

Y Combinator’s Anyvite Takes On Evite, Keeps Things Simple - rwebb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/01/y-combinators-anyvite-takes-on-evite-keeps-it-simple/

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timr
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:

[http://www.scurrilous.com/blog/archives/2007/03/30/evite-
alt...](http://www.scurrilous.com/blog/archives/2007/03/30/evite-
alternatives/)

~~~
marketer
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).

~~~
timr
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.

------
defen
PLEASE crush Evite...they're my least favorite internet company that everybody
uses. Good luck.

~~~
jmorin007
We would be more than happy to oblige! Whatever you can do to spread the word
about Anyvite would be much appreciated ;)

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apu
Some minor suggestions/bugs:

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?

~~~
jmorin007
Great suggestions! We're definitely going to add the pop up calendar ASAP and
will look into the other bugs with the date and time stuff.

Thanks for the recommendations!

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Alex3917
I like the concept, but the color and font of the logo makes me think AnyWine.

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phd2000
Good luck on this but everyone I know just uses Facebook to coordinate events.
Plus Facebook Mobile lets you keep updated even on the go.

~~~
jmorin007
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.

~~~
jyu
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.

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omnipath
I don't particular use Evite (I mean, I know what the site is, but that's
about it.)

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.

~~~
alaskamiller
Not much.

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.

~~~
drm237
Not Much? I think you may be in the minority of people who think that evite
doesn't have many issues...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evite#Criticism>

[http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,16383...](http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1638344_1638341_1638337,00.html)

[http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/s...](http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/su_evite)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13wwln-
medium-t.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13wwln-
medium-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

<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-...](http://valleywag.com/tech/modern-and-awkward/8-companies-we-all-hate-
and-why-we-use-them-anyway-260371.php)

~~~
alaskamiller
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.

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auston
What I love about anyvite... It lets me use my coordinatr login!

~~~
jmorin007
Yup! If you have an account on Coordinatr, then all of your data and past
history should be available to you.

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soundsop
Same people as Coordinatr: <http://coordinatr.com/about> ? The sites seem very
similar.

~~~
drm237
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.

~~~
pchristensen
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!

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initself
I just started a party at my house in an hour!

~~~
mwinters58
how come I didn't get an SMS invite? I'm so bored at home...

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chez17
No matter how good the service is, I think the design of the homepage could
use a lot of work. Just my two cents.

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morbidkk
Havent you guys checked purpleTrail.com It has even more features; please
check out

~~~
drm237
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.

~~~
OneSeventeen
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.

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fbailey
<http://de.amiando.com/index.html?requestLanguage=EN>

The european competitor, as a I european I prefer them

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fletch
"Anyvite" is way to close to "an Evite."

Good luck not getting sued. Sincerely. :/

~~~
aasarava
But Evite is way close to "invite" -- and Evite is going to have a pretty hard
time showing that it has ownership over all derivations of the word.

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prakash
didn't renkoo (adam rifkin's company) start out trying to do the same thing?

