How we restarted our company in two weeks during Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

How we restarted our company in two weeks during Y Combinator

blog.eventjoy.com

111 pointstgoldberg78 comments

> we had to announce our name change in an upcoming edition of a local newspaper. Yes, it’s exactly like it sounds.

I don't think this is out of the ordinary (in the US). My understanding is that printed fictitious name filings are required in most places when you do business as a name other than your personal name or corporate entity name.

If your town has a weekly alt newspaper, it's usually pretty easy to go through them (and usually < $100).

It is very common (I've filed over a dozen articles of organization and incorporation across 3 states) but clearly an archaic, inefficient means of announcing a business name establishment. There are "newspapers" in Arizona dedicated entirely to publishing these announcements. It seems like a racket, becoming a recommended vendor to provide a service for a legal requirement in an obsolete way.

Is it me or is every YC company coming out with "joy" as the second part of their name?

* ridejoy

* homejoy

* eventjoy

A startup culture meme. There'll be another hip suffix (or prefix) in due time.

Honest question, does this meme provide any actual benefits? Wouldn't it cause confusion of your brand?

It's a simple solution if you don't want to spend a lot of time on a name. It means you can get back to providing an amazing service or product all that much quicker.

I don't know - I always think it's funny choice of words. I like homejoy a lot actually - but I don't know if they've caused me to feel "joy."

That said - nicely done on such a fast turnaround.

The response to the name has been overwhelmingly positive. We still have a ton of people come up to us just to say how much they love the name. Thanks!

Worse than this is the use of the word "delight" to describe UI. I cringe every time.

It's short, memorable, and evokes positive emotion.

Such names become much less memorable once there are numerous ones that share the same format.

It can rapidly get to the point where people remember that the name has an -ify or -ly or -joy suffix, but can't remember what the root word was.

But remember that the world out there isn't reading HN, nor is it likely that real customers are going to see multiple companies with the same meme in a particular vertical.

I still confuse spotify and shopify regularly when reading headlines quickly even though I know both companies and what they do very well.

3 out of 600+ is not every.

Nice writeup, but what's up with that bottom photo? I'm looking at the redchair in front of the unoccupied MacBook. If I had to work like that, I'd quit so fast I'd create a Superman 1 style reversal of the space time continuum and bump into myself on the way out the door.

We had three team members working on this and only two good chairs, so we rotated. What you can't see is that we have two couches around the work area.

I'm thinking a $100 chair from Office Depot would be a good idea. (I'm an independent working from home, and I recently bought an Aeron, out of my own pocket) I get the whole long hours, bare bones startup incubator thing, but just like we often use MacBooks instead of $249 WalMart specials, seating isn't an area to skimp on! :-) (as for the couch, I think I couldn't do that for long as an alternative - my MBP Retina gets way too hot for that)

Hey this is Karl, the other Eventjoy founder. I actually spend a lot of time working on couches, so I was actually pretty happy :) Besides... we didn't have time to fetch another chair

Order it online, 10min max.oryou are too busy reading hn?

Todd, thanks for sharing your personal experiences. Really nice writeup and interesting details. All the best!

LOL ... I totally agree.

I'm just curious about the reason for this, but I notice a lot of startup's (especially from Y Combinator) tagline is 'The easiest/best/fastest way to x'. Should there be more originality here, or has it tested so successfully that it is recommended for everyone? (I am genuinely asking if there is data to support this, and am not being critical of eventjoy)

While there could very well be something to back this up it could also be similar to the "Netscape Now" button that was very common back in the mid to late 90's. People doing it in other words because they are merely copying what others do. I think this is probably more common with startups because young people who do startups aren't aware of anything fresh out of school and are certainly more likely to mimic what they see others do. "Oh ok so we get a ping pong table".

Non sequitur, but...

Seeing that whiteboard, after constantly feeling ashamed of my whiteboard writing next to that of my team members, I am just overjoyed to see whiteboard writing that looks as messy as mine. In fact it looks exactly like mine, letter shapes and all.

Other Eventjoy founder here... I have no shame about my whiteboard writing. I try not to spend time worrying about my cursive handwriting these days :D

I expected some minor design tweaks but everything changed. Amazing work for 2 weeks.

I like how you guys offloaded as much unnecessary work as possible (e.g. blog hosting, Tumblr theme, email template).

"the .com was owned by a domain broker in South Korea. Within five minutes we emailed the broker asking for a price. A few hours later we had a price and quickly countered, which ultimately resulted in a low four-figure deal we accepted."

-> On an unrelated note, it seems like buying up a bunch of well-named domains 20 years ago would have been a smart thing to do lol (if you just wanted money). But I guess that's like owning real-estate in a way.

Just the other day I emailed the owner of a name I wanted. 17 years registered and it had never been used, the guy wanted 5 figures for it for no other reason than that's the price he paid for it. I countered with a more reasonable offer and didn't hear back from him, so the next day I bought the same name with a different TLD, for $35. I feel like at one point having that coveted .com was a priority for any business that wanted to be taken seriously, but today that just doesn't seem like the case anymore thanks to marketing mediums that use links instead of catchy names. Did I want the .com? Sure. Did I absolutely need it? Not at all. If my venture becomes successful down the road then maybe I'll inquire about the .com again and have more leverage to negotiate, but I'm not losing sleep over it until then.

5 figures? Damn. How many characters was it, if I might ask?

10 characters. It's two words, no spaces or dashes. Nothing trendy. I don't know whether he bought it as an investment or had plans for it, but he's clearly only trying to get out what he put in. I'm willing to bet the initial investment is a huge regret at this point.

Wait. Are you saying that he claims he paid a certain amount as the justification for the price he wants for the domain?

I asked if he was willing to sell it and at what price. He replied:

I get asked regularly and am still waiting for someone to pay $XX,000, like I did.

I can't find any public record of the sale. I told him if that's what he was waiting for, good luck.

Without knowing the exact name and owner you have dealt with it's hard to speculate.

That said being in this industry I can tell you:

a) "I get asked regularly" - very common to claim others are interested and considered a good way to get someone off the fence to make a buying decision.

b) "to pay $xx,000 like I did" - could be a complete lie. Once again hard to speculate w/o know the info I stated above (owner/name). But would tend to think that's bs from my experience. Another big one is "we just turned down $xx,000". Also "we are not looking to sell at any price" (means "make me a big offer and I'll think about it").

c) "can't find any public record" - not unusual at all. Only public records would be news stories on sales (not common) or auction sales (sedo.com etc.). Most domain sales info are not public.

The good news is that the seller would consider selling and may just be bullshitting. Other sellers (large companies) really won't sell at any price and you are totally SOL.

"If my venture becomes successful down the road then maybe I'll inquire about the .com again and have more leverage to negotiate."

If you do that, you'll find yourself with a lot LESS leverage. What's to stop the owner of the .com from saying "Now that you've established a brand on that name, the price is four times higher"?

Same thing as now, needs vs. wants. If I'm already successful without the .com I'll have shown I don't need it. He's shown no attempt to put the name to use and he's made no attempt to negotiate a reasonable price. If he increases the price after I've built the brand then I'd gladly spend $1500 on an ICANN arbitration hearing.

"He's shown no attempt to put the name to use and he's made no attempt to negotiate a reasonable price. If he increases the price after I've built the brand then I'd gladly spend $1500 on an ICANN arbitration hearing."

Sorry but you are wrong. (I won't even get into the "made no attempt to negotiate a reasonable price" and skip right to the action you think you will file.

That's not what a UDRP (what you call an "ICANN arbitration hearing") is for or how it is used or what it is intended for. (Sure every now and then pigs fly just like people sometimes win crappy cases or OJ is acquitted.)

While there are certain circumstances that would allow someone to use a UDRP to get a domain the situation you are describing is most definitely not one of them. In short he owns it prior to your use of the mark. And if you did have a case you would not be doing yourself any favors by trying to DIY this process you'd have to hire an attorney with experience (and not all attorneys who claim expertise in this area actually have it.) Further if the domain is owned by someone who is in the business you have even less of a chance even if you think (or an attorney thinks) you have a case.

(I'm not an attorney but this is most definitely my area of expertise and I am quite involved in different aspects of this business...)

It's been a while since I read all the regs on this stuff, but at one point I read them enough that I believed I understood them and the definition of fair-use (at one point I was threatened for squatting on a name I owned).

This section in particular seems related: http://www.icann.org/en/help/dndr/udrp/policy#4b

Obviously the purchase date in relation to any trademarks may be relevant. Maybe what I should have said originally was that if I felt he was attempting to extort me, I'd handle it in a manner other than paying what he asked because he beat me to the purchase.

That being said, this bridge is a long way away from being crossed and the .com doesn't even warrant an entry on my todo list.

I am curious why the focus went to ticketing and registration instead of back office systems, seems ticketing and reg are already solved problems?

1) Existing/new organizers loved the idea of going mobile for their events, but they didn't want to manage another platform. 2) Users were asking us if we could handle ticketing/reg. as well. 3) We now have an opportunity to make mobile engagement seamless for attendees the moment they check into an event.

There are other things as well, but these were the top three.

How do you plan to prevent event organizer churn? Since each event's data like scheduling, speaker list, sessions change from year to year, there is no real incentive for organizers to keep coming back to your platform.

With the registration component, we now have a lot more data and value that we can provide to the organizer. Over time we'll give them the right tools to leverage that.

Do you think the focus positions you better for new smaller scale events or getting access to larger events? I ask because it seems like the real value in this space would be taking down active.com and high volume high frequency events like 5K races etc.

I'd say both. We're seeing smaller events than we used to get signup. On the flip side, we're seeing large events signup as well. What is interesting is the variety of events we're now seeing (5Ks included). We're talking to users in these new verticals to see how we can better serve their needs.

Good luck. I do some custom dev work for a event management firm because they could not find something that fit their needs (this was 4 years ago) so I took an interest in the space. It shocked me how broad the reach of Active.com was and how they were pretty much universally despised by everyone who had to use them. Really a sales organization pretending to be an event management system.

I'm impressed by your insight into the industry - A lot of your observations really resonate with my own experiences. I'd love to talk shop some more sometime if possible! My email is pshin45@gmail.com. I tried reaching out to you on Twitter just now as well.

As someone who is working in this space with a reasonably unsexy product, I'm a believer that back-office is where it's all at.

Sorry, what is meant by back office?

I have a customer I have built lots of 'back-office' functionality for into a custom event management system. T-Shirts are a simple example, each participant in their event gets a shirt (lots of races do this as well) and they have to coordinate the ordering and production of thousands of shirts, allocate the orders for pickup and ensure that it alls happens in a short amount of time. They need a structure for that process and they expect a simple integration with their registration system. To them this means that when a person or group registers they define the sizes for their people. They have rules about shirt types (kids get t-shirts and adults get collared golf shirts) and upcharges based on sizes larger than XL. This seems like a simple problem but do that 25 times for various operational aspects of their event and now you understand what is meant by 'back-office'

I agree. I have a customer who is an event management firm and the complexity and size of their events (long running events that last over several days) makes the operational side of running the event the biggest challenge.

In a lot of ways it's tricky, but easy at the same time. We end up trying to build strong concepts that can be mapped onto a few different problems within the event. A lot like an online store product, but with a better grounding in events.

We then try and provide the right management/reporting/organising tools so that they can work with it better.

Why is your blog in all caps. Too hard to read -_-

Only the blog title should be in caps. Are you seeing the whole thing in caps?

Is it supposed to look like this? http://i.imgur.com/mmTX2EW.png

Nah, just kidding. It looks fine for me.

Ah it's probably then that I am on IE9. The worst of all the browsers... except 8. I read the article now, thank you for sharing :)

Your h1 is not closed (the closing tag is in the comment). IE is rendering the whole page in red caps. It is throwing a bunch of script errors as well.

There are 32 other errors as well: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.eventjoy...

Good find! I closed the tag.

Clearly this is why HAML/Jade/Slim should be used instead of HTML. /s

Great job on the relaunch and rebranding, and on the blog as well! Thanks for sharing.

Just so you know, I had a few minor issues on the blog:

- None of the images are visible.

- I think a word and period are missing at the end of this line:

> Todd, one of the Eventjoy co-founders, began the design for the new web product and necessary updates to our existing

Thanks for catching that, turns out I cut off two words :x

Images are working fine on our end. What browser?

I use (webkit-based) Epic, but on Firefox and Chrome it's working fine so I guess you don't need to worry! Sorry for the false alarm :)

They're not showing up for me in Firefox 27 on Mac OS X. If I remove the amazon part of the URL (leaving the domain as cdn.eventjoy.com) and use http instead of https, the image loads. On HTTPS, an Amazon certificate shows up and Amazon is sending some weird redirect XML.

Thanks a lot. This helps me think I am on the right track with outsourcing the non critical(non dev) aspects of my startup. I was under the false impression before that a startup consisted of doing the all aspects of the work by myself.

We've generally been very resistant to outsourcing anything and this is the first time we've ever done it. It didn't come out flawlessly (we had to tweak a lot), but it paid off so we could launch quicker.

It seems like it worked out very well for you.

Out of curiosity, what CMS did you use for your help center? My startup is hitting exactly the point where we're getting common questions and need an FAQ.

Zendesk. They even have a startup program where you can get some months for free. You might have to search around to find it.

Sick, thanks!

Great story! Amazing what you can achieve in such a short space of time if you're focused and dedicated.

Agreed. Going through YC helped us remove all distractions. Beyond that, we just consumed a lot of caffeine.

the like and follow buttons in https://www.eventjoy.com/organizing/ overlap each other

Chrome 33 on Mac OS X

Impressive turnaround. Great job and thanks for the write-up.

Thank you!

I guess eventbrite.com wasn't available...

RED ALLCAPS.

Thanks.

Oh, thank goodness. I was worried it was some bizarre stylistic fad and not just an unclosed tag.

Great post! Keep it up!

Automate the setup of all your events!

FB, TWITTER, TICKETS! WALLS!!!

Enter eventomator.com!!

I was trying to illustrate that eventomator.com was available....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com