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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

I've been using Google's calendar to send out invitations. How are these sites different? I.e. what's the point?

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.

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.

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