Case Study: CouchSurfing automates address verification and saves time with Lob

Couchsurfing Uses Postcards & Address Data to Build Trust With Their Users

CouchSurfing, a travel community that connects members for stays and cultural exchange, needed reliable address verification to build trust between users. Before working with Lob, CouchSurfing relied on a traditional direct mail vendor and a manual weekly CSV process that produced unstandardized or undeliverable addresses, making the verification program slow, error-prone, and time-consuming.

By integrating the Lob API, CouchSurfing automated address validation and programmatic, on‑demand postcard sending—what they called a "pretty trivial" integration. Lob’s solution eliminated the manual CSV work, improved deliverability and delivery speed, reduced costs, and saved CouchSurfing time each week so the verification program now runs itself.

CouchSurfing

Denise Remhof

Product Manager