Great review of Pingg in TechCrunch today!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/25/pingg%e2%80%94invitations-done-right/

Whenever a niche gets really crowded with startups, you know that something is broken. Online invitations, which has been dominated by Evite for the past decade, is one of those areas where there is literally a dozen services trying to make it better-MyPunchBowl, Amiando, Invitastic, MadeIt, Socializr, iPartee, Renkoo, ImThere, Skobee, Zvents, Zoji, Windows Live Events. Now add Pingg. The site launched publicly last week. A little late to the party perhaps. But it starts from a very basic premise that most other online invitation sites surprisingly have ignored. Says co-founder and CEO Lorien Gabel: “We have taken the approach that the invite matters.”

When you get an invite from Pingg, you don’t have to click through to a Website blaring with advertisements just to find the address for a dinner. All the information is right there where it should be, in your email. Pingg’s invites are drop-dead gorgeous. A lot of care and attention has been put into the design of each one (you can choose from about 45 themes like dinner party, baby, wedding, food, travel, and eco-friendly). The invite, image, and event details all come through in your email. And you can RSVP from the email as well.

Of course, each invite is linked to a dedicated Website, where more photos, maps, videos, gift registries, and payment options exist (if guests want to pitch in to fund an event, for instance). The e-mails and Website are free. But you can also send out printed invites as postcards for $1.50 each (including postage) or send the invites as text messages to guests’ mobile phones ($1.50 for 20 messages). Gabel explains why he thinks Pingg is different in this blog post.

In addition to making money from printed invitations and sending SMS messages, Pingg has various other affiliate deals in place. If you don’t like any of the images Pingg provides for its invites, you can purchase one directly on Pingg through micro-stock photography site Fotolia (or upload your own image for free). The gift registry, which is currently linked to Amazon, offers other affiliate-fee opportunities. A ticketing feature will soon be launched, as will premium subscriptions for professional and power users. But advertising will never be part of the equation. “That detracts from the event,” says Gabel. Nobody wants to see a Weight Watcher’s ad next to a dinner invitation.

The site has some other nice touches, including guest-list management and event-reporting tools. Event hosts can set up automatic reminder messages and thank-you notes when they are creating their invites. And the RSVP options include the ability to limit an event’s capacity, or to allow invitees to bring guests or transfer their invites to others.

Pingg is based in New York City (the CEO and VP of marketing share an office with Clickable. First30Days, and independent film company PalmStar Entertainment). Its development and design team is in Toronto. The co-founders, brothers Gabel and CTO Matt Harrop, are Canadian. They founded the company in January, 2007 and self-funded it with $500,000. Then they raised an $800,000 angel round in March, 2007 led by the early-stage Actarus Funds, the investment vehicle of Stephan Paternot, co-founder of TheGlobe.com. (Paternot now runs PalmStar). At least that 1.0 money is now being put to good use.

Comments Off

Ah, the good ol’ days

From the March 2008 Issue of Vanity Fair…
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2008/03/postscript200803

In January 2000, contributing editor Nina Munk reported on the late-90s Internet gold rush—a surreal time when speculators competed for stakes in Web start-ups, and entrepreneurs with little more than the talent for self-promotion became insta-tycoons by taking untried ventures public (“It’s the I.P.O., Stupid!”). Free Internet provider NetZero, which drained $15.3 million in its first, and only, year as a private company, was valued at $3 billion on the first day of public trading. Online-community site theglobe.com broke I.P.O. records when it rose 606 percent in its initial day of trading, briefly propelling its two giddy twentysomething founders to a combined worth of more than $150 million. Kozmo.com, having just raised $60 million from Amazon.com for its plan to deliver snacks and trinkets to people’s doorsteps, was racing toward a mega public offering, as were Pets.com and Petopia.com. It was I.P.O. mania. But as Munk’s article anticipated, everything would soon fall apart.

In March, the nasdaq, driven by Internet stocks, closed above 5,000 for the first time ever—up from 3,000 just four months earlier. Then, in mid-April, the bubble burst. Suddenly there were no more I.P.O.’s of tech companies. Dot-coms were dot-doomed.

Theglobe.com’s Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman, who were each worth at least $90 million on paper at one point, watched their million-dollar fortunes evaporate. Pets.com, which raised $82.5 million in its initial public offering in the last gasp of February 2000, was out of business nine months later. The others—among them Petopia.com (which had funding of at least $79 million, but was later folded into Petco Animal Supplies in order to pay off debts of $2 million) and Kozmo.com (which burned through $250 million before it went bust)—never made it to Wall Street.

The dot-commandos did recover, however. “What do you do after you’ve made and lost a fortune? You pick up where you left off, chasing the dreams that inspired you before you made your first dollar,” says Paternot, who wrote a tell-all book, A Very Public Offering, in 2001. Today, he invests in Internet 2.0 start-ups (including event-management site Ping.com and Craigslist–like Olx.com) and independent movies (Lunar Park and Down & Dirty Pictures). Krizelman started a publishing-data venture called MagazineRadar. Kozmo.com’s C.E.O., Joseph Park, who fell off the map after the delivery site went bust, resurfaced in December 2006, founding Askville.com, an information-sharing Web site under the Amazon umbrella. And former Pets.com C.E.O. Julie Wainwright is a self-employed strategic consultant.

As for NetZero’s C.E.O., Mark Golden, he and his Web 1.0 relic have survived, buying competitor Juno Online Services in 2001 to form United Online, a public company worth less than a third of what NetZero was worth in its heyday. Golden remains C.E.O. of the combined company.

The new Internet frontier is different from the virtual boomtown of the late 90s. “I think everything is more measured—both entrepreneurs and investors,” Krizelman says. Paternot agrees: “It’s founded on significantly stronger companies, many of whom show solid profits and more realistic long-term targets.” But that doesn’t mean Paternot is advocating Web-site I.P.O.’s. “Only go public as an absolute last resort,” he says. “If you absolutely must go public, then at least make sure first that your revenues are steadily rocketing and your profits entirely predictable.” That brings up this question: With so many of today’s Webpreneurs more focused on growing traffic than on building revenues, was anything really learned from the first tech bubble?

Comments Off