Punchbowl Blog

A few weeks ago I was in New York City and met with Catherine Holohan, a writer at Business Week magazine. Catherine and I spent about an hour talking about MyPunchbowl. We talked about the market overall, and why MyPunchbowl is different than other event and party planning sites. However, this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill press meeting… Catherine is really nice person and we enjoyed chatting about our jobs and life too.

This morning I awoke to a very nice article in Business Week magazine. Here’s what Catherine wrote: “This year, MyPunchbowl.com launched an invitation site with party-planning tools. One is a date optimizer that chooses the best day for an event based on votes by those invited, even giving preference to the dates preferred by those invitees whom the host identifies as VIPs behind the scenes. “There is demand for sophisticated party planning online,” says founder Matt Douglas.”

I also like how Catherine clearly articulated the business opportunity for Punchbowl. Beyond the nearly $30 billion U.S. market for online ads, there’s another obvious financial opportunity for online invitation sites: the $10-billion-plus market for party supplies.

Thanks to Catherine for spending the time with me and covering MyPunchbowl.com. Business Week is one of the few publications I actually read consistently. It’s really nice to be recognized in such an important publication.

Read the article here.

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Party Planning and Online Invitations with MyPunchbowl

A few of the leading tech blogs are sponsoring a new awards competition for 2007. The blogs involved are TechCrunch (thus the name “Crunchies”), GigaOm (we like them, although they’ve never written about MyPunchbowl), VentureBeat (great blog for any VC deal news), and Read/WriteWeb (good blog for up-to-date product news).

You can participate by nominating MyPunchbowl to one of the 20 categories. To nominate MyPunchbowl or yours truly, visit the Crunchies nomination page.

Thanks for your support of MyPunchbowl.com.

P.S. Shameless plug: Did you miss that?!? You can nominate me….

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Party Planning and Online Invitations with MyPunchbowl

One of our marketing goals is to reach beyond the “early adopter” tech crowd and reach the more mainstream user. That’s why it was particularly nice to get a surprise from “Ladies Home Journal” magazine yesterday.

Ladies Home Journal has a circulation over 4M, and is one of those publications that has been around for years. I love this description of the magazine (taken from their website): “Ladies’ Home Journal is a magazine for the modern American family woman who celebrates and cherishes her family relationships but also seeks ways to enrich, indulge and improve herself personally…”

MyPunchbowl was covered in their “Miss Gizmo” column online. Miss Gizmo writes: “Less stress from picking the date gives you more time to prep for the party, and the site’s party store locator will make hostess shopping easier. You can even add a personalized photo to the invite. What’s Miss Gizmo’s favorite feature? Every party’s own message board for before and after event chats. Try it out, it’s free.”

Check out the post on LHJ.com. Thanks to Ladies Home Journal for covering MyPunchbowl.

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Party Planning and Online Invitations with MyPunchbowl

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

On Friday night, Punchbowl was a sponsor of the TechCrunch Boston Meetup. It was a fantastic event for us — and by all accounts a big success for MyPunchbowl.com.

For Punchbowl, preparations for the event started a few weeks ago, and we really kicked it into high gear at the beginning of last week. Our goal was to elevate our visibility within the Boston TechCrunch crowd and clearly articulate the benefits of MyPunchbowl.com. At the event we launched our new marketing campaign: Use MyPunchbowl.com and you will be the “World’s Greatest Host.” We created t-shirts, big signs, and lots and lots of stickers. Oh, and we served the World’s Greatest Punch (yes, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic). Here’s a quick run-down of the MyPunchbowl presence at the event…

Our demonstration area was on the second floor. As people walked up the stairs, they saw this sign:

If you turned the corner to the right, you would see our demonstration area (note the beautiful monitor in the background showing off our brand new interface):

Here’s my co-founder Sean sporting our “World’s Greatest Host” t-shirt and listening intently to a potential user:

We had “World’s Greatest Host” stickers– and we applied them to anyone who stopped by our area. Here’s Mike Arrington (the real host of the event) showing his support for MyPunchbowl:

Last but not least– my brilliant wife came up with a name for the punch we served:

This event was truly a team effort– thanks to everyone who helped us make this happen. In no particular order, thanks to Jeanne, Dave, Blake, Jess, Sean, Mike — and anyone else I might have missed.

To read more about the event, see Don Dodge, Doug Levin (dude, where were you?), Center Networks, YoavShapira, Chris Herot, Jeff Bussgang and the official TechCrunch writeup.

We sponsored this event to help spread the word about MyPunchbowl. If you haven’t signed up for a free account and given MyPunchbowl.com a try yet, I’d like to invite you to take a minute and check it out: http://www.punchbowl.com.

A few weeks ago I heard from a number of people who saw that MyPunchbowl.com was covered in “The Week” magazine. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of this magazine in the past, but I can’t say I’ve ever read it. So after I heard about the mention, I went over to the magazine’s web site. The site is a only a subscription site– I guess this is a magazine that is only available in print.

Anyway, thanks to a friend of mine, I received a paper copy of the magazine in the mail last week. Here’s the cover of the October 5th issue:

And here is the mention of MyPunchbowl.com (from page 42 under the Leisure: Consumer section):

It’s great to see MyPunchbowl.com showing up in general interest magazines and mainstream publications. We’re making this product for people of all walks of life, and we’re grateful for the exposure in these mainstream publications.

Last week, we announced new GLBT templates and themes on MyPunchbowl.com. This morning MyPunchbowl.com was covered on all of the Edge Publications sites — and it’s a pretty impressive list. Check it out…

www.edgeBoston.com

www.edgeNewYork.com

www.edgeMiami.com

www.edgeProvidence.com

www.edgePtown.com

www.edgeFtLauderdale.com

www.edgeNewEngland.com

www.edgePhiladelphia.com

www.edgeDallas.com

www.edgeSanFrancisco.com

My thanks to Jason of Edge Publications for an informative article. Oh, and check out the logo we provided him by reading the story. If you’re interested in the GLBT community, you need to make Edge a permanent part of your web reading!

Today, MyPunchbowl.com is introducing a new line of themed online invitations for the gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual (GLBT) community.

Over the past year, a significant number of people have asked us for GLBT templates. The common requests are for gay marriage and civil unions, but once in a while we get other requests like coming out or adoption.  We want MyPunchbowl.com to be a place for everyone who is planning a celebration, so we’re happy to oblige.

We’ve decided to introduce these new online invitations to coincide with National Coming Out Day, which is today, October 11th. We have over 25 new templates, including gay marriage, civil union, second parent adoption, coming out, gay pride, AIDS awareness among many others. We’ll be adding more everyday as users request them. Here is a screenshot of our “Choose a Design” page with the GLBT category selected:

To see these themes, and view a large preview, create an account on MyPunchbowl.com and create a new party.

To all of you who asked for these new online invitations, we hope you like them. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. To send us your thoughts, go to www.punchbowl.com and click Feedback/Support (on the bottom of the page).

We’re committed to do our part to celebrate equality and help spread lasting understanding and tolerance. To the millions of people who are pausing today to celebrate National Coming Out Day, we’re proud to join you.  We invite you to sign up for a MyPunchbowl account and take a look at our new gay and lesbian online invitations and party themes.

Our friends over at Reddit have a drinking problem…um, I mean they want to buy you a drink. You see, apparently when you get acquired it comes with a provision that you get to celebrate the anniversary by getting your acquirer to pay for beer. Not bad. So Conde Nast/Wired Magazine is paying for friends of Reddit to gather in a few cities across the country. And drink. For free. What are you waiting for? Check out the reddit blog and add your name to the guest list.

And I’ll see you at the Reddit open bar in Boston. Hey Reddit, when’s that one?

I spent a few minutes looking at my blog stats this morning. I was pretty surprised when I saw that the post where I asked readers to wish my wife a happy birthday was my #1 post of all time. Just in the last few days, that post has had dozens of views. Why? It didn’t take long to figure out.

Try it for yourself: go to Google and type in “wish happy birthday to wife” and my post comes up first in the search results.  Type in “happy birthday to wife” and my post comes up 1/2 way down the page.. No wonder so many people are finding my blog!

This means that there are lots of people searching to find a way to wish their wife a happy birthday. I suppose they are looking for creative ways to celebrate their wife’s birthday. It’s got me thinking about how MyPunchbowl could help solve this problem. Obviously, one way to celebrate a birthday is to throw a party in your wife’s honor. I guarantee she’ll appreciate you for bringing her friends together.

If you’re reading this, you may be thinking “good idea, but it sounds like a lot of work.” What if MyPunchbowl.com made is dead-simple for you to throw a birthday party for your wife? What if you could organize everything you need and plan all of the logistics from where you are sitting at work? In many ways, this is what we are all about. That’s our vision in a nutshell and everyday we’re working to reach this goal.

So if you found this post by searching “wish my wife a happy birthday” or “Happy Birthday to my wife” consider using MyPunchbowl.com to throw a party in her honor. Don’t worry, we won’t tell her where you got the idea.