MyPunchblog

Happy International Talk like a Pirate Day. It’s a pretty special day around MyPunchbowl. We have lots of users who are planning pirate festivities (it helps that International Talk Like a Pirate Day is on a Friday this year). By my count, there are at least a couple hundred pirate-related events being hosted by MyPunchbowl users. This morning, people are walking around our office singing pirates songs, and our lead developer is speaking in pirate. Our home page has been updated with an appropriate pirate greeting, and we’ve maxed out our search engine marketing budget for the keyword “Pirate Party Planning.” Hopefully we won’t blow our entire funding in one day.

Here’s a screenshot of our updated MyPunchbowl home page greeting:

TechCrunch has an article this morning about other sites that are celebrating International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s nice to know that we’re in the company of Facebook, FriendFeed, and Google by celebrating this esteemed day. Check out Google’s Pirate search. Brrrrriliant!

It’s not too late to join in the festivities.  Head over to MyPunchbowl and bring your friends together tonight to celebrate this (important) day. Our resident party planning expert Penelope shares her favorite pirate party invitations but I’ve got mine (see below). Whatever you choose, have fun. Arrrrrr!

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve closed a $2.1M Series A funding, led by Contour Ventures with participation from Intel Capital and eCoast Angels. This funding will enable us to increase our leadership position and expand MyPunchbowl. I’ll provide more details and some background stories later. For now, here is the official press release:

Framingham, Mass. (PR Newswire) September 16, 2008 – Punchbowl Software Inc. announced today that it has completed a $2.1 million Series A financing, led by Contour Venture Partners with participation from current investors Intel Capital and eCoast Angels. The new funding will be used to pursue strategic opportunities and grow the Punchbowl Software development team.

The Series A funding arrives at a key moment for the fast-growing company behind MyPunchbowl, a critically acclaimed event-planning website. MyPunchbowl serves up all of the key ingredients to effortlessly plan unforgettable celebrations. The site includes unique features for picking a date for the event, sending save-the-dates, finding supplies, communicating with guests, sending online invitations, and sharing photos and videos after the event has passed.

“We’ve seen explosive growth since our first round of funding last year,” said Matt Douglas, CEO, Punchbowl Software. “This new funding will enable us to grow our team and pursue numerous market opportunities.”

MyPunchbowl’s step-by-step, workflow-based interface makes it popular for key life milestone events such as baby showers, bridal showers, milestone birthdays, and retirement events. The site’s traffic has grown more than 20 percent each month over the past year. With helpful tools, great advice, and unique features, MyPunchbowl helps hosts and guests get from the planning to the celebration without the stress.

“We see great opportunity for MyPunchbowl to continue to grow its leadership position in the party and event planning market,” said Bob Greene, co-managing partner, Contour Venture Partners. “Its viral and word of mouth growth impressed us and attracted us to invest with this outstanding management team.”

Since the launch of MyPunchbowl, the site has added unique features for event planning and party invitations. The “Pick a Date” feature helps drive group consensus and automates date selection for the host. The “Checklist” section offers an innovative way to organize party planning and a simple way to ask friends to bring something to the party. Users of the site can expect to see ground-breaking new features on MyPunchbowl within the coming months.

“The MyPunchbowl website is a great example of how new technology can bring value to consumers,” said Lucy McQuilken, investment manager, Intel Capital. “Intel Capital is pleased to re-invest in Punchbowl Software.”

They say that the “quiet comes before the storm.” And indeed, in many cases that is true. Why is it that things are quiet before something big happens? Here are a few possible reasons:

• It’s nature’s way of preparing for what’s about to happen (for example, in the case of a hurricane)
• The human body auto-regulates to make sure it has enough energy to get through the excitement (part of the fight or flight response, but prior to the adrenaline kicking in).
• You specifically schedule a quiet period to give yourself time to prepare
• You shift your priorities temporarily (because you know that your full attention will soon be required)
• Life gets too damn busy to have much time for anything else

Over the last few weeks, it’s been a combination of all of the above for me. I haven’t had much time for blogging (thank you to the people who wrote to me asking me to post more). I’ve taken some time to rest, and luckily the world around me has cooperated. And in the lead up to this something big, I’ve been busy preparing. I shifted my priorities, scheduled quiet times in my life, and have also had periods of time where I was overwhelmed with all of the work and responsibilities that this job often brings. In particular, the last week has been pretty much all-consuming, but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Our “something big” is soooo close.

So what is the “something big” that is about to happen for Punchbowl Software? You’ll have to wait to find out.

A few weeks ago, I was at an epic Red Sox game. If you follow baseball, perhaps you heard about it. In the bottom of first inning, the Red Sox scored 10 runs. Yes, 10 runs. David Ortiz (aka “Big Papi”) was up twice in the inning, and he hit two 3 run home runs — in the same inning! Absolutely incredible.

I’ve seen a lot of baseball games in my lifetime. So when I turned to my sister-in-law in the bottom of the third (with the score now 12-2) and proclaimed that the Red Sox would likely hold on and win the game, I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to jump to that conclusion. Boy was I wrong.

Apparently the Texas Rangers didn’t get that memo. In the top of the 5th inning, the Rangers put on a hitting display and scored 8 runs. The very next inning, they scored 5 more — to make the score 15-14 and take the lead. Stunning.

So how did it all end? The Red Sox battled back with 4 runs in the bottom of the 8th to reclaim the lead, and hung on (barely) to win the game 19-17. That’s 36 runs on 37 hits. It tied an American League record for most runs scored in one game. Take a look at the final box score to get a sense of the unbelieveable comeback by the Rangers — 13 runs in 2 innings!

Most reasonable people would have drawn the same conclusion as I did in the 3rd inning. The Red Sox had already pulled off an amazing feat — 10 runs in one inning — no one could possibly match them, right?

The same can be said about many web businesses. The pundits of the web have declared over and over again that certain websites have such a large lead on their competition that they will never be beat. I remember distinctly meeting some of the original employees of Google back in 1999 (I was living in Palo Alto at the time where Google was founded). My reaction was typical. “Why do we need another search engine?” I asked the guy with the Google t-shirt. With Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, AOL ahead of them, there is simply no way that Google could catch up… right?

In Google’s case, not only did they catch up, but they took the lead. However, the real moral of my story is this: although the Red Sox won the game, Texas scored a hell of a lot of runs. They played a great game, and were successful in their own right. Startups (and business in general) are the same. You don’t have to win the overall game to win. If you can follow the leader (and keep pace), you’ll build a very successful business and score a lot of “runs.” I’m sure that the Rangers wanted to win the game, but I’d bet that they were very pleased with the game that they played.  

If you have a startup, don’t listen to all of the %@#^* pundits who proclaim that the competition has such a huge lead that it’s not worth playing the game. Remember, the game is 9 innings long. Focus on what you need to do to be successful, and stop looking at the scoreboard. Who knows? You may find yourself successful in your own right — and maybe you’ll even take the lead.

What other examples on the web come to mind? Facebook and MySpace? Flickr and Kodak Easyshare? Who else? Add your thoughts to the comments.

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It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been in our new offices for more than six months now. When we first moved in, we had no furniture. In fact, on the first day of our new office, the team spent the morning at IKEA buying furniture. That afternoon we set it all up. It’s interesting to look around the office and see some of the things that we bought that day that we still don’t use (desk organizers) and see some of the things we use alot (our coffee table in the lounge). I know IKEA is known for cheap home furniture, but every startup should head to IKEA when they are starting out. We outfitted our entire office for less than $1500. That’s about $250 per employee. Not too bad.

With all of that money we saved from our IKEA furniture, we wanted to spice up the office. We were inspired by some of the pictures we saw on a blog post from our friends over at Xobni. So a few months ago, we added our most important piece of office equipment. You see, we do a lot of design reviews and often have the need to gather around a large monitor. Our developers have nice large monitors, but it’s not really convenient to have a large group sit around their desks. We knew that we had to do something. And there was only one reasonable solution: head to Costco to pick up a useful piece of electronics to hang on the wall. Others may colloquially call it a “TV” but we’ve been instructed by our accountant to call it a “large display monitor” (that way it can be filed under “furniture and fixtures”). And of course, we never ever watch any TV on it…. really….

Here it is, in all of it’s glory (note the computer hookup that proves we really do use it for work purposes!):

Truth be told, we use it quite a bit for design review meetings and when we’re reviewing open development issues. It’s nice to be able to gather around the screen and comfortably sit back and have a discussion. After a few days of using our new 46 inch flat screen TV we officially declared that it was a worthwhile (and not just fun) purchase. 

The hardest part about all of this for me is that our office TV is nicer than the one I have at home. Perhaps it’s time to upgrade my large display monitor at home? I bought my current TV in 2003, right after I finished school. In “TV years” that makes my TV about 45 years old by my calculation…. perhaps it really is time. After all, football season is coming…

If you ever get a chance to visit Punchbowl HQ, make sure to bring some popcorn and other movie snacks. We’ll sit you down in our comfortable IKEA chair, turn the lights down and let you enjoy our large display monitor. Trust me, everything looks better on the large screen.

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A few weeks ago I was at the Nike outlet store in New Hampshire and I saw a classic t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Just Do It.” This simple phrase is arguably the best marketing slogan of all time. Can you think of a slogan that captures the brand and mission of a company better than “Just Do It”?

I’m wearing my ‘Just Do It’ t-shirt today (it’s 90 degrees here in Boston), and it got me thinking about how I can apply the “Just do it” mantra to my everyday work. 

Are you like me in that you have a list of things to do that never seems to get done? I keep my to-do list in a handy-dandy web application and I prioritize by things I need to do “Now” versus things I need to do “Soon” or “Later.” It’s amazing to see that some of the items on my “Later” list have been there for many, many months. So why haven’t I gotten to them yet?

I wonder if I were to add up all of the time that I’ve spent reading those tasks on my to-do list how much time I’ve wasted. Rather than spending those 5 seconds to process the item on my list, I could have simply used that time to start making progress on the item. I’ve done this with my email inbox many times too. Rather than handling an email right away, I’ll let it fester in my inbox. I’m always more effective when I touch an email only once.

So today I’ve been trying to handle a bunch of things using the “Just Do it now” mantra. It’s been a productive day. I’ve cleaned out my inbox, responded to a bunch of things that I had let linger, and I even knocked a few things off of my long-standing to-do list.

It’s been an interesting experiment. If you’re like me and have a long-standing to do list and an inbox full of emails you haven’t handled, try the “Just Do it Now” approach. And let me know how it goes.

Seth Godin has a great post up today about his experience with Air Canada. Apparently he got charged for checking his bags while other passengers didn’t get charged. In his post, Seth compares his Air Canada experience with a Disney theme park by noting “Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.”

Seth uses this story to emphasize a key lesson for many businesses: “When there is both pain and pleasure associated with your service, work extremely hard to separate them by time and geography.”

I can think of many businesses that do this effectively, especially ones that allow you to use your credit card to automatically pay your bill every month. Take DirectTV for example: if I had to pay for every time I turned on the TV, I’m guessing that I would turn on the TV a whole lot less. The pain of paying for the service is separated from the fun of using it.

One more example: all-inclusive vacation resorts. By the time I’ve arrived in the sunshine, I’ve forgotten about the pain of paying for the trip. In fact, I can eat and drink all that I want without ever thinking about the cost. Brilliant.

So let’s map this onto the MyPunchbowl service. We have the same problem. When you are in the midst of party planning, there’s a lot of pain associated with all of the things that you have to buy: party supplies, an event venue, food and beverage, gifts etc etc. Our goal at MyPunchbowl is to help you separate all of the pain of planning from the fun of actually hosting the party. Most people who are planning a significant life event are planning many weeks ahead of time and using our end to end workflow to walk through the steps of event planning. Here’s our hope: if you use MyPunchbowl, by the time you get to the time of the event you’ll be relaxed, organized, and ready to enjoy it.

Let us know how we can help you separate the pain from the fun of planning an event using MyPunchbowl. We’d love to hear from you.

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.