Your startup sucks. You know how I know that? I just heard about it for a few minutes, and I have no idea how your product is different from the other dozen in your market. And you know what? There’s no way you can get customers to come to your new website. It’s too hard, it’s too expensive, and simply too crowded in your market.

By the way, you’ll never be able to hire the engineers and marketers you need to grow your startup. No potential employees will ever see the long-term potential of your idea, and no potential employee would EVER leave their stable job to come and join you. You’re better off finding some overseas engineers anyway. You’ll spend a lot less money, and you can fail smaller.

Your startup sucks. Yeah, I just read about it on TechCrunch, but I also read all of the comments. There were a lot of valid points in those comments, and I don’t know how you are going to possibly address all of them. If you don’t fix each and every one of them there is no way you can get the “early adopters” to use your product. And you know that you need the early adopters if you ever have the chance to cross over the chasm to the mainstream user.

Ok, I used your product. It’s nice, but I don’t think I would use it again. But I do have a list of features that I’d love to see you implement. Where should I send that list? How come you don’t have a feedback form for customers yet anyway? You really should get on that.

Oh, and you’ll never get funding for that startup. Investors want to see real traction, real sales, and real competitive barriers. You don’t have them. Trust me, I know what it takes to get funding for a startup, and there is no way you’ll ever get an investor to believe in your vision. How many investors have you even spoken to so far? Did anyone even talk about giving you a term sheet?

How do you plan to market your startup anyway? Do you have a Facebook strategy? Do you know how to use Twitter to drive traffic? There’s quite a bit of learning curve to understand what you need to do to be successful in social media marketing. If you don’t, you better hurry up and learn. Do you know anything about SEM or SEO? It sounds like you’re already way behind.

Who am I? I am everyone around you — everyone who thinks you can’t find a way to be successful. Everyone who doubts your vision, and can’t see the opportunity that you can see. I am an angel group, a VC investor, a tech blogger, or a colleague. I am your mentor, your friend, or your family member — everyone who doesn’t vocally support your efforts, and has no idea how lonely starting up a company can be. I am everyone but you.

SWAMI SAYS: This post is dedicated to everyone who is in the process of starting a new company or trying to grow their startup. Don’t look for outside validation. Don’t listen to those who doubt. Fuck them. Keep going. If you believe you can do it, that’s the only thing that matters.

Guest post by Matt Douglas, CEO, MyPunchbowl.com. Checkout Matt’s previous guest post, The Golden Rule of Startup Success.

eCards can be shared via Facebook and Twitter — the Twitter sharing seems unique. MyPunchbowl notes that they have hundreds of designs to select from. I like the collaborative ideas I’ve seen with the picturebooks I’ve reviewed over the past week. Perhaps that’s something for an online card creator to think about. The "office" cards work pretty well and with all of the "friends" online, could work well in this new media age as well. Would be pretty cool to get a birthday card signed by 50 of my online friends.

With all of the free eCard providers online, it will be interesting to see if MyPunchbowl’s eCard Studio can make any headway into the pack. I assume they will be able to get traction from their current userbase but getting past that will take a lot of effort.

Here’s a demo of the eCard Studio from MyPunchbowl CEO Matt Douglas:

The basic idea of Design Studio is that it allows you to very heavily customize a save the date or event invitation. Anything can be customized from photos, colors and text. What’s neat is that everything is customizable so while the background might enter the invitation in blue, it can be changed to pink or green. CEO Matt Douglas seems to love the fact that you can now add ribbons to your invitations. With all of the options available, it will make sure your Halloween invite doesn’t look like the 1,000 others you will receive.

The basic flow is to create a "pick a date" mailing where you ask your event attendees when works for them. Then a "save the date" mailing which can be up to a year in advance. Then the actual event invitation. MyPunchbowl also helps with things like travel and local services to make the event special. Then the thank you note. Basically MyPunchbowl is attempting to be the one stop for the entire event plan. 

Earlier this summer, eVite relaunched and added the option for users to contribute their own designs. I’d suggest that MyPunchbowl adds that option as well. It will get users excited about putting even more time and effort into their designs.

Here’s CEO Matt Douglas demonstrating how the Design Studio works:

MyPunchbowl recently launched a Facebook application and integrated Kayak trip planning services.

Check out all of our MyPunchbowl coverage including my interview with founder and CEO Matt Douglas.

What would be great is if the event planner can select the recommended airline, or hotel to their attendees.

The other feature looks like the Facebook news feed and shows you real-time activity around your party or event. Douglas says RSS feeds, SMS notifications and IM messaging are coming in the next weeks. As a party host or planner, it can be difficult to keep up with what’s going on – from invites sent, to invites accepted to event questions to BYOB status. This new Buzz feature is meant to help making things smoother for the event planner or host.

Check out our previous MyPunchbowl coverage including our interview with Douglas. Here is a sample of what the Buzz feature looks like:

MyPunchbowl is creating an end-to-end party planning tool rather than just an invite service such as eVite. He went on to say that their tool "helps the host look good". They are working on finishing the complete loop for party planning. It’d be great to have a service that can not only help you schedule the party but make sure everything you need is ready including location advice and rentals where needed.

Competitors to MyPunchbowl include Socializr and Renkoo (our Renkoo coverage). Matt notes that MyPunchbowl is much larger than both competitors using analytics charts from Compete (Compete is down so I can’t embed a chart unfortunately).

The team is located in Boston and has 4 full-time employees and 5 contractors. All development is done inhouse.

What service do you use for event planning? My sister uses evite for everything, I haven’t had many events to plan.

Here are the new features Matt sent over:

• New visual design throughout the entire site presents a tabbed layout for easy navigation and an attractive new layout for guest view
• Party theme selector enables users to select templates by category, subcategory, search terms, and even color
• New online invitation templates for Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years Eve, and other winter holidays
• Party theme selector provides a full-screen preview of the Save the Date or online
• Invitation, including information input by the host
• Party planning ideas & advice by party expert “Penelope Plans” is now integrated into MyPunchbowl.com
• New email import including .CSV and others to quickly create a guest list
• Flexible display enables the user to show or hide the on-page help system

Here is the video from Matt:

And here are a couple screenshots of the new version (click for larger version):

»

Fast forward to today. Going on an interview? Check out the interviewers Facebook, Twitter, blog, MySpace, and review what others think of him or her. Of course you will have found the job on the CenterNetworks Job Board. :)

MyPunchBowl CEO Matt Douglas has an excellent article about preparing for an interview and how to handle research in today’s Web 2.0 market. A snippet:

One thing I’ve been struck with are the vast differences between those who prepare for an interview and those who don’t. Here’s some advice that I gave a college-age person yesterday (she was interviewing for a college intern position). Before you interview, learn about the person that is going to interview you. With all of the resources of the web, you can find out a lot about me pretty quickly; where I’ve worked, my professional experience etc. But more importantly, you can find out personal things about me. What makes me tick? Do we share the same interests? Do we know anyone or anything in common? These are critical things to learn BEFORE the interview so that you can not only make small talk but you can “get inside my head.”

In my past roles where I was responsible for hiring, the people who got the job were the ones who were prepared. I can teach someone Rails or SEO, but I can’t teach someone the instinct to be ready. So be ready, there’s absolutely no reason when the Internet does all the work for you. And for the hiring manager, review this essay on hiring by Marc Andressen.

"Intel Capital, with its recent emphasis on early-stage consumer internet investing, is the perfect investor to help fuel our rapid growth," said Matt Douglas, founder, Punchbowl Software. "This funding will allow us to capitalize on numerous opportunities available in the market."

"The event-planning market is substantial and enjoys viral growth dynamics," said Lucy McQuilken, investment manager, Intel Capital. "Punchbowl is well positioned to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies and become one of the leaders in this market segment."

The amount of the round was not disclosed. MyPunchBowl recently launched a major upgrade and a Facebook app called Party Animal.

MyPunchbowl

The new features include: a "party checklist" which allows a party host to create lists of items for attendees to bring with them. The attendees can check which items they will bring and the host can also prioritize which items are of greater need. Somehow I bet "beer" and "vodka" will appear at the top of many lists.

The other features are more utility-based: unlimited co-hosts, party duplication and e-mail bounce notification. This last one is important as if you incorrectly enter a person’s email address, they might not show up and it will be egg on your face!

MyPunchbowl is also launching a Facebook application today. Their blog notes, ‘The new application "Party Animal" offers a fun new way to tell your friends how they act at a party. Facebook users can vote for their friends, choosing between personalities such as "Drunken Pig" and "Lone Wolf." Facebook users can also unlock bonus animals by creating a MyPunchbowl.com account. Bonus animals include celebrity personalities such as "Paris Hilton" and "Snoop Dogg" and creative party animals such as a "Social Butterfly" and "Party Pooper."‘ A screenshot of Party Animal is below.

I wonder what personality I am at a party! It looks like a fun app that can draw users back to MPB to plan their own parties.