MyPunchblog

This morning, we announced a brand-new version of MyPunchbowl.com. We’re very excited about this new release — it’s a complete face-lift of the site and we’ve added a few new features as well. It’s been quite a team effort, and we’re all really proud of what we’ve accomplished. It’s hard to explain how good it feels to ship a new release after months of feature spec’ing and testing, and this one feels better than most. We would love to hear your feedback: particularly we would love to know what you think about the overall new look as well as the new theme selector. To send us feedback, click “Feedback/Support” at the bottom of any page on MyPunchbowl.com. So what are you waiting for? Go check out our new release and start your holiday party planning!

Follow the link for the press release….

MyPunchbowl gets a face-lift in time for holiday party planning

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Party Planning and Online Invitations with MyPunchbowl

This morning I came across an interesting post from the founder of Fog Creek Software, Joel Spolsky. Joel wrote about his experience dealing with a web design firm. Writing about his new web design Joel wrote, “We’ve been tweaking it and polishing it and changing things carefully, and the firm we hired to design it has been taking us step-by-step through information architecture, site maps, wireframes, initial designs, and several rounds of design. All with a carefully-designed process to get our buy-in at every step along the way. And so far every step I thought the design was converging and we’d get a nice web design out of it. And then I came back after a week on the road, took one look at it, and thought, oh crap. We can’t go public with that.”

I read this post and chuckled. This exact phenomenon has happened to me numerous times as I’ve developed software user interfaces and marketing campaigns. It’s frustrating for the people you work with. In many cases, just like Joel, people around me have gotten my buy-in all along the way. And then bam! I take a fresh look at it and no longer like it.

So why does this happen? I think there are a bunch of factors that lead to this kind of a moment. Here are a few:

1) We’ve all lost sight of the “main” thing: In my opinion, a good design clearly points the user to the main purpose of the page. In the times where I’ve had the “just not right” feeling, I look at the design and think to myself “I don’t see the main point of this page.” That’s a clear sign.

2) It doesn’t feel right: The reality is that we all have our own sense of what “feels right.” If it doesn’t feel right to you, then you just have to fix it.  Joshua Porter wrote today that “people make sense to themselves.” I agree. And people know for themselves what looks good and feels right. When you’re the final decision maker (like Joel), it’s critical that you know when to say “this doesn’t look right.” The key is choosing when and how to say that, and to not do it too frequently (unless you want to really piss off the designers and engineers).

3) It doesn’t look as good as Blahblah.com: I don’t care what your process of design is, but if at the end of the day you look at your design and then you look at someone else’s design and you feel inferior, then you have to go fix it. I’ve been in this situation many times. We *thought* we were on the right path, but the final product simply didn’t look as good as something else we had seen. The key to communication with designers is to clearly explain why you think Blahblah.com is better — and be as specific as possible. The better you can articulate the differences, the more likely they are to work with you to fix the design.

I applaud Joel for recognizing that sometimes you have to stop the presses and revisit your design. Even if you are “on board” all of the way through the process, you have to be truly happy and proud of the final product. After all, users don’t have the insight to see the process along the way. They only see the final product. And it better be great if you want to keep them as users.

Sean here, the other founder of MyPunchbowl.

Let’s see, its been about 9 months since my last post - yeah, I’m right on schedule! You see, I like to keep my posts very infrequent and rare so that they appreciate in value … sort of like a classic Ferrari.

Speaking of Ferraris, I’ve noticed Matt likes to draw real world :: startup analogies in this blog, so I thought I’d do it my way. I’m a car guy, you see. I like knowing about cars, working on cars, and dreaming about cars that I can’t afford (that’s where Ferraris fit in).

Soooo, ahem, “Running a web startup is like maintaining your car”. Oh wait, I’m supposed to do the “top 5 reasons why” … ok then:

1 - You’ve got to be in tune to know when something is wrong

Sometimes I’m driving with a friend and they hear a strange sound coming from my car (hey, its got 187,000 miles on it!). They say “what is that rubbing sound?” I say “you mean the rusty strip on the rear brake rotors? Yeah, I know about it”. Or, more often I’m driving my car and I hear, for example, a soft whistling from the corner of the driver’s side window. It turns out the rubber window seal needs adjustment. No one else would ever have known that or even heard the noise, but I’m in tune with my car.

How does this relate to startups? We spend so much time with MyPunchbowl that we know it like an old car we drive every day. When users write in and say, for example, “I stopped being able to see how many friends my guests were bringing” we know to tell them they accidentally unchecked “Allow guests to bring up to _____ friends each” in the RSVP options section. Like a strange noise in my car, I usually have an idea of how serious a user’s problem is very quickly.

2 - You’ve got to be realistic

Developing MyPunchbowl.com is a balance between the slick, cutting edge “theoretically possible” features, and what makes sense and is reasonable. Could we build a feature that text messages a YouTube video of you singing your invitation over the instrumental-only track of the latest Beyonce single? Yes, in theory. But maybe we’ll start with just plain texting your invitation.

Likewise, am I going to pay $2000 to replace the clutch packs in my AWD transmission because I experience a little torque bind in tight corners? Probably not at this point since that’s half the value of my car. I’ll take the more realistic option of turning off the AWD when I don’t need it (98% of the year). My point is, decisions like this are presented to us all the time (the website one, not the transmission one). It’s up to us to balance all the possibilities, and choose the best realistic path.

That’s enough for now … did I say top 5 reasons? You’ll have to stay tuned for the other 3. Don’t worry, it should be a short 9 or 10 months from now. Until then, check your oil, don’t ride the clutch, and don’t drive slowly in the left lane. Oh and make cool websites.

My co-founder (Sean) and I spent lots of time designing MyPunchbowl.com well before we hired any software engineers. It’s sometimes amusing to think about how much time we spent in front of the whiteboard– but we believe that products should be designed first, then implemented. Of course there is a balance. You can’t design every detail about a feature before you begin implementation. Many times the nuances about a particular feature only are clear when you have a chance to actually use it. So how do you guide your decision-making as you are tweaking a feature?

For us, we developed an internal mantra that helps guide our decision-making. It’s a mantra that I remind the team of often. It’s an important guiding principle. Our mantra is simply this: Help the host look good.

This may seem like an easy mantra to implement, but it’s not. As we make design decisions, we constantly have to make tradeoffs between what is better for guests and what is better for hosts. Using this mantra, these decisions become easier. Here’s an example: our RSVP options are all based on helping the host look good. There are other ways to implement these RSVP features that might be better for guests, but we believe that our role at MyPunchbowl.com is to help hosts look good. This mantra makes hard design decisions much easier.

It’s great when we get validation from real customers. Chris from Idaho recently wrote to us: “We used MyPunchbowl for our first family reunion in 20+ years and everyone, I mean everyone, was totally satisfied with the MyPunchbowl invitation. Our reunion was in Seattle (and I’m in Idaho) and because of your site/service it made me look so GOOD! Thanks for making it so Fabulous! Chris from Middleton Idaho.”

I’m convinced that all great products have mantras.

What’s your product’s mantra?

One of things that we try to do at MyPunchbowl.com is to build our software so that we can improve the product quickly. Templates and themes is a great example.

When we built the “Pick a Theme” page, we carefully made sure to build a robust back-end system so that we could create more templates quickly. This means that without any programming or additional software development, we can create new templates and push them “live” to the site very fast. Because of this technology, we’re literally adding dozens of templates every week.

The part about this that is really rewarding is that users have been emailing us template ideas, and we’re able to respond very quickly. Brian emailed us early this week asking for a “Hockey” template. Here’s what we made for him (within a few hours):

What templates or themes do you want? Go to MyPunchbowl.com and click on the “Feedback” link (bottom of page) to let us know. We’ll get it made quickly!

Well, file this under “holidays for the esoteric.” Tomorrow is Pretzel Day. Don’t ask me why. I’m sure some lobbyist for Bachman Pretzels was involved.

At MyPunchbowl.com we want to help you celebrate. That’s why we are the only website out there that has a template for your Pretzel Day celebrations. Grab some beer, buy some pretzels and invite your friends over. And tell them MyPunchbowl gave you the idea.

Here’s our Pretzel Day template:

Start your next party at MyPunchbowl.com!

It’s not too late– Earth Day is this coming weekend (April 22nd).  So why not get some friends together and throw an Earth Day party this weekend? MyPunchbowl helps you with some fun and sophisticated Earth Day templates. Here’s one of my favorites:

My recommendation: if you are going to have an Earth Day party, don’t use plastic forks and knives for this party (kind of defeats the purpose, you know?).

In case you are wondering how Punchbowl helps the earth, we all are fanatics about recycling and do our best to keep everything digital (not much printing around here). We also use those low-energy lightbulbs. Yes, I know it’s not much, but Al Gore told me it’s the little things that add up!

I asked my wife to tell me which of our new templates is her *least* favorite. She chose the one that is my *most* favorite.

Don’t ask me why. I guess I just like hotdogs.

Start your next party at MyPunchbowl.com!

A great new site launched recently called Behance. Behance offers an in-depth take on what it takes to be a creative person. Their interview style is in-depth, focused, and edgy.

I’ve spent a bunch of time clicking around to read interviews with various creative people. I’m partial to the more technically minded folks, but they have some great interviews with musicans and artists too.

Take a read of MyPunchbowl’s Behance interview– then book some time to spend looking around the rest of the site. My hats off to Scott and the rest of the crew at Behance for an interesting and visually appealing site.

When we launched MyPunchbowl.com, we took a stance on public vs. private RSVP. I wrote a detailed post about how we think private RSVP is better for the host, and that RSVP shouldn’t be a public exhibition.

Well, it’s time to come clean: this was a calculated risk to get the conversation started about the whole notion of public RSVP. A lot has been written on the subject. I personally don’t like public RSVPs (I’m not a fan of coming up with a witty comment for all to see). We wanted to stir the pot– and hear people’s viewpoints about online RSVP.

Boy did we ever get some passionate responses. Here’s one of my favorite emails we got shortly after we launched in January: “Are you (@#)& kidding me? You guys are idiots. How can you not show the guest list? Surely this can’t be very hard. This is a big, big miss.”

When I got this email I realized that we had succeeded: people really care about RSVP options. We were successful in stirring the pot– from the Wall Street Journal to CNET to O’Reilly, they all covered our design choice. Clearly it is an issue that matters to many.

The reality is that we believe that great software should provide the most flexibility in a simple to use interface. Sometimes you have to take a calculated risk to get the conversation started. So with that said, MyPunchbowl.com now allows you to choose RSVP options. We think we have the most flexible RSVP options: you can change them at any time and the updates will happen in real-time.

So now that we have options, which way do you prefer? Would love to hear your thoughts.