Pingg Event Planning: An Interview With Co-Founder Lorien Gabel

We have covered a good number of event planning sites here on CN. Today I had a chance to catchup with the co-founder of NY-based Pingg Lorien Gabel to find out what’s going on with the event planning service.

Lorien noted that they decided to start Pingg because the space was underserved and most of the services were "bad looking or cheesy". He says that they have a strong artist community using Pingg and creating invitations for site users to utilize for their events.

I asked about the difference between Pingg and the other 8,001,141 event planning services. Lorien believes the biggest difference is their print service. Basically with Pingg you can choose to send your invites electronically or by postal mail. The postal mail invites provide a revenue stream for Pingg. The print pricing starts at $1.25/piece plus postage. The other big differentiator is that they focus on more formal events including weddings. He sees a time when weddings are using Pingg to send invites electronically instead of traditional paper invites. Another interesting stat…over 15% of the invites sent on Pingg are for business events.

Pingg raised $2.8 million in a Series A round of funding from Martha Stewart in late 2008. The biggest player in the event market is eVite, which even though it isn’t as sexy or as strong in services as Pingg (and a few others), still does 16 million invitations each month. I asked Lorien about how he plans to grow the service and he said they are working some deals to get more distribution via Martha’s networks.