MyPunchblog

This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations & Analytics

One of the wonders of an Internet business is that we have reams of data to pore over from tools like Google Analytics and internal metrics:  Who sends us the most traffic? Which marketing programs are the most cost-effective? Where are hosts and guests willing to spend money?

One of my favorite questions to examine is:  What do we want the customer to do?  For starters, we want our hosts to enjoy the process of using our site and to feel good about how they are represented by our product.  And, we want guests to have a favorable impression of the host and of our site.

We can use our data to see how well we live up to these goals.  User behavior tracking shows us how hosts are using our workflow and if there are any confusing points that we need to address.  Host survey data gives us both qualitative feedback and solid trend analysis for our brand.  And, finally, we can track how many guests create an account and host their own events.  Ultimately, the quality of our product shows up in the numbers.

This post was written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO

By now I hope you’ve heard that we launched a new service today: MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders. I’m really proud of how this product came together, and I hope that it will be very useful to our customers. I thought I’d take a few moments to explain why we decided to create this new product.

Birthdays are a big part of our business. Whether it’s on our party planning site or on our free eCards site, our customers love to celebrate birthdays using MyPunchbowl. Personally, I use MyPunchbowl eCards a few times a month to wish someone a happy birthday with a personalized eCard, and about once or twice a year I’m involved with planning a birthday party on MyPunchbowl. As the CEO of MyPunchbowl, I know it’s important to improve our birthday-related functionality.

I’ve always looked at reminder services and thought they were very useful — especially for remembering birthdays. A handful of years ago, my wife signed up for a birthday alarm service, and I’ve seen how she’s used it to remember important birthdays. While she uses a web-based service, most of the birthdays I want to remember are in my personal calendar. Although my calendar usually helps me remember (at least during the week), more often than not I find myself wishing that I had gotten a reminder before the actual birthday.

Before we started working on the birthday reminders product, I spent a lot of time looking at the existing birthday reminder services. Most of the existing sites that are out there are very outdated or too simplistic. One site that stands apart is Facebook (both as a native service and several Facebook applications). Isn’t *everyone* on Facebook these days? Why would we launch a new service that already exists as part of Facebook?

As I see it, MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders solves a different problem. I don’t know about you, but like many Facebook users, I have hundreds of “friends” in my social network on Facebook. Frankly, I don’t care about most of their birthdays. MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders are for the 30-40 people you actually care about, and want a reminder. We see it as a much more personal service for keeping track of those birthdays that matter (and especially useful for birthdays of people who are *not* on Facebook, such as kids, parents and grandparents).

We built MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders so that our customers could build a useful list of birthday reminders — just the ones you want to make sure you don’t forget. In my list, I have my close friends, my nieces and nephews, my brothers, and other close family members (yes cuz, you made it in). My entire list is about 35 people. I don’t expect it to grow much, and it’s really comforting to know that I’ll get a few reminders before the actual birthday rolls around. And one of my favorite features? MyPunchbowl keeps track of the age of everyone on my list. Very useful.

If you haven’t set up your birthday reminder list yet, give it a shot: it will only take 5 minutes to get started and you can always come back and add more. Try it out for free at http://www.mypunchbowl.com/birthday-reminders

Here’s a screenshot of our new service. Let us know what you think in the comments of this blog post.

This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations & Analytics

At MyPunchbowl, we’re always looking for reasons to celebrate. The quirkier, the better. I noticed on a random website that Saturday is National Corn Dog Day.  Now, corn dogs have a special place in our family…my son and I share one every time we go to the zoo or to a baseball game.  So, we’ll be celebrating this…well…”holiday”…with pride on Saturday.  Two corn dogs, freshly battered with mustard, and another trip to the zoo.

Looking for more goofy reasons to celebrate?  This website is a great starting place.  My personal favorite?  August 8:  “Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night”.  Looks like we’ll be starting a new tradition at the Peden household this summer.

What’s your favorite reason — or non-reason — to party?

This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations & Analytics

I recently returned home from my monthly trip to MyPunchbowl headquarters, and I struck up a conversation with a woman seated next to me. We inevitably landed on a familiar question:  “What do you do?”

MyPunchbowl is a fun company to talk about — who doesn’t like parties? — and the site generally intrigues folks who are hearing about us for the first time. We talked about how she could use the site for her church gatherings, and we discussed a few of the ups and downs of working for a startup.

But when I asked her, “What do you do?”, her response was different. “I solve problems for University Hospital in Cincinnati,” she replied.

I liked the directness of what she said, even if it didn’t offer many details about the nature of her job. (Turns out, she was a nurse administrator.)  My seatmate had a very clear idea in her own mind about what she did every day:  wake up, go to work, solve problems.  And with that kind of clear purpose, I’m pretty sure she’s good at what she does.

This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations and Analytics

I’m one of two remote employees at MyPunchbowl, and — like most startups — we utilize a number of communication tools to keep everyone engaged.  Email, company wikis, teleconferences — all are great tools for communication, collaboration and execution.  But when there is a strong difference of opinion on which course of action we should take, we’ve found that there’s little substitute for face-to-face.

If I find myself at an impasse with a colleague, a 10-minute videoconference (either Skype or gchat video) will usually resolve what might otherwise take an afternoon of emails. Seeing another person’s nonverbal response helps me better understand his or her objections to my viewpoint more than words over email or telephone.  Similarly, I gain a lot more insight into the other person’s viewpoint when I can look him or her in the eye.

We’re better listeners when we can see the whole picture.

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

I get a lot of questions regarding the process that we have in place on MyPunchbowl when a Save the Date or Invitation email bounces. A “bounce” means the email is undeliverable and is rejected by the receiving mail server. Most people have had this experience at least once in their personal email account.

This is one of those issues where, unfortunately, the underlying reasons for doing what we do is not clearly apparent to the user.

It all comes down to our ability to deliver email. Delivering emails successfully (to a guest’s inbox) is a very important part of what we do. No one likes it when their emails get caught in a spam or junk folder, but there are many many aspects (mostly technical) to how we avoid that. One of them is how we handle bounced emails.

You see, if we try to send an email to a non-existent address (for example, if you made a typo in the email) the email provider rejects it. Let’s use Hotmail as an example. If we keep trying to send emails to the same non-existent Hotmail address, they start to get suspicious. Why? Because this is something spammers do. They generate a list of emails programmatically and just send thousands and thousands at a time, not knowing if there is an actual existing inbox at the other end. So this is one way that Hotmail keeps on the lookout for spammers. If you keep trying to send mail to a non-existent address, you get on Hotmail’s bad side, so to speak.

Back to MyPunchbowl. To deal with this issue, we let an email bounce twice, and then we automatically “quarantine” it in our system. We don’t let anyone try to send to it again.

The host gets an email saying “There was a problem sending your email to _______”. We then automatically put the email back into your Add More Guests page so that you see it in your account and you can correct it. If you try to add that same bounced address to your guest list you see a message that says “Delivery to this address has previously failed” and you’re asked to contact support (me).

It might not be a perfect system, occasionally an email bounces when the address is correct, but most people agree that the most important thing is getting emails to their guest’s inbox.

This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations and Analytics

 ”The real trouble with this world of ours is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality, yet it is a trap for logicians.  Its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden.  Its wildness lies in wait.” — G.K. Chesterton

Anyone following the financial markets in recent months knows all about wildness.  No analyst could have foreseen the freefall of previous stalwarts like Dell or GE, where a runaway bear market crushed year-ago expectations by several orders of magnitude.

So if the future is capable of such wildness, then what do we do about it?

I think about this often at MyPunchbowl, where one of my responsibilities is to create and explain our forecasts.  When it comes to predicting the future, I’m always wrong, sometimes happily so. So, what’s the point of the exercise?

I’ve come to learn that forecasting isn’t about predicting the future. The purpose of forecasting is to better understand the variables that influence the future. Accuracy matters, of course, but forecasting is more useful as a management tool than as a prediction machine:  Can we dissect the business into its critical components? How much influence do we have over those components? Which levers can we pull to yield the best results?

The future is wild, and it is somewhat out of our control. But thinking like a good forecaster can help us navigate the unknown and ultimately take advantage of the opportunities that wildness inevitably creates.

This post was written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO

Last week, Punchbowl suddenly lost a friend. His name was Chyorni, and he was the beloved cat of our most senior engineer — Blake. Chyorni was taken from this world suddenly and without warning. While it’s not unusual for cats to pass away suddenly, I was struck by Blake’s description of Chyorni’s final resting place. You see, Chyorni was simply sleeping in his happy place. In fact, Blake didn’t immediately know that he had died, simply because Chyorni was where he liked to be in the evenings. He was quiet and peaceful — in his happy place. It’s a horrible thing to lose an animal that you love so much, but I know Blake is comforted with the knowledge that Chyorni spent the last moments of his life in the happy place that he found so comfortable. We could all be so lucky.

All of us have a happy place.  It’s the place where you feel most comfortable — the one you return to as a “default.” At home, it might be your favorite spot on the couch or in your special chair. For me, my happy place is quietly sitting next my wife on the couch: reading, watching TV, or writing (like I am right now). After a long day, there’s something really nice about just spending some quiet time together.

I was thinking today about the concept of a happy place in the workplace. I believe that most of us have a happy place at work as well.  Your happy place at work are the tasks that you feel most comfortable doing. You know, the “to-do’s” that you return to when you don’t want to do the more difficult or time-consuming items on your list. At work, my happy place is in spec review meetings. Although I’m not a software engineer, I feel very comfortable helping to develop product specs and reviewing design issues with the team. I love working on new software — especially when great new ideas emerge.

What’s your happy place at home? What’s your happy place at work? I hope you’ll spend some time thinking about your happy place. And when you do, think about Chyorni: quiet and peaceful in his happy place.

This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations and Analytics

The startup world is governed by numbers.  While the qualitative pieces of an individual startup can be interesting and unique to each business, ultimately, familiar metrics like traffic, revenue, and burn rate decide success or failure.

Given this black-and-white reality, I’m often fascinated by the interplay between the quantitative and the qualitative within a startup. One nice thing about numbers is that they can be deconstructed into their component parts: Identify the key variables, think qualitatively about why the variables are underperforming, then experiment, analyze, improve, and repeat.  Each step is an alchemist mixture of arithmetic and the accumulated knowledge and experience of the decision maker.

I spend a lot of time with numbers, and it’s important for me to remember their limitations:

- Data doesn’t predict the future. Forecasting and understanding probabilities, yes.  But probability isn’t certainty.

- Data helps with answers, but it doesn’t always ask the right question.

- Data doesn’t replace the customer.  We can track and parse customer behavior, but customer experience is much more than a dataset.

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

It’s been about six weeks since we first started looking for a marketing intern and trust me, I had no idea what we were in for when we first started this search. I mean, how hard could it be to find a marketing intern? Seriously.

Well, many resumes, several interviews, and a handful of blog posts later, we’ve come to our decision. Or as Matt would clarify, I’ve finally come to a decision.

Here are the factors that I used to come to this decision:

1) Thought-process — how does the candidate think? We use our 24-hour test as well as interview questions to try to gauge this.

2) Drive — how much does the candidate want the position? Obviously in this tough economy jobs, including internships, are very competitive. As a start-up, we need people that have the drive needed to thrive in this type of business.

3) Personality fit — will the candidate get along with the small group we have in the office? This might not seem to be a big deal but we like to have fun at work, joke around, and just be ourselves. Having someone who fits with our personalities just makes the transition a bit easier.

4) Resume/Experience — do they have any relevant experience/coursework? I originally put more emphasis on experience and as someone who went to school for marketing, did marketing internships, and now actually has a job in marketing maybe you can see why. But Matt is the first to give me a hard time about the number of people who get a degree in one thing but end up actually doing something completely different.

So you’re probably wondering about the elephant in the room…the girl with “spunk and fight” and how she fits into all of this. Obviously there was something about her — the aforementioned “spunk and fight” — that Matt liked. I’ve been on the fence, trying to stay neutral and not make my decision based on the hype.

What sealed my decision about whether she would become our marketing intern was her blog post response. While some still criticized her, others thought we should hire her. I guess you can’t ever make everyone happy.

But I’ll probably make some people happy because I’m excited to say that I’ve decided to take a chance and hire her!

I’m really looking forward to bringing her on. With passion, spunk, dedication, and a willingness to learn, I really think she can bring a lot to MyPunchbowl. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll prove the haters wrong in the process.

Stay tuned for updates from the intern herself…