The Birth and Life of a Really Cool Website

mom rock

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:59:00 +0000

Happy Mother’s Day from March of Dimes
Free e-cards at MushyGushy.com

NY Tech Meetup re-cap

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:16:00 +0000

We presented last night to a crowd of around 350 at Cooper Union. We want to thank Scott Heiferman for the opportunity and for bringing a lot of great technology minds together. It was our 1st time at an event like this, and we certainly feel like it was a worthwhile learning experience. While we had a few rough spots along the way, we had a lot of positive feedback during the meet and greet part of the night and made some contacts that we think will be very helpful. We loved the presentations by Organized Wisdom, Clickable, and Newsgroper. And then we ate some crazy Korean food and called it a night!

NY Tech Meetup October 3, 2007

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:54:00 +0000

MushyGushy.com is thrilled and honored to be chosen as a presenter at the October 2007 NY Tech Meetup this Wednesday, October 3. The event will be held at Cooper Union's great hall, and will be attended by 500 of New Yorks Technonolgy movers and shakers (geeks, investors, entrepreneurs, hackers, etc). We look forward to putting our site out in front of some great industry minds, and sharing ideas with you all.

E-mail Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:17:00 +0000

We periodically email our member base with announcements of new cards, site changes and enhancements, incentives, etc. In this case, we are featuring our newest card - meant to reach out to loved ones serving in the military overseas, as well as a $500 contest to spur registrations. For details (and a chance to win!), visit MushyGushy.com and register!

(CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Send Your Love Overseas

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:42:00 +0000

MushyGushy.com has unveiled a new e-card designed specifically to be sent to friends and loved ones serving in the armed forces. Here's a sample. We will be getting the word out to bloggers and publications that reach the families of those in the military. PLEASE pass it on!

Vanessa Hudgens surprises Zac with her birthday suit.

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:00:00 +0000

We’ve aggressively used YouTube as a viral marketing tool. If anything newsworthy happens in the entertainment world or if other YouTube videos are receiving thousands of hits, we make sample GushyGrams to spoof them. Some of our GushyGrams have gotton well over 100,000 hits. Our various YouTube videos have exceeded 2 million views since July. Here's a recent one featuring Vanessa Hudgens in her birthday suit!

Yankee Stadium

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:35:00 +0000

A couple of the Mushy Maniacs went to Yankee Stadium. We got 4 seats right at the egde of the top deck - a great spot for a Mushy K Corner.

55,000+ fans, Channel 9 coverage, and 14 innings of exciting playoff race baseball. We had 13 "Kay" opportunities including one Kay which floated down to the bottom causing everyone below us to look up and check out the sign. Some guy asked us if he could have one to put up in his bar.

RED SOX S@*K!

MushyGushy.com to Exhibit at Circle of Sisters Expo 2007

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:47:00 +0000

MushyGushy.com will be at the Circle of Sisters Expo 2007 this weekend (September 22-23). The Circle of Sisters Expo is an annual event that takes place at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. This is the largest business expo in New York City, focusing on Uniting Women of Color. One of the aspects of our site that we are the most proud of is the ability if the user to change skin tone and gender of the characters - addressing an almost embarrassing lack of diversity in greeting cards across the boards.

Feeling Mushy?

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:48:00 +0000

Send A Gushy!

Right Place, Right Time

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:21:00 +0000

We had a great night on Tuesday. A few of our guys went into NYC to do some on the street marketing and stopped into The Gallery Bar on their way to the San Gennaro festival. The stumbled upon Web2NewYork's September networking party, and made some great contacts.

Web2NewYork is a project by Peter Verkooijen/Modified Content and is an on/offline community for post-internet media, advertising and business. They hold monthly networking parties for founders of web companies and media/advertising professionals. Instead of trying to emulate the west coast as "Silicon Alley", Web2NewYork aims to represent New York web business - technology meeting Madison Avenue and Wall Street.

Peter Verkooijen is a journalist from the Netherlands, based in Brooklyn, working for Adformatie, Computable, Emerce, Molblog and other leading Dutch business titles.

Around 75 members attended the September meetup including web entrepreneurs, bloggers, marketing profs, web attorneys, search engine specialists, advertising profs, tech specialists, media profs, etc. Our guys saw a great opportunity and spoke to Peter about MushyGushy.com. Peter was very impressed and invited them to do a 5 minutes presentation.

We were one of 5 speakers which included web start-up founders from Marzar and AmieStreet. After the presentation, the founder of FriendsEAT.com approached us and said that our presentation was really entertaining and that we have a kick ass site. People were approaching us with compliments and advice. We exchanged email addresses and are awaiting positive helpful info from our new web friends such as advertising opportunities on our site and future conferences which we should attend.

This is an area that we will be concentrating on in the future.

Site helps to connect with family - News

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:12:00 +0000

Site helps to connect with family - News

Brian Stokes: The Intermittent Super-genius: Behold! Customizable Animated Electronic Greeting Cards

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:16:00 +0000

Brian Stokes: The Intermittent Super-genius: Behold! Customizable Animated Electronic Greeting Cards

E-card Virus

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:59:00 +0000

It is UNBELIEVABLE that I get 10 fake e-card emails every day now! What terrible timing! Hopefully people saw our press release explaining about the safeguards that MushyGushy.com has in place

Sweet Site of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:46:00 +0000

I found Sweet Site of the Day when i was looking for blogs that we can contact - we're trying to let as many bloggers in relevant areas (humor, family, ethnic, e-cards, new web site review) know about us. Thos site says "blog about us and we'll give you a link on our site". Sounds like a deadl to me. So..

Here's a BIG Shoutout for Sweet Site of The Day. (google it)..It's fantastic!

From PR Newswire

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:58:00 +0000

Business Wire - Press Release
E-card Company, MushyGushy.com, Takes Steps to Thwart ``E-vildoers'' Before Their Users Get Impacted
07.25.07, 10:30 AM ET

A recent wave of malicious e-mails distributed through fictitious e-greeting companies has prompted www.MushyGushy.com, a start-up e-card company, to take some dramatic steps to protect its customers prior to any issues.

In an attempt to lure recipients into clicking on links that install a variant of the Storm Trojan virus, many fake emails are entering inboxes masquerading as e-greetings sent from "a friend" through well-known companies like American Greetings, Hallmark, 123Greetings, and Egreetings.com. These bogus emails usually feature a subject line that informs the recipient that they've received a greeting card or postcard from a friend, family member, or school-mate. When the e-mail is opened, there's a link to a website that uploads the virus to the recipient's computer. The first signs of Storm Trojan were seen in January 2007, with the e-greeting variant first appearing in June 2007.
"It is vitally important to make people aware that these emails are not coming from the e-greetings companies. They are spam," states Kurt Schwartz, the founder of MushyGushy.com. "These spammers are preying on innocent people and hurting the reputations of some great e-card companies. If the e-greeting you receive does not show your name or mention the sender's name in the subject line, as they do on MushyGushy, do not open the email or click on the link provided. Simply delete it."

In response to this growing problem, MushyGushy is proactively combating these "e-vildoers" with a three tiered approach before any possible issues could impact their loyal base of users. First, MushyGushy has hired additional customer service staff to answer questions and help educate their growing membership about this issue. Second, they have set up their own email notification templates that clearly display the receiver and sender names. MushyGushy's third line of defense is its most unique, providing a service that lets members post their e-cards on Myspace, YouTube and other websites - bypassing the emailing of the e-greeting altogether. "Posting your e-greeting to Myspace and YouTube are also great ways to dress up your profile page," states Schwartz.

MushyGushy.com, based in Parsippany, NJ, allows members to upload photos, cut out heads, and star in any one of over one hundred animated e-cards for all occasions. The site is fun and free!

It's not unusual/YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:35:00 +0000

Here's our 1st YouTube promo video. I'm in it!

It's a little unusual...

The Today Show

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:30:00 +0000

Right after we launched, we took the crew into New York to the Today show. We joined the thousands of tourists (and dozens of marketers) standing behind the fence to get our faces and the MushyGushy name on camera. We gave out 100's of business cards, looked great in our new tee shirts, and made some good contacts. Someone who might put us in touch with Rachel Ray. A guy who knows a guy who works for Letterman. Etc. All small steps along the pathway. We're fortunate that we are located close to the city so we can take advantage of the news programs, as well as special events. You can't spend a day in the city without running into a news camera!

You Tube

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:11:00 +0000

Today we are working on a new promotional video just for YouTube. Without revealing too much, we have a star-studded cast coming in today to film around the office. I'll let you know when its up

We love YouTube. It allows us to reach hundreds of thousands of people for free. We have a MushyGushy channel on YouTube and typically have around 100 videos up. And, for a limited time, we are offering our members the opportunity to have their own creations posted on YouTube - pretty exciting for most non-techies.

Here's a link to a video we posted a while back - it was in the top ten veiwed that day! It reall surprised us, and showed the value of being topical. We had 150,000 people view it in just a few days - definetly created some new MushyGushy fans, and showed the dual nature of our site. While we are an e-card site 1st and foremost, we're a vehicle to be funny as well.

Kurt

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:07:00 +0000

There would, of course, be no MushyGushy without Kurt. The idea was his and his alone, and he has put his full resources behind it. I can't say that we were all true belivers the whole way - but I can say for sure that Kurt has never wavered. And the great reaction that we get from everyoen who uses the site, and the extremely positive feedback that comes with every Blog that gives us a mention, affirms that Kurt was right. We've seen the numbers improve every single day. Maybe not the "Beanie Baby" run-away train that we would have liked, but a great site on a great path. Thanks Kurt, from the whole team

We've come a long way baby

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:35:00 +0000

This, I guess, was the very 1st "Gushy"...A static invitation from a co-worker for her husband's birthday. It was a big hit.

So here we are

noreply@blogger.com (paul) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:59:00 +0000

e-cards
Its the middle of July, 2007, and things are in full swing. We've got a team of around a dozen creative driven people working to make the site a success. We're contacting news outlets, getting the word out the the blogging community, and hitting the streets of NYC en masse to let everyone know how cool and unique MushyGushy.com is. I'll "backtrack" in later posts to give you some specifics (Hungrygirls.com and the launch of the Apple i-phone were benchmark events for us). Now, back to work.