A quick read on what we're building and why it holds up — then a live walk-through of everything that's running. Edit anything here on the fly.
Approximately 5.9 million people living outside the USA fall under USPS' mandatory delivery status: Puerto Rico (3.3M), Hawaii (1.4M), Alaska (0.7M), plus Guam, the United States Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and military APO/FPO addresses. Every one is legally reachable at USPS domestic rates. Retailers refuse them anyway.
Forwarding isn't new, but the incumbents (MyUS, Stackry) are cold, transactional logistics machines — our brand study scored them 3/10 on warmth; OT48 sits at 6 and climbing. The emotional ground — "the mainland forgot you; we didn't" — is completely undefended. For a market defined by the feeling of being excluded, warmth isn't decoration; it's the differentiator and the moat.
Single point of failure: Oregon. Every parcel routes through one "warehouse" with no backup operator and no second site. That single node is both the thing that makes the business work and the thing that stops it if anything goes wrong.
Customs friction. Some destinations — American Samoa, the Freely Associated States — are not fully domestic for customs purposes. The eligibility logic handles the known edge cases, but complexity grows with volume.
Competition escalation. A funded incumbent could clone the forwarding model if this market proves out. The defence is brand warmth and community — real, but not a permanent wall.
The bottleneck is Oregon. Scaling to the full addressable market means that "warehouse" needs redundancy — a second operator, a backup site, or both. That is what investment here unlocks: not the website, not the brand, but the physical layer that makes the promise keepable. Fix Oregon and the rest of the model can scale.
USPS must serve these customers at domestic rates; retailers won't. OT48 is the bridge across that gap — a structural, durable arbitrage, not a temporary loophole.