Guestlist

New: A smorgasbord of additions

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:00:05 -0400

Over the last little while we have been working on refining Guestlist and adding features to smoothen the overall experience. There are quite a number of smaller changes and adjustments, some of which you may have already noticed.

PDF ticket tweaks

PDF tickets now display event logos instead of attendee photos. A number of event hosts pointed out that while personalized tickets were neat, it is important to have a strong brand for your event.

Max tickets per event

Often event hosts set caps on different ticket types but still need to ensure they don’t end up with too many attendees overall. Guestlist now allows you to set a limit on the total number of tickets that can be sold for your event.

Option to make sure new attendees receive info emails

When you send an all attendees email, you now have the option to have it automatically delivered to future registrants on signup. This can be very useful for sending special instructions or any custom message that you want attendees to see as soon as they register.

Coming Soon status for tickets

Sometimes you want to announce an event and start marketing it before tickets go on sale. Now you can setup Coming Soon tickets so that visitors can view your event page but not register until you open up ticket sales.

Social sharing links now optional

You can now hide the social sharing links via the Event Settings > Advanced Settings pane. This is useful if you are running a private event and don’t want to encourage attendees to share the event page url on Facebook or Twitter.

Limit the amount of tickets per order

Another setting you will find in the Advanced Settings pane is the ability to restrict the number of tickets per order. This will not prevent people from making multiple orders, but if you are expecting a registration rush this can be a useful way to give more people a shot at registering.

Speed optimizations

Guestlist has been growing strongly over the last few months so we decided to tighten some bolts to make sure it stays as fast as possible. You should notice a pretty hefty increase in speed while using the application.

New support system and custom ticket limits

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:32:51 -0400

We have just released an integration with Intercom to see if we can push our customer support experience to the next level. When you click help in the app from now on you will be presented with a dialog showing you all the communication you’ve ever had with us, and the ability to contact us with questions and feedback.

Intercom also gives us the ability to communicate more easily with our users. With Intercom we can broadcast notices to keep you up to date with what we are working on, let you know about new features, give tips on how to better leverage Guestlist, and more.

We have also released an Advanced Settings tab to give you more control over your events. There are some settings for events that don’t often need to be changed but are sometimes important.

The first setting we are making available in this section is order limit. This will restrict how many tickets of each ticket type can be purchased within an order. We occasionally receive requests for this but never saw it as something a most users should need to make decisions about. While we don’t want to burden users with unnecessary choices we also don’t want to limit needed functionality so we will be tucking away such options in this tab.

If you want to give us feedback on what we should be working on now would be the perfect time to give our new help section a try. Finally, support@guestlistapp.com will of course continue to work as before.

New: Google Analytics integration

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:58:48 -0400

Have you ever wondered how people find out about your events? Are you better off promoting them on Twitter or via email? Starting today you can find out thanks to our new Google Analytics integration. Now you can drop your Web Property ID into Guestlist and gain access to all of the valuable visitor data you need.

Adding it is easy. Click “+ Add new profile” in your Google Analytics account and create a profile for the domain http://guestlistapp.com

Next, take the new Web Property ID (the code that looks like UA-12345678-9) and drop it into the Google Analytics pane in your Guestlist event settings.

That’s it! In a few hours the first visitor data will start showing up in your Google Analytics account.

New: Coupon codes

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:00:06 -0400

We’ve just released our first take on coupon codes. This was one of our most commonly requested features so we are excited to see how people will make use of it.

As usual we’ve built a simple but flexible implementation that should accomodate a wide variety of use cases. We currently support percentage and fixed value discounts.

We have also thrown in a handy Generate Random Code button that will add a new coupon based on the last coupon created, and assign it a random code. This lets you quickly and easily generate a whole batch of coupons.

Up next we will be spending some time polishing interface elements and investing in performance improvements.

Brand spanking new ticket types dialog

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:46:27 -0400

Now that the Rails 3 upgrade is behind us we can get back to iterating upon our user experience and feature set. There is still much that can be done to improve it and the most obvious case of this was probably the ticket types dialog.

Ticket descriptions

We noticed that a lot of people where cramming quite a bit information into the ticket name so we added a ticket description field.

The ticket description is the perfect place to put any qualifiers or clarifications that you may have regarding the ticket. Things like bonuses you get from buying this ticket or special requirements you may need.

The infamous Qty column

Other than PayPal, our biggest topic for support questions has been the ticket type dialog. There was a lot confusion as to what the Qty column was referring to. We had intended for it to indicate the number of tickets available for sale, but many people interpreted this as the number of tickets available per order. So some event hosts put a 1 or a 2 here and then became confused when their event sold out after only one sale.

Well, no more! We’ve renamed it “# to Sell” which is much clearer and also added a “# Sold” column as well.

Ticket statuses

Stopping sales on a particular ticket type used to be more difficult than it should have. One had to reduce the Qty field to below the amount already sold which, by the way, was also not so easy to find out. We’ve cleaned this up nicely by adding a status which can take one of three values:

Selling This is the default and behaves as you would expect. Tickets will be available for sale until the # to Sell equals # Sold.

Sold Out When a ticket type is marked as “Sold Out” we cut off sales and display it identically to actually sold out types on the public event page, regardless of how many tickets are remaining. This is good for hiding early bird tickets after the deadline has passed.

Hidden Hidden cuts off sales and completely hides the ticket type from the public event page. This is useful if you need to keep some of the ticket types for special use such as sponsorships or if you have made a price change that you do not want to be publicly visible.

Custom fields

Users had frequently asked us whether it was possible to create custom fields to collect additional attendee data even though we have supported this feature for quite some time. We now have a prominent link right on the ticket types dialog to make it easier for users to discover this feature.

And so much more…

We also fixed a myriad of small issues such as disabled dropdowns not looking disabled (they do now!) and the Guestlist fee dropdown being hard to understand (so hard in fact that we were frequently confused ourselves).

These are all minor changes but we feel it is important to address small points of confusion if you want to build a really solid user experience.

Guestlist on Rails

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:00:00 -0400

You might have noticed that it has been a little quiet around here of late. We haven’t gone anywhere and we certainly haven’t stopped improving Guestlist. On the contrary, we’ve actually rewritten it.

A little while ago Guestlist quietly cut over to a shiny new Rails 3 application. We did this without downtime and without anyone even noticing.

Wait, Guestlist wasn’t already Rails?

Many people probably thought Guestlist was already a Rails application. This is *almost* true. We built the original Guestlist using Merb, a Ruby framework that emphasizes modularity and performance. Because the Ruby web framework community is so fantastic we were able to make use of many Rails components even though we were using a different framework.

Why?

While the two frameworks were originally competing for mindshare, over time Merb became an important influence on Rails. In fact, the projects ended up merging and a number of core Merb committers did a huge amount of the work involved in making Rails 3 a reality. We were incredibly pleased with how well Rails 3 turned out and decided that we should invest the effort in upgrading our app in order to take advantage of all it has to offer.

How we did it

We were able to make the upgrade seamless by leveraging many of the great libraries that the Ruby web community has produced. We had Guestlist running on Rack and Unicorn even before they were part of a stable Merb release. We had been very early adopters of Bundler from back when it was still a Thor script that came packaged with Merb. Over time we replaced many Merb components with Rails-compatible Rack middleware. In early February we started swapping out major parts of the infrastructure, getting our large automated test suite to pass, and repeating.

When it came time for the final release we made our Merb and Rails deployment environments identical. This included the database schema, Nginx and Unicorn configurations along with all of the daemons, watchdogs and other monitoring infrastructure. We already use Unicorn for seamless, no-downtime upgrades so rolling out the Rails rewrite release was no different than a bugfix deploy.

Some stats:

242 commits, 903 files changed, 18771 insertions, 32006 deletions.
26 gems added, 23 gems removed, 33 gems upgraded, 27 gems unchanged.

It has been a lot of work but we’re very pleased with the results. We are already starting to make use of many Rails 3 goodies and will be announcing some of the great features we are building on them shortly.

Guestlist downtime tomorrow morning

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:55:28 -0400

Just a quick heads-up that Guestlist will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes tomorrow morning (April 17, 2011) starting at 06:00 EDT.

We will be upgrading our database server so that we can provide you with faster service.

A new face for our website

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:57:59 -0500

First we did a redesign of our logo, then we evolved the application design to make it even easier to use, and now finally we release a new website that ties it all together beautifully.

We are still fleshing out some of the content, so if you have a great photo of a Guestlist event or want to be a featured customer, shoot us an email.

Custom event backgrounds are here

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:57:35 -0500

Just a quick note that we’ve added support for custom event backgrounds in Guestlist.

We’ve wanted to support custom backgrounds in Guestlist for a while. Twitter, for example, uses them to great effect. Although changing the background is one of the only available customizations in Twitter it really allows users to make pages unique and personal.

We try to choose new features that add a lot of value for a minimal amount of interface change. For custom backgrounds we’ve gently integrated uploads into the existing background swatch picker that is found in the event settings dialog. The uploader blends in with the background thumbnails and new images upload asynchronously with progress feedback.

Users who run frequent events will notice that any background uploaded is available for use in any of their events without having to re-upload. We will be bringing these improvements to the logo upload facility shortly.

Finally—although it probably goes without saying for our developer readers—there are a huge number of details to worry about for providing a smooth file upload experience. We’ve learned a lot from building this feature so a more detailed technical post is forthcoming.

Timelapse: Designing a new website

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

We are in the process of creating a brand new website for Guestlist and figured it may be helpful to share some of our design process. Since our launch more than a year ago much has changed in how we see Guestlist and our place in the event registration market. The new website will communicate what we are about more clearly and also allow for some new feature additions.

The Guestlist design process, and really my design process since I am the only one doing design, is pretty simple. I don’t see design as a science. My design is largely driven by gut instinct. What this means in practical terms is that in order to get to a great design you need to go through a whole lot of mediocre and bad designs.

I am not suggesting making ten different versions and picking the best—that would be a colossal waste of time. Rather, a single design is reworked and refined until you find something that makes you think Yes!. A lot of work may be thrown away or abandoned along the way to perfection. Or, you might stumble upon something awesome on your first try.

The new homepage took two weeks to get to a final design, but only 4.5 hours of actual work. Why the discrepancy? If you stare at the same design for extended periods of time things will start to blend together. Sleeping on a design for a day or two will allow for a fresh look.

As the design for the new website comes along we will share some of the design thinking behind what we are doing.

PDF tickets are a go!

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Earlier today we started sending PDF tickets to attendees.

Until now we had sent out “tickets” in the form of html emails. This caused some confusion because it wasn’t clear whether users were expected to print the email and bring it with them. Also, our emails don’t print very well. We make extensive use of color and images which don’t really jazz with most printers.

Today we address those issues.

We will continue to send the same ticket email as before, but now we also attach a PDF ticket that the user can print. It comes with a QR code to help prevent ticket fraud and add that extra touch of professionalism. And because events are fundamentally about people we also show a photo of the attendee if one is available.

A new face for Guestlist

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

After a year of adding new features to Guestlist we decided it was time to go back and tighten up the user experience. We didn’t always have time to integrate new features as nicely as we wanted to, so this was an opportunity to do that and also fix some of the issues that have popped up over time.

Today we are launching the result of that work. While we focused mainly on improving what was already there, we managed to sneak in a couple of new features.

Greatly improved event summary

The event summary page has been redesigned to provide relevant content depending on what your needs are. As you progress through the event we will highlight the next steps needed for hosting a kickass event.

Order stages

Until now we had only displayed completed orders (and their associated attendees) in Guestlist because we wanted to keep things as simple as possible. However, this was misleading in some cases. For example, if an order was paid by echeck, the event admin would have no indication of it until the payment cleared. We now display four distinct order stages to help event admins better understand their order pipeline:

Incomplete In-progress orders where users are currently in the process of filling out information in Guestlist and/or PayPal.

Pending Orders where a payment has been submitted but has not yet cleared.

Completed Orders with completed payments that have not been refunded.

Refunded Orders that have been refunded. If you initiate a refund inside PayPal we will automatically move the order here and make the corresponding tickets available for resale.

Charts!

We’ve wanted to update our recent activity feed for quite some time. A long list of purchase details does not clearly convey how well an event is doing. So we removed the activity feed and replaced it with a chart.

There are lots of other changes as well, but don’t want to spoil everything. Take a look and let us know what you think.

A new face for conversations

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This is a guest post by Verne Ho from Jet Cooper

From time to time, Jet Cooper works with a group that has already done such a phenomenal job building a user experience that our only job is to carry it forward into another form. Arguably bigger shoes to fill, but a challenge we welcomed when our first conversations with Jaco, Ben and Justin from the Guestlist crew started.

In early March, initial brainstorming and conceptualization started around an identity refresh for Guestlist. We understood from the get-go that we wanted something simple and subtle that resonated with the friendly and people-oriented personality they had already established. Naturally, the new mark also had to encompass the smart, casual and social aura that had come to be synonymous with Guestlist-driven events. Easy as pie (or not).

Our approach revolved around finding ways to intelligently integrate a set of imagery and symbolisms that had emerged from early discussions into the wordmark. Location pins, doorways, folding chairs, podiums, name tags and speech bubbles were ideas that stood out. We vetted a handful of concepts by the Guestlist team through several rounds of sketches and inevitably agreed to further explore speech bubbles, folding chairs and podiums as digital comps.

It didn’t take long before we all agreed to drop the chairs and podiums and focus on an interesting arrangement of speech bubbles that we had stumbled upon in earlier rounds. The concept was intriguing - two opposing speech bubbles coming together to form a ‘g’. We had early hesitations around using imagery as cliche as speech bubbles, but we eventually fell in love with the subtlety of the execution. We also realized that not everybody would necessarily see the speech bubbles initially, which further deepened our affection for the concept.

Early versions of the ‘double bubble’ were much more subtle than the finished product. The pointers were much smaller, which made the ‘g’ a lot more prevalent. We liked this, but were concerned over its scalability as the bubbles became indistinguishable at smaller sizes. We eventually found a healthy balance between the size of the pointer and the play between the ‘conversation’ and the ‘g’. Woot!

For the typeface, despite trying a few alternatives, we ended up sticking with the Haptic Bold family, though opted to go sans-italics as it meshed better with the ‘g’ we had designed. Haptic is great for its ability to convey a warm and playful personality and simply felt right as the typeface behind the original Guestlist identity.

For us, Guestlist represents a genre of events that bring together a collective of smart, young and incredibly inspiring professionals. Those events are often best remembered by the conversations that took place with those people, which is exactly why we think the new mark’s focus on conversation is a step in the right direction.

Though a lot of work went into the process, the end result is a subtle refresh that retains a lot of the brand’s familiarity. We’re very pleased with the final product and feel privileged to have our work grace the face of such a bright and inspiring product. It was an absolute pleasure working with Jaco, Ben and Justin through the process and we’re both anxious and stoked to see how it will be received by the community. We hope you like it!

Trust your data, not your gut

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

As of last night Guestlist has officially completed our first month of business. To mark this occasion I thought I’d share a funny story with you.

In addition to cleaning up workflows and building great new features, we’ve also been adding more analytics to give us better insight into how people are actually using Guestlist. As I was working on this last night I stumbled on a mistake we’d made in rolling out the payment system.

When we started charging on July 12, we grandfathered all published events that our beta users had previously created but not completed. However, we also have this great copy feature to help customers who run repeat events. I think you can see where this is going. Copied events were inheriting the grandfather status and hence were not being charged commission!

As it turns out, a lot more customers were using the event copy feature than I had thought. In fact, this little oversight cost us about 20% of our first month’s revenue! Well, better learning this now than twelve months from now.

I only noticed this because I was investing time in understanding how people were actually using our app. Before this I had incorrectly assumed that not many people were copying events and as a result did not have that in mind when implementing our payment system.

So do yourself a favor and get to know your application usage data a little better. Not only will it help you build a better product, you might just learn something that surprises you.

Sell tickets on your own website

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

A lot of events create their own sales and marketing website but then have to redirect visitors to an external page that looks completely different when it comes time to sell tickets. Today we are solving this problem by letting you sell tickets right on your own website. Think of it as Disqus for events and yes, it even works with paid tickets.

We are calling this feature Integrated Events and it is going to be great for users who want to control the full user experience and sales funnel for their events.

First, give it a try

Give it a shot and see what your users will see. Sign up for our sample event using the button below:

How does it work?

All you need to do is add the following piece of JavaScript to your website:

      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://guestlistapp.com/javascripts/guestlist-embed.js"></script>

Then simply add a class called “guestlist-event-ID”, where ID is the ID of your event, to any object on your website. You can get the ID of your event by going to your public page and copying the number out of the URL.

For example, if you wanted to create a link that said “Buy Tickets” you could use this code:

Buy Tickets

When users click this link a lightbox will appear that lets them choose their tickets and fill in their attendee information. If there is money to be paid we will send them over to PayPal for payment and then automatically send them back to your website once they are done. Nothing could be simpler.

Customizing the dialog

By default the title of the lighbox is “Register for Event”. You can override it partially by specifying a term to be used instead of “Event”. Simply add a title tag to your link with the term you want to use. You can specify a title of up to 25 characters long.

Buy Tickets

Give us feedback!

This is only our first stab at integrating events into external websites so if you have any feedback please shoot us an email or comment on this post.

Looking back at a year of bootstrapping Guestlist

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:00:00 -0400

It’s hard to believe, but it’s now been exactly one year since Guestlist first opened its doors. What began as a dare between three friends to actually finish a software product has turned into full-fledged web service that has helped hundreds of event organizers sell tickets online and keep tabs on their cash flow. Over that period we’ve collected half a million dollars on behalf of our users, a near-majority of which was delivered directly to charities. All powered by word of mouth. Needless to say, we feel pretty good about ourselves. So, we thought we’d take a moment to reflect upon this crucial milestone, and look back at how Guestlist has grown from 2009-2010.

A brief timeline

July 22nd, 2009 We open Guestlist to our adoring public: a single user based out of Houston, Texas, who caught our pre-release demo at a tech event earlier that month.

July 26th, 2009 I present Guestlist at DemoCampToronto21. We earn some rave reviews, and the local *Camp community pledges to use Guestlist for their events.

August 9th, 2009 We announce our first major feature addition: public attendee lists. Turns out to be a pretty popular feature.

October 12th, 2009 Our Campaign Monitor integration is released. CampaignMonitor is gracious enough to write a blog post about us and include it in their newsletter.

November 27th, 2009 Mashable writes an article about us and we get a boat load of traffic. Server manages to stay afloat.

December 19th, 2009 We allow users to add new fields to their registration form from a set of predefined fields. It’s not exactly custom fields, our most requested feature at that point, but it’s a step forward.

March 3rd, 2010 Copying of existing events is added. Users with recurring events rejoice and support requests drop by 30%.

May 5th, 2010 We release our custom fields implementation. We think we have a slicker and easier understood interface than anybody else. Oh, and branded emails gets released too.

July 12th, 2010 We launch our paid service. We become the first event registration company that doesn’t charge a minimum fee, or ask for your credit card. Not too shabby.

Doubling down

That’s the story of what our team put together, part time, over one year. We can’t say it was easy; building and maintaining a quality application part-time requires a lot of dedication and free time. That’s why we’re excited to announce that 2/3s of our team has opted to work full-time on Guestlist going forward. We believe 100% in Guestlist, and want to make sure it’s taken care of in the best way possible.

Stay tuned, exciting features soon

If you haven’t already, we’d be thrilled if you’d subscribe to our blog or follow @guestlistapp on Twitter. It’s the best way to stay on top of new feature announcements and Guestlist news. We’ve got some really exciting things to share with you — some of which is coming out as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Guestlist becomes a paid service today

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

As mentioned a few posts ago, Guestlist becomes a paid service beginning today. After 10 months of open beta service, hundreds of thousands of dollars in ticket sales, and dozens of feature updates, we’re finally ready to open the till and start paying our bills.

How much does it cost?

We’re happy to say that Guestlist will only cost 2% of each ticket sold, *with no minimum fee*. We believe we’re the only event registration provider that foregoes a minimum fee, which, when coupled with our competitive 2% commission, gives both small and large events a single affordable solution. Run the numbers, and you’ll find Guestlist is tough to beat.

How will you charge me?

Guestlist will never send you a monthly bill, or ask for your credit card number. Instead, we take our commission at transaction time, every time a ticket is sold, securely via PayPal. If you need a receipt, an ongoing tally of payments you’ve made to Guestlist will be available inside your Guestlist account, under the “My Account” link.

Existing events are unaffected

If you’ve already published an event page on Guestlist, don’t worry - we won’t charge you a cent. This will only affect events going forward.

Charitible events will still be free

Guestlist will continue to be 100% free to use for charitable events and organizations. If you believe your event or organization qualifies, please contact us.

More improvements on the way

In just the past few months we’ve introduced custom fields, branded emails, and copyable events, and more is on the way. Becoming a paid service enables us to keep growing Guestlist, by adding more really useful features, delivering better performance, and providing more timely support. We’re very grateful to everyone who’s used Guestlist over the past year, and we’re hopeful that you’ll remain onboard as customers going forward. For more information on our pricing, check out our pricing page, or contact us.

Shorter event urls for Twitter

Mon, 31 May 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Sharing Guestlist event urls over Twitter just got easier. Now when you hit the Twitter share icon from a public event page, we’ll publish that event url using our new shorter domain located at http://guestli.st.

Why does this matter? Well, Twitter lets you use up to 140 characters per tweet, and this new feature gives you another 13 to work with. That’s some serious real estate; we hope you find it useful.

Guestlist free period extended until mid-July

Thu, 27 May 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Earlier this month, we announced that Guestlist would become a paid service beginning May 24th. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we’re delaying that move for another two months. Why?

We’re committed to delivering both a competitive price and a world-class billing system for Guestlist. Unfortunately, not all pieces are in place yet, and we’re going to need more time to get it right. We could start billing people today using a number of different services, but we don’t think this would provide the best experience for our users. So we’d rather keep the service free in the meantime.

The good news is this: users can continue using Guestlist to host their events, absolutely free, until mid-July. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Custom fields, branded emails, no more beta

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Today, almost 10 months from when we first went public, Guestlist is finally exiting beta and growing up. Since we launched back in July of last year we have resolved 156 outstanding issues and deployed 72 updates to the application. But this is just the beginning—there is a lot more to come.

Branded Emails

We are also releasing some new features and enhancements today. All the emails seen by attendees are now branded with the event’s logo. We have also tweaked their content a bit and given them a gorgeous new design.

Custom Fields

Custom fields is a very tough problem we have been working on for a while. It has been our most requested feature and it ended up being a deal-breaker for many. Today we are releasing the first phase of custom fields that lets you collect information from attendees using inputs, textareas, and checkboxes. For organizers that need to collect student IDs, meal choices, and more, we’ve got you covered.

There will be more field types to come in the future.

Pricing

We have often been asked about our pricing plans. It has been a challenge to figure out a pricing model that is fair, simple to understand, and easily applied across all currencies. We ended up deciding we are not going to have any minimums or fixed fees because it hurts smaller events. Instead we are going with a flat 2% commission pricing structure.

Starting May 24, 2010 we will start charging 2% commission for each ticket sold. That is two weeks from today. Any event created and published before May 24 will still be 100% free. Charities will continue to be free.

We are actually really excited about our billing implementation, and not just because we are going to start getting paid. We think it is one of the most pleasant billing processes out there, but we will save the details for a later post.

Take a look at our new pricing page if you have any further questions, or send us an email.