Email is the New Threat to Invitation Services
This post is a response to Mark Smithivas's comment on my earlier Hello Google Invites, Goodbye Evite:
I’ve been making similar arguments to the Planypus founders about this very issue. If Gvite truly clobbers the small, intimate group planning arena, then maybe the opportunity for startups is to address the needs of event organizers who plan larger, more public events. Trouble is there’s a whole slew of competitors in that space too (addressing the corporate meeting planners of the world)
The other competitive threat to the invite services comes from plain email itself, be it Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, office mail, whatever. I've noticed lately that friends are skipping evite altogether and inviting friends via CC, even for larger than intimate gatherings. People are so comfortable now with internet life that some value added services become unnecessary. When entrepreneurs try to find value to offer the masses, they should ask, is it really wanted? The "hassle" of inviting or coordinating people through email is less of a hassle than people think. Why do people spend so much time on Facebook getting apparently nothing productive accomplished? "Social crack" = entertainment. Invitation service as optimization is something that psychologists like Simon Baron-Cohen (Ali G's cousin) label as those closer to the autistic end of the spectrum, ie, the typically male, scientific types, and not the more social and typically females would appreciate.
I haven't followed the professional event planning space much. That's a whole different market. Interesting is the software to do seating organization. I remember one or two PC apps on the market recently joined by Web 2.0 server side AJAX new entrants.
Btw, Renkoo is struggling for an identity; wisely they chose to steer away from being a straight up invitation service but are playing a bad copycat to Twitter which owns that nascent category. Socializr will probably be at best a new clubby Friendster for a small group of people in SF. Vibely is actually achieving the same for DC partygoers and it doesn't have the overhang of Jonathan Abrams sized expectations. Planypus is making an earnest effort to compete with Evite straight up by taking the service into new spaces like Facebook and events or regional websites.
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April 1st, 2007 11:48
Minger you’re always very thoughtful but I think you’re missing the point. You can’t compare things based on functionality only. You need to consider the fun factor which is the emotional base that gets people using a particular product. Most people do not do well thought out objective product comparisons. They go with their gut feeling. Read more in my response here http://www.minger.net/2007/01/10/hello-google-invites-goodbye-evite/#comment-5709 and there’s a great recent post on 37signals about this quoting a guy who did marketing for various car companies, etc: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/346-people-have-no-idea-why-theyre-doing-what-theyre-doing
I think we all know this intuitively but this guy really drives the point home about how people make purchasing decisions. Thanks!
April 1st, 2007 12:50
Yan, I’m a big fan of Rapaille — I’ve cited him at least once in my earlier posts. I highly recommend reading his book “Culture Code.”
His work is much related to Ries and Trout positioning, except he delves into cultural idiosyncrasies as they relate to positioning. Like fractals, there’s positioning issues on different scales. Sure, there’s fun, but if you zoom out — as I spelled out in an earlier post — there’s the internet cultural code for invitation services.
In America, formal invitation = evite & informal invitation = phone, sms, email. People will mentally sort any new freestanding web invitation service as formal invitation — and that is ruled by evite. Fun is fun, but what activation energy is needed to crack this code?
Again, I think email will subsume more of the formal invitation share and so will social networks by tangential attack. The biggest shift will come, if ever, when we standardize on a rich mobile platform. Flash UI?
April 1st, 2007 13:26
And why do I assert the “internet cultural code for invitation services” trumps “fun?”
Think about it. Let’s use Rapaille’s consulting for the Chrysler Jeep as a case study. What Rapaille doesn’t say is that SUVs and Jeeps are status vehicles. Who really drives them off-road? When someone is planning to spend $20-$40K on a status vehicle you bet they do their homework, eg look at all the competitive products in the space. When they change SUVs, they prefer to buy something that improves their image, which means they are open to new styles. Car makers change their styles every four or five years, so it is really an open game each buying cycle.
Invitations services is more like shopping for a car like Honda Accord or Toyota Camry; buyers want utility and reliability. That and people DON’T shop for invitation services. No average person says “hmm, I should try a new invitation service today.” If they do, they are victim to network effects, “if i try a new service, will my guests “get it?”" Only early adopters find status in trying new things. What do their friends think they see an invitation from an alternative service? “WTF is this?” The sort what they see in a instant, and that is where the positioning comes in. They will immediately think formal v informal. Of course, in the long tail, there will be pockets of early adopters, people new to invitation user services altogether, etc ripe for conversion, but i think the numbers will be small.
April 1st, 2007 14:04
Hi Minger! Just curious: what is the “nascent category” that Twitter and we (Renkoo) are both in? I’m flattered to be compared to them, by the way, even if we come off a humble second-best… but I have very little idea in what area we could possibly be competing.
April 1st, 2007 14:39
Let’s imagine you are blogging in 1998 about evite coming out. What would you have written? Would it be that people aren’t shopping for invitation services? Probably. Would it be that early adopters of evite would have to deal with network effects and their guests not “getting it”? Again, I would think so. Would you be right? Well you’d probably be right on a small scale, evite took some time to take hold. But in the end it is doing 10million+ invitations per month.
I would venture a guess that when evite started it out it was just two college kids solving their own problem, a similar story to many of the new competitors. But if we do some retroactive market analysis we can see why Evite succeeded.
In 1998 there were two predominant modes of invitation 1. paper invitations (highly formal) and 2. emails, phonecalls, etc (informal). Evite ’saw’ that there was a market gap for those people that wanted the tracking capabilities and theming of formal invitations, but did not want the highly formal and slow aspect of doing snail mail invitations. Now we have evite. It’s almost as fast as email, but adds the ability to do theming and rsvp tracking. So there was a gap that evite filled.
Now fast forward to 2007 and let’s eliminate paper invitations now because we’re talking about the segment that uses the internet. Now we have emails/sms (informal, hard to track, hard to collaborate), and we have evite (formal, easy to track, hard to collaborate). Between these two options we now see another gap. There is nothing that can allow me to easily collaborate with my friends.
What to do when you are planning a trip somewhere with your friends? Or when you want to go out or get together and don’t know when and where. Well you’re going to need some way of voting, discussion, and probably a wiki if you’re going to do involved things like planning trips or larger events.
Countless groups are still using listservs for this purpose. Are they happy? No, almost every event organizer I’ve talked to including the savvy ones that are using wikis and listservs are not happy with these tools because they are too cumbersome in their tracking, notification, and discussion aspects.
So we see there is a gap between formal non-collaborative easy to track evite and informal somewhat-collaborative hard to track email that can be filled by a service that offers a highly collaborative environment, with easy rsvp tracking, and makes it informal by lowering the threshold to posting an event to under 30 seconds, and that works transparently by integrating with email, sms, rss, calendars, facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. That service is Planypus
April 1st, 2007 14:47
@Troutgirl: i’m not sure what he meant about renkoo/twitter comparison either…maybe he meant multi-modal notifications? I mean all twitter is really is a big multi-modal notification hub…
April 1st, 2007 14:49
Hi Joyce, good to hear from you. My imperfect description of the “nascent category” would be “colorful web-based intermediary (multi-modal multiplexer) for social communication.”
April 1st, 2007 15:15
Yan, Evite is the Xerox of photocopying. Xerox eventually did get unseated by the likes of Canon and Ricoh through technological prowess and deep pocketed marketing. Here we are dependent mostly on publicity and viral adoption. Can you convince someone within a few seconds that a new service is distinct and better? A few seconds is the only time you’ll have in a viral exposure. Someone seeing evite for the first time circa 1998 clearly understands that this is something different. As different as orange is from blue. You’re asking in 2007 someone to grasp two different shades of orange, and in a few seconds.
As I posted in a comments a while back in my pseudo-economic analysis, it’s not even a clear benefit to the traditional event planner to have collaboration. The alpha dog sets the plan and decides the platform. Collaborative planning could work for big budget, time time forward things like travel.
Specifically, I see Evite as a service for an event planner to broadcast a event to her guests and get a pulse on the attendance interest. As a matter of sociology, how many casual events are truly collaboratively planned. My guess is that a small percentage of the people in any social circle do a majority of the planning, say 20/80 rule.
Planypus’ basket of features could work Twitter style if there is the force of community behind it. Twitter, to me, is the spirit of IRC rechanneled.
Voting widgets would be cool actually. We see things like that in forum mods all the time. A voting engine with portable widgets for various contexts would be killer.
April 1st, 2007 18:34
“As a matter of sociology, how many casual events are truly collaboratively planned. ”
Well I guess the only way to answer is to say that so far 1407 plans have been made on planypus collaboratively in the 4 months it’s been up
You’re probably right that in most social circles its 20/80. I would even say it’s probably lower than that. Probably less than 10% of people in a social circle are what you would traditionally call active organizers. Those are the people who launch events on evite.
But what’s interesting about the planypus userbase is that it consists of two types of people right now. First are of course the early adopters and the people who are just pissed off at evite and looking for an alternative. The second and more interesting group is those that used to never send out evites, never initiate any plans, never send out emails, never even call people. These people are now using planypus because it’s so quick and easy to initiate an event when you don’t have to worry about organizing it.
There’s an interesting niche to be filled here. Despite the fact that only 10-20% of people in a social circles have enough patience to be organizers, it turns out 90% of the social circle has had an idea one time or another like “i want to do dinner” or “we should have a poker night” or “lets go skiing”. It used to be that they let these ideas slide because they didn’t want to organize them. Now they just put them up on planypus and let the actual organizers take over
April 2nd, 2007 00:33
There’s a service even older than Evite that you’re missing in your thinking here. I use Yahoo Groups as the backbone of a regular weekly event (the a2b3 lunch in Ann Arbor). There’s no negotiation about time or place to do, but what is required is an automated weekly reminder, and that service handles that task admirably. I continue to be surprised by event planning services that don’t offer automated scheduling of upcoming events far into the future - what I really want to do with any of them is configure it once and then walk away, coming back only to add more people into the stream.
The other service I am amazed doesn’t exist - and this may just reflect the youthfulness of who is writing code - is the whole playdate/playgroup organizing thing for people with kids.
April 2nd, 2007 13:31
Yan, I’m curious — have you crunched the data on the 1407 plans to learn the typical usage patterns for Planypus? It would be fascinating to see how the tight the social circles are and how many modifcations users make before finalizing a plan. The Planypus paradigm works well for established circles of singles that go out together week after week, where the plan is secondary to group’s intention. (In the case where social buddies are seriously coupled, the plans are usually primary to a regular intention; the intention is irregular and more centered around particular events that one person plans.)
Edward, I’ve used Yahoo Groups. People sometimes give feedback on dates that are suggested for meeting on the Yahoo Groups I’ve seen.
I suppose one could set up a Yahoo Group just for the sake of letting subscribers know about future events. Users can tune their subscription to the event feed. Too bad Yahoo doesn’t deploy SMS notification yet like GCal. I like being reminded of events on my phone.
Your very last idea is cool!
April 2nd, 2007 17:34
Minger,
We are currently building more and more stat capability to be able to answer questions like that. Right now I can say that 2/3rds of plans have comments. The average number of comments is 12 per activity with an average of 1.2 comments/person.
From talking to some of the most active users, your analysis would seem to be correct (other than that they have to be singles)..mostly it’s preexisting social groups that like to do things regularly together and use planypus to decide what to do and when and where. There is also a significant portion planning long-term events like trips or vacations.
Edward, we will have reminders soon, we are currently focusing on stability and a big secret project that we can’t quite reveal yet :-). We will certainly have reminders before we come out of beta. Thanks!