, the National Breast Cancer Foundation, buildOn, and Thirst Relief International, but plans to expand the program to more. According to Brezina, Sincerely’s mission has always been to make the act of card giving more thoughtful. So far that thoughtfulness has taken the form of customization – allowing customers to insert their own photos, images and sentiments into the cards they send. Attaching a charitable donation to those cards is the next logical step, Brezina said.

Each non-profit has multiple card templates within the Sincerely Ink store, each of which can be customized with a giver’s own photos and messages. The cards run either $10 or $20, but 70 percent of that cost is giving directly to the non-profit selected. As with Sincerely’s regular cards, which start at $1.69 $1.99 for U.S. addresses, the San Francisco startup prints out each card and mails it to its intended recipient.

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Until now, you most likely took a picture of that post card and sent it to Twitter or Facebook. Which is cool and all, but it also means that it was probably out of focus or there was reflection from the flash or it was off-center or whatever. In other words, your digital picture of a physical postcard of your friend’s digital photo ends up looking pretty crappy, which takes away the entire point of your post on the social networks.

The newest version of the Postagram app solves all those #firstworldproblems. It does so by adding a QR code to all post cards sent out, which — when scanned by a QR reader that was just added to the app — lets recipients download a digital copy of the photo and share it on Twitter. It also lets the sender of the post card know it was received — success!!! — and automatically adds the senders’ address to the recipients’ address book so they can send their own Postagrams in reply.

Matt Brezina, CEO of Sincerely (the company behind the app), admitted that most Postagram recipients have probably never scanned a QR code, which is one reason the post cards don’t actually mention “QR.” Instead, it instructs users to “scan the stamp with the app.” Once they do so, both recipient and sender will receive credit toward their next Postagram.

The notification aspect is just one part of Sincerely’s attempt to bridge the physical and digital aspects of sending a post card. Senders will also be able to get notifications and track the Postagrams they send, letting them know when cards and other Sincerely products hit the mail stream, when they reach the first post office, and when they get to the recipient’s local post office. And, of course, they’ll know when the QR code is scanned by the recipient.

Finally, the app seeks to connect users by letting any Sincerely or Postagram user send a card to another user without actually having to know his or her address. With the new feature, called Sincerely Magic, the iPhone app will scan your address book and users will be able to connect so long as they have another user’s email address. If the intended recipient already has his or her address stored by Sincerely, an “S” will appear next to his or her name in the sender’s address book.

The idea, according to Brezina, is for Sincerely to become the new White Pages, by allowing users to send gifts without having to know anything more than an email address. And when/if it reaches critical mass, users won’t even need a physical address for their friends if they want to send something cool. That’s the plan, at least.

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On Thursday, Sincerely announced the launch of its Sincerely Ship iOS Library, a platform that lets any iPhone developer add the company’s “print and ship” functionality into its app — meaning any iOS app can allow users to turn a photo into a printed postcard and mail it anywhere in the world.

As part of the launch, Sincerely has teamed up with 12 corporate partners who have already created iOS apps on the Sincerely Ship platform. These partners include travel guide company Lonely Planet, which on Thursday is debuting “Lonely Planet Postcards,” and photo-sharing startups Path and Waddle.

Once a developer builds the Sincerely Ship’s “Print, Ship” capability into an app, Sincerely handles all billing, fulfillment and customer support. A revenue share is paid to partners based on the amount and price of products purchased – generally 70 percent of all revenue above 99 cents per transaction.

It’s a smart move for Sincerely, and it couldn’t come at a better time. Now that it counts Apple as one of its competitors, banding together with an army of app developers may be the best way for the company to keep an edge.

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Apple unveils the 'Cards' app during its October 4 keynote

Apple today announced a new mobile app called “Cards” that will allow users to turn any photo taken with an iPhone or iPad into a greeting card. After the card is designed, Apple will print and mail it anywhere in the world for $2.99.

Gee, that rings a bell.

San Francisco-based startup Sincerely launched earlier this year with a mobile app called Postagram that does a remarkably similar thing. The Postagram app — which is now available on both iOS and Android devices — lets users add a short message to any photo from Facebook, Instagram or their mobile device. Postagram then prints the cards and sends them anywhere in the world for 99 cents.

I gave Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina a call this morning to find out how he was feeling about his company’s new heavyweight competitor. According to him, the team at Sincerely knew this day would come — and have been preparing for it since the company’s inception. “I can’t say I was surprised that they did it. Apple’s been offering photo book services with the iPhoto desktop application for years now,” he said. “When we started this company, we talked about how Apple would eventually take what they did on iPhoto and bring it to the iPhone.”

Size matters

A Postagram postcard

So now that Apple has entered the space, how exactly does Sincerely plan to maintain its edge?  For starters, the startup can try to use its small size as an asset. “Our core focus is to let our users send simple thoughtful gifts from the mobile phone. That’s all we think about day and night,” Brezina said. “If our users want something special for, say, the holiday season, we can turn that around in weeks. For a company like Apple it would take months or even a year.”

He was also quick to point out that Sincerely’s offerings stretch a bit beyond postcard apps for the iPhone. In June the company debuted its PopBooth app that essentially turns iPads into photo booths, and in August it released an API to let developers build their own photo printing apps that run on Sincerely infrastructure. In addition, the Postagram app is also available on Android — something Brezina is happy his team prioritized early on. “Thank God we support multiple operating systems,” he said.

Diversify early, diversify often

At Sincerely’s launch back in April, Postagram worked only alongside of the Instagram app. I wrote at the time: “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.” Soon after its launch, Sincerely was smart to quickly expand its technology to work with more platforms — integrating with Facebook photos, launching an Android app, and so on. Those early choices could turn out to be the company’s saving grace.

If today’s news proves anything, it’s that it can be dangerous to base a business on another company’s software or its hardware. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur, but with profits at companies such as Apple higher than ever, it’s also a great time to be a big powerful corporation. To avoid being trampled by industry giants, smart startups should take full advantage of their agility by hedging bets across different APIs, operating systems and devices much as possible.

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PopBooth allows you to take photo booth-style photos with an iPhone or iPad 2 and have physical copies of the photo strip sent to you through the mail.

The PopBooth process is pretty straightforward for anyone who has ever used a traditional photo booth: You stand in front of the iPhone or iPad’s self-facing camera, press the shutter button, and pose for a series of four concurrent photos. You then have the option to add one of several filters on the photos, such as black and white or jewel-toned overlays. PopBooth photo strips can be shared for free on Facebook and Twitter, and Sincerely will print and mail two copies of a PopBooth strip to you for a yet-to-be-determined price.

PopBooth will be available for one-off use or in “party mode,” which will allow a user to purchase a package of a certain number of prints. I could definitely see folks setting up an iPad at a wedding or party and using PopBooth strips as a fun gift for guests — a much less expensive alternative to the increasingly popular rented photo booth.

The Sincerely team’s hard work seems to be paying off: The company is set to move into a new 5000-plus square-foot office space in downtown San Francisco — digs I’m told the venture-backed startup is paying for entirely with its own revenues. If PopBooth takes off as well as Postagram has, Sincerely’s recent success could be just the beginning.

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Postagram, the Sincerely product that allows users to send physical photo postcards directly from pictures on their phones, is now available for phones that use the Android OS. Postagram for Android supports photos from the device as well as from Facebook. Sincerely also rolled out a 2.0 version of Postagram for iPhone on Thursday that supports photos from the iPhone device, Instagram and Facebook.

The Postagram app allows users to turn photos taken with their mobile phones 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.

At Postagram’s debut in April, the product could only be used on top of the Instagram application, which is exclusive to the iPhone. While Instagram is used by a valuable group of early adopters, Postagram is a product with a huge potential for mass appeal. With Postagram for Android and the added Facebook and device integrations to the iPhone app, the product is now accessible to a much wider audience.

Sincerely’s expansion onto other platforms is right in line with the larger company vision CEO Matt Brezina described to me in April. Brezina was emphatic that though Postagram 1.0 was built on top of the Instagram API, it was only the first of many multi-platform products Sincerely planned to roll out in the months ahead.

For 99 cents including postage, Postagrams are an amazingly easy way to send a small thoughtful “thinking of you” gift to, say, my mom. Now that Postagram is available beyond the realm of Instagram, my mom is much more likely to return the favor.

Watch my interview with Sincerely’s CEO Matt Brezina here:

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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 five-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.”

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