Yeah, it's the next iteration of Coordinatr. Coordinatr has been a great proof of concept for us and very useful for gathering user feedback. With our YC launch, we've added a ton of features and have really tried to improve the user experience.
Congrats! I wasn't that excited about YAEK until I realized it was you guys that made it. Coordinatr was the best user experience I've had with software because of how receptive and responsive you were to the feedback I gave. I wish you the best of luck and I will be using AnyVite!
We realize that Facebook is a dominant competitor in this market space and a lot of people use it for creating events, but there are still some people we've talked to who aren't entirely happy with it, as well as some market segments out there that aren't avid Facebook users.
How big is the addressable market? What you just described sounds pretty small.
"...still some people we've talked to who aren't entirely happy with it" This sounds like people that are slightly annoyed, and not really displeased enough to switch over to something else.
For my last party invite, I tried using facebook but a lot of people balked at it. Pretty sure the reason was that it forces you to think that you need to sign up/log in and people just want to have an easy access to event time/address, and a yes/no button to rsvp.
I just created a test on anyvite and it was super easy and common-sense. Definitely preferrable to facebook in my opinion. Two comments though:
1. RSVP dropdown is smallish/hard to notice.
2. Background images stretch in an ugly way, at least on my work IE 1024 x 768.
Using Evite is not the most intuitive thing in the world. We hear from lots of people who won't create invites using it because it's just too confusing to use.
The biggest complaints has always been the placement of ads on the invitations and their insistence on drawing you to the site to look at any relevant information (which in turn increases the pageviews and expands their ad inventory). But that's their business model. Few other people have hooked on a more clever way of making money off invitations.
These toys that people make, and yes they are just toys, flame out quite quickly despite people clamoring that Evite's evil and so on. Here's a list of other similar services taking on Evite:
Mypunchbowl (complete event coordination)
Planypus (fuzzy arrangement)
Goovite (simplistic invitation system)
Invitastic (pretty invite templates)
Eventful
Imthere
Madeit
Crush3r (hipster/pretty invite templates)
Partee
Renkoo (friends getting together)
Skobee (dead)
Socializr
Upcoming
Zvents
Pownce can also be considered a similar service. Tack on the current trend of location-aware social apps like Loopt and you have another layer. Those apps are likely where these apps will evolve into. Plus the old standbys of email and phones.
In the end they all do the same thing: you type in info and it gets sent out, sometimes you get to gussy up the invites. The strategic advantage you have is simply size and inertia. If there's going to be anyone that's capable of crushing Evite it would only be Facebook.
Yeah, I went through the same exercise with developing a product in this field and went through all those links and used it as justification of how an Evite killer is possible. All those links end up talking about the same 2 things over and over again:
- ads on the invites
- email bait you to visit the site
Great, but that's how they make money and they've been profitable with a small staff for a long long long long long long long long time.
Most of the other invitation sites focus on niches, Renkoo on the concept of friends getting together, Crush3r on hipster stylings, MyPunchbowl on coordinating the whole event, Socializr on being a social network, so on so forth. Besides Facebook, MyPunchbowl is the only other service getting quite a bit of traction. But it ends up being the same concept: single input info, multiple output info. I really believe this is a game of user conquest and attrition. Without the momentum and money to stay in the fight for the long haul, Evite (which has already been genericized) will just keep on chugging along.
Either way, good luck with the site and I'm sure you're much smarter than me at figuring out how to make this work.
1. It would be nice to have a button which pops-up a small calendar (something like on kayak.com or any other flight site). The automatic parsing is nice, but for the less web-savvy, a button would be easier to grok.
2. The time parsing is a little funky. If I type in 9:30, it auto-detects as PM. If I add a space after that, it suddenly switches to AM. This might catch people off guard.
3. The auto date parsing is awesome (with the 'natural language' feature). However, I found that the word 'tonight' doesn't work...perhaps you want to add it to your dict?
Yeah, we have seen purpletrail. As the article said, we're going for simple and straightforward. We're also pretty big believers that "more features" does not mean something is better.
Similarly, have y'all seen mobaganda.com? It is doing the simple == better thing, as well. I notice you guys seem (I haven't actually used either site yet) to have a few more features. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
yes... i hve checked out http://www.purpletrail.com and the site is pretty neat with some great features... i guess worth giving a try... and it also has desktop and mobile... abilities
How are you guys planning to get traction? This is a really crowded field, and adoption doesn't appear to be driven by rational behavior. For example, Invitastic (http://invitastic.com) is already a pretty darned good replacement for Evite, but nobody knows about it (no personal association; they just happen to be a local company in the space).
Also, a few seconds of googling turned up this laundry list of pretenders to the throne:
Agreed, it is a crowded market space with different sites targeting different sub-segments. We have some ideas that we're working on for user adoption and growth.
Specifically about invitastic -- they never made any serious attempt to go after evite. Jackson Fish Market is more of a marketing/consulting company. They developed invitastic for a client to promote a product (which is an interesting business model).
True, but it's not that they don't want to take down evite -- they just realize the difficulty of the task, and prefer to take a few quick shots at the goal instead. Their subsidized development model is a really just a hedging strategy against the failure of any particular app.
I think the important point is that they've built a great evite-replacement product that nobody is using. There's clearly something interesting going on here, and I wonder if it's a case of evite being good enough? Geeks may complain about evite, but there are enough good replacements out there that the general public could have switched already.
I definitely agree with this. I don't think anyone has yet figured out the X factor that has got evite all the traction. Maybe evite didn't even have an X factor (just luck and timing), but, certainly, any new players in the field need to have an edge somehow to succeed.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread"...still some people we've talked to who aren't entirely happy with it" This sounds like people that are slightly annoyed, and not really displeased enough to switch over to something else.
I just created a test on anyvite and it was super easy and common-sense. Definitely preferrable to facebook in my opinion. Two comments though:
1. RSVP dropdown is smallish/hard to notice. 2. Background images stretch in an ugly way, at least on my work IE 1024 x 768.
Otherwise, a great site!
For example, most of my friends do not use Facebook.
But all of my friends use email.
What are these problems that Evite supposedly has? From what I seen, people in general don't have a problem using them. Lay people, I mean.
The biggest complaints has always been the placement of ads on the invitations and their insistence on drawing you to the site to look at any relevant information (which in turn increases the pageviews and expands their ad inventory). But that's their business model. Few other people have hooked on a more clever way of making money off invitations.
These toys that people make, and yes they are just toys, flame out quite quickly despite people clamoring that Evite's evil and so on. Here's a list of other similar services taking on Evite:
Mypunchbowl (complete event coordination)
Planypus (fuzzy arrangement)
Goovite (simplistic invitation system)
Invitastic (pretty invite templates)
Eventful
Imthere
Madeit
Crush3r (hipster/pretty invite templates)
Partee
Renkoo (friends getting together)
Skobee (dead)
Socializr
Upcoming
Zvents
Pownce can also be considered a similar service. Tack on the current trend of location-aware social apps like Loopt and you have another layer. Those apps are likely where these apps will evolve into. Plus the old standbys of email and phones.
In the end they all do the same thing: you type in info and it gets sent out, sometimes you get to gussy up the invites. The strategic advantage you have is simply size and inertia. If there's going to be anyone that's capable of crushing Evite it would only be Facebook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evite#Criticism
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,16383...
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/s...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13wwln-medium-t.h...
http://www.evitesucks.com/
http://www.jabrams.com/thetruthaboutevite.html
http://venturebeat.com/2006/09/19/why-i-hate-evite/
http://valleywag.com/tech/modern-and-awkward/8-companies-we-...
- ads on the invites
- email bait you to visit the site
Great, but that's how they make money and they've been profitable with a small staff for a long long long long long long long long time.
Most of the other invitation sites focus on niches, Renkoo on the concept of friends getting together, Crush3r on hipster stylings, MyPunchbowl on coordinating the whole event, Socializr on being a social network, so on so forth. Besides Facebook, MyPunchbowl is the only other service getting quite a bit of traction. But it ends up being the same concept: single input info, multiple output info. I really believe this is a game of user conquest and attrition. Without the momentum and money to stay in the fight for the long haul, Evite (which has already been genericized) will just keep on chugging along.
Either way, good luck with the site and I'm sure you're much smarter than me at figuring out how to make this work.
1. It would be nice to have a button which pops-up a small calendar (something like on kayak.com or any other flight site). The automatic parsing is nice, but for the less web-savvy, a button would be easier to grok.
2. The time parsing is a little funky. If I type in 9:30, it auto-detects as PM. If I add a space after that, it suddenly switches to AM. This might catch people off guard.
3. The auto date parsing is awesome (with the 'natural language' feature). However, I found that the word 'tonight' doesn't work...perhaps you want to add it to your dict?
Thanks for the recommendations!
Also, a few seconds of googling turned up this laundry list of pretenders to the throne:
http://www.scurrilous.com/blog/archives/2007/03/30/evite-alt...
I think the important point is that they've built a great evite-replacement product that nobody is using. There's clearly something interesting going on here, and I wonder if it's a case of evite being good enough? Geeks may complain about evite, but there are enough good replacements out there that the general public could have switched already.
The european competitor, as a I european I prefer them
Good luck not getting sued. Sincerely. :/