MyPunchblog

As I mentioned in my last blog post, we recently launched the “MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget” a handy-dandy widget that is easy to add to your blog. We thought we would kick off this new MyPunchbowl feature with a contest to encourage bloggers to try out the widget. So…drumroll…

Would you like to win a $250 Amazon gift card for less than 5 minutes of work? We thought so.

Here are the details and entry instructions for the MyPunchbowl Widget Contest:

MyPunchbowl, the sophisticated party planning site, has a new widget that would look amazing on your blog. We think it’s pretty cool, but we want know what you think. Fortunately we’re also in a giving mood, so we thought we’d put together a little contest to see how cool we are, how creative you are, and ‘cuz contests are fun!

What do I do to enter?: Place the MyPunchbowl Celebrations widget on your blog and send an email with a link to your blog to support@mypunchbowl.com

What can I win?: A $250 Amazon gift card – we’ll award one for “Most Creative Use” and one for “Best Look & Feel Integration”

Where’s the fine print?: For legalese and official contest rules, see here.

Oh no! I don’t have a blog! If you don’t have a blog, go visit our friends over at Typepad, Blogger to set up a blog within minutes or you can try hosting one yourself using Wordpress. It’s easy to set up a blog but you’ll need to think of a topic to blog about. (My brother used to have a blog written by his cat. That would do.)

What else do I need to know: The contest runs until September 30th, 2008. Winners will be announced October 1st.

Got questions? Email us at support@mypunchbowl.com

Good luck!

We’ve been working on a few interesting new features here at MyPunchbowl and I’m happy to be able to tell you about one of them today.

For many of us, the hardest part of planning a significant celebration is having enough time to pull everything together. How many times have you glanced at the calendar to see that the birthday party you were going to plan is only a week away? And how many times have you been surprised that a significant holiday has snuck up on you?

For those of you with a blog, we’ve launched a new feature to help you with this problem: the “MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget.” Everyone has their own reasons to celebrate, and we’ve developed a handy-dandy widget so you can share your reasons with the world. Add your brothers and sisters birthdays (and your nieces and nephews) and choose which holidays to display too. You can change the theme and the color of the widget to match your blog’s color (and even choose the font). Then simply copy and paste the code to your blog, and you’ll have a personalized celebrations widget.

Here’s a screenshot of MY personalized widget, all customized just for me (if you want to see how this looks on my blog, head over to the MyPunchbowl blog):

If you have a blog, we hope you’ll give the MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget a try to display your reasons to celebrate to the world. Oh, and stay tuned… we have a widget contest that we’ll be announcing soon.

A few times everyday, someone tells me (either in person or by email) that I should do something. A few examples:

• “You should go to this upcoming event.”
• “You should really meet this person.”
• “MyPunchbowl really should have this feature.”
• “You should check out that site.”
• “You should partner with that company.”

I’m fine with someone making a recommendation, and I love when people share new and interesting things with me. But I don’t like it when others assume to know my priorities and insert their beliefs with the simple word “should.” Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we removed ”should” from the dictionary?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently as more and more customers have written in to tell us what MyPunchbowl “should” do. With almost any feature in MyPunchbowl, I can think of a user who told us exactly how they think the feature “should” work. But as with all software design, there’s much more than what meets the eye. It’s hard to explain the nuances of a particular feature implementation to a customer over email, but often there is a very good reason why the feature works the way it does. When a user tells us that the feature “should” work a certain way, it’s usually a clear signal that they haven’t looked at the problem comprehensively.

I was thinking about writing this post today, when I came across a post from my friend Dharmesh Shah titled “Why You Should Attend Business of Software 2008 in Boston.” I know that Dharmesh is well-intentioned, but his post would have been a lot more effective if it was called “10 Great Reasons to Attend Business of Software 2008 in Boston.” With that title, I’d be more intrigued to learn about the conference. The conversation would start from a point of excitement and interest.  I wouldn’t feel the need to defend my decision not to go to the conference.

Yes, I suppose there are a few things that you “should” do in life. Most people would agree that you should pay taxes, and you should brush your teeth. But doesn’t it feel better to encourage someone to brush their teeth because of the health benefits versus saying “you know, you really should brush your teeth.”

Look back at the title of this post — how did you feel when you read “You should read this post.” Wouldn’t it have been more effective if I wrote “I hope you’ll read this post”? (And for the record, I hope you’ve read this far, and I hope you’ll continue to read my blog.)

Am I wrong? What would happen if we removed “should” from the dictionary? Are there cases where the word “should” is appropriate? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

There a lot of resources on the web for finding jobs, but only a few that are focused specifically on Boston startup jobs.

One such website is one called Genotrope, a creation of Tom Summit. I’ve met Tom at a few Boston events and he’s always been gracious and pleasant. He asked me a while back if I would be interested in being a part of Genotrope and I quickly agreed. It’s a nice site with lots of great resources for those looking to understand the startup scene in Boston.

A great section of the site is the Boston VC Directory. I’ve used this area of the site a few times, and I noticed that the Genotrope VC Directory was covered on the 93 South blog several months ago.

If you’re looking for resources and information on the Boston startup scene, check out Genotrope.

Next week on July 15th, 2008, the Web Innovators Group will be holding their only summer gathering. I’ve been to many WebInno meetings in the past, and we presented MyPunchbowl to the group in January of 2007.

If you’re any one of the following types of people, you won’t regret attending the WebInno meeting next week:

• You’re a person trying to start a company
• You’re a person looking for a job in a startup company
• You’re an angel investor looking to meet interesting people with new ideas
• You’re a VC looking to be one of the first investors to find an interesting deal
• You’re in a big company and spend most of your day wishing you weren’t

Make sure to register for the WebInno event (you have to be registered to attend). Also check out a preview of the WebInno demo lineup.

I’m hoping that David Beisel and friends will take my suggestion to help connect employers with employees. Specifically, here’s what I would do at the event:

1. Provide large green stickers for hiring employers to wear on their name badge
2. Provide large red stickers for job seekers to wear on their name badge
3. Set up a specific area/room of the venue where job-seekers should congregate. Invite hiring employers to head over there if they are actively hiring
4. Provide a large corkboard with notecards where job seekers and employers can post a note about what they are looking for (this will also serve as a logical place to gather)
5. Publicize the WebInno job board throughout the event.

I also wish there was a WebInno Google group to keep the conversation going after the event was over. Hopefully, some of these ideas will be implemented for the July WebInno event. Hope to see you there.

What makes something the brutal truth? In my opinion, the difference between the “truth” and the “brutal truth” is that the other party doesn’t want to hear your perspective. There’s an inherent resistance (and usually vested interest) by the other person to live in their world, even though an objective 3rd party would likely disagree with their point of view. The brutal truth confronts the situation head-on with the hope that it will help set everyone on a better path.

I’ve been in a few situations recently where I decided to tell the brutal truth.

The first situation happened at work. We’re working on a new feature for MyPunchbowl, and it’s been progressing steadily. The lead developer on the project has been working hard over several weeks to hit the deadline. It hasn’t been an easy project, and there are multiple pieces to coordinate. He’s making progress, but it’s going to be a close call whether it will get done on time.

Last week I had the chance to see how the feature is coming along. The developer gave me a quick demo, and I was happy with the functionality and how the project was coming together. There was clearly lots more to do, but I could see how it would be a great feature for our site. However, there was something really wrong with the new feature: it was ugly. Really ugly.

Here’s where the brutal truth came in: despite the look in the developer’s eyes and the approaching deadline, I had to tell him that the feature was simply ugly. I specifically explained why I thought it did not meet our standards for shipping a great product and I asked him and our lead designer to revisit the visual look of the feature. It was a hard conversation. As much as I wanted to tell him that the feature was almost done, I knew that the brutal truth would lead us to a better end result.

I had a similar situation recently with a family member. This person is having a hard time, and is going through some personal problems. Unfortunately, a similar situation has happened in the past and the most latest episode is almost a carbon-copy of before. As hard as it was to do, I believe that telling the brutal truth was the best way to deal with the situation. Others around me felt that we should be careful to not upset the situation more by highlighting the similarities, but I knew in my heart that it was time to confront this person. Sometimes hearing the brutal truth hurts. But I believe that by my actions to tell the brutal truth, the end result will be much better.

Try it for yourself: sometime this week tell someone what you are actually thinking rather than sugarcoat it because you’re afraid of their reaction. You’ll feel liberated by knowing that you’re helping to drive to a better end result more quickly.

They say that “the truth can set you free.” Perhaps, then telling the brutal truth “can set you and others free.”

Do you think telling the brutal truth is sometimes the best course of action? Why or why not? Please share your thoughts with me and others in the comments.

There’s been a steady increase of Punchbowler dogs that hang out at the office with us these days. First there was Mozart, the dog of our landlord Steve. Then there was Ollie, brought to us by our newest developer Aaron.

In the last two weeks, we’ve had a few new dogs join the Punchbowlers. Our new tech support person, Colin brought us Jordy (who enjoyed lying on his back and pretending he was swimming). And today we have Pippy Louise, brought in by our new marketing contractor, Scott.

I don’t have a dog at home (we have two cats), so I’m always happy when we’re visited by our canine friends. Usually the dog finds a spot in the office to quietly hang out — in this case, Pippy Louise is spending this morning eating a bagel:

While it’s not a requirement to have a dog in order to get hired at Punchbowl, it sure is a nice bonus. So if you’re on a call with someone from Punchbowl and you hear barking in the background, now you’ll know why.

This morning as I sat and ate some cereal, I read the text on the back of the box of my Raisin Nut Bran (by far my favorite cereal). On the back of the box, the text reads something like this:

“Eating breakfast gives you the energy that you need to have a productive day. So stop hitting the snooze button and make time for breakfast.”

This simple statement says a lot about how General Mills thinks about their product and how it relates to their real competition. General Mills realizes that their biggest competition is not other cereals or even other breakfast foods. Their real competition are those people that don’t make enough time for breakfast (those who substitute sleep for breakfast).  The best thing that General Mills could do to increase sales of their product is to find a way to get people out of bed in the morning rather than hit the snooze button. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that GM should partner with alarm clock manufacturers like Bose and strike some radio programming deals that help people get out of bed.

As I mapped this way of thinking onto MyPunchbowl, one substitute is probably “paper and pencil”. It’s certainly possible to plan out your entire event using paper and pencil (and lots of people still do it this way). However, it’s not as efficient, it will take more time, and I would argue that you will have a less successful event (for example, when you use MyPunchbowl’s Pick-a-Date feature you can ensure the key people will be at your event). One other potential substitute is other forms of celebration (like vacations). For example, my sister-in-law recently told me that they are going to take a trip this year instead of holding a birthday party for my nephew. If somehow we could convince people that hosting a party or event was the best way to celebrate a birthday, our traffic would likely go up significantly.

Think about your product in this light: rather than focusing on other companies who are competing for the same market space, think about the substitute for your product. What substitute is the real competition for your product?

Sean here, the other founder of MyPunchbowl.

It’s been a while, but I was inspired to write a blog post. You see, in the last year or so I’ve had a few moments of clarity about myself. When you have these moments like I did, you realize that they don’t come along that often. Get ready because this is some really deep stuff (ahem).

1 - I like food that is small in size, but large in quantity.

Yup, read it again. I know your next question: what are some examples?

• Sprinkles. I love sprinkles. I’ve been told that I have sort of a problem. I don’t think I do- they’re sprinkles! …  brightly colored, crunchy, small, and completely edible! I mainly eat them on ice cream (but i won’t claim i’ve never eaten a straight spoonful). I prefer rainbow, but chocolate are cool too. I used to buy the small tin at the supermarket for $3.49 but then I got smart and ordered bulk quantities on eBay (6lbs of rainbow sprinkles for 12 dollars!). I never thought my love of sprinkles was a big deal or that unusual, but I’ve been informed that it is.

• Couscous. Getting the idea here? They’re small, there’s lots of them, so i like them. Back in my bachelor days I could eat a whole box of “Near East” couscous for dinner. My wife Jessie informed me that it wasn’t a well-balanced meal. Huh … well OK maybe not.

• Angel hair pasta. Slight variation here but the spirit is the same - small in diameter, large in quantity. I prefer Pesto sauce. In fact, i boycotted red sauce for a while cause I got tired of it. Speaking of boycotting, that brings me to my next life revelation …

2 - I’m not going to drink wine anymore

Look it’s not that i hate wine or have some big issue with it, I’d just rather drink other alcoholic beverages. I don’t particularly like wine, and I don’t have a great palette for it (in a blindfold test i could probably tell you if it was red or white) and so you know what? Not gonna drink it anymore. In case you’re wondering, i like beer, bourbon, vodka, and gin (I drink them separately, of course).

3 - Liquid and leather.

These are the two forms in which I eat fruit. So to clarify: If you want me to eat fruit (Jessie tells me it’s healthy) give it to me in liquid form (e.g. a smoothie, or ‘Naked’ juice) or give me some fruit leather (it’s like a natural fruit roll-up) and I’m in!

OK, that about wraps it up. I eagerly await my next moment of clarity. I hope others will be inspired to look inward, dig deep, and uncover some truly profound, fundamental, life-altering revelations like I recently have. Feel free to share with us if you do …

-Sean

This morning, there was a five alarm fire in downtown Natick only 2 blocks from my house (the old Punchbowl HQ). It was quite a scene. The entire building was lost, including five businesses that were housed in the building.

Consider this your public service announcement to check your fire insurance policy….

If you like watching fires (or you just like firemen) here’s a video of the fire, courtesy of the Metrowest Daily News article: