Hi, Hunters!
Borne of a desire to end evites in our SPAM folders, Facebook Events blasted across our social network, and group texts filled with anonymous numbers, we built Hobnob to help you send photo-based, designer invitations and manage your parties, straight from your phone. No downloads or social logins required. Easily opt out of guest discussion. And RSVP with a one letter (Y/N) text message. We'd rather sacrifice the almighty download for the best guest experience.
We just launched, but have already seen Hobnob used for housewarmings, dinner parties, birthdays, music performances and more. We wanted Hobnob to get people excited about your event, and keep things fast and fun. We have a lot more work to do - we'd love to hear your feedback on what we have so far.
@tf808 this is a great product & I will most definitely be using it. I absolutely hate what FB events have become & was actually looking at creating an app purely around events /w friends, never thought about just using good old text messages. Great idea, great execution. Good job & thank you for solving a real problem for me. :)
@sleinadsanoj Thank you so much!! We hoped there were others like us who wanted to keep each event private and its own mini-community. So glad you like it. There's a lot more cool things in the works, too, but we want to stick with mobile optimization.
This is fantastic. Evite must die, and Facebook invites are almost worse than email spam. Going via text is smart, most casual events you organize are with people you might text, anyway.
I'm impressed that unlike most RSVP systems, you don't require invitees to register or download the app or anything. Favoring users over user capture is rare, so I hope it pays off in the long run!
@hawaii Thanks Ryan! Yes, we feel the *same* way about evite and FB events.
Not requiring guests/invitees to signup or download an app was a core principle for us. We knew that if Hosts couldn't get RSVPs easily, they wouldn't use it. We put the Host's experience above the all-mighty download. :)
What's cool is that guests love it too. We've seen a 300% increase in RSVPs vs. FB invites and evite in our early tests. And happy guests become happy Hosts at some point.
Thanks for trying it out! Please feel free to send any additional feedback our way :)
Thanks, @luketucker ! We felt the phone is where the contacts you actually interact with in real life reside, so wanted to start there. It also allows us to offer an experience that is as close to natural texting behavior as possible, but with none of the annoyances, e.g. you can opt out of group chat, regardless of phone service provider, or request daily summaries via text only. We do want to allow Hosts to publish event invites/info to guests they interact with across other messaging platforms - would be keen to hear what services you and other Hunters think should be top of our list?
@tf808 Cool. I think the mobile-first experience and SMS focus is a good approach and frankly a competitive advantage from a product side. I do think the integration with email will be an important one, especially from the newsletter and community engagement (reminder emails, daily digests of event comments, etc.). There's so much with events that could be cool... messages and live event interaction, sharing of content, during and after the event, etc. Keep it up! I'm a fan for sure.
@luketucker Yes! It's an exciting space. We want to keep the product tight, beautiful and intuitive - but there's definitely a lot of opportunity around private and public events. Thanks for your support!
@scottorn That party sounds awesome! We'd like to be able to let hosts add guests via FB - in fact, we'd like to eventually let people distribute their invites via whatever their preferred means of communication is with each guest. But we believe our users don't necessarily want to publish events to their FB feed, so we're first focusing only on platforms where we can enable direct/private distribution. We're also adding a feature in the next week to make it super easy to add contacts to your phone directly from the app while inviting guests. Were you thinking more of using Hobnob to post a public event on FB?
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Please get this to Europe asap!! Great approach - thumbs up ;-)
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