Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Posted Nov 30, 2006
eHub Interviews Planypus

Thanks to Yan Pritzker and the rest of the team at Planypus for this email interview.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Planypus: Planypus lets friends easily and casually make plans together. One person has called this ‘organized spontaneity’. Instead of calling or emailing several friends and trying to negotiate where you want to go on a Friday night, Planypus makes it easy for one person to post “let’s go to dinner”, while the rest of his friends suggest times and places, vote, figure out what they want to do, and then everyone can get notified where to be via email, rss, or text messages. Planypus also offers one-click planning to make plans to go to concerts or restaurants that you find on the My City tab of the site by clicking on a plan icon. Planypus offers integration with a number of desktop products such as Microsoft Outlook and iCal, as well as online calendars and homepages such as My Yahoo, Google Calendar.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Planypus: My friends and I loved to have dinners on friday after work, but it was always a hassle to organize them and decide where to go. It was not practical to call ten people or do a back and forth email exchange. Our first solution was to put up a wiki where every person would contribute their thoughts, which was good for pasting in options and voting but poor at giving us a way to count rsvps or who wants to go where. We also had to keep calling each other to find out what the final location was...we wanted to build a product that would help us make plans and stay in the loop.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Planypus: We all have day jobs and contribute 10-20 hours per week on the side.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Planypus: We are six partners:

Yan Pritzker - CEO/CTO
Alex Chizhik - COO
Alex Antonov - Architect
Anton Mostovoy - Architect
Stan Mazo - Strategy
Varun Syal - Finance

Our backgrounds can be found here at our site.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Planypus: We believe that Planypus should be simple and intuitive. Less is more, that sort of thing :) We try to limit our feature set to the things our users really need. Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the trap of duplicating the features of the competition, but we have realized that a lack of a particular feature can be a feature in itself.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Planypus: Planypus is built on Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL database backend.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Planypus: We are currently in alpha testing. We deliver new features and improvements weekly. Right now the hottest topic is how to properly represent multi-date and fuzzy planning.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Planypus: As we are currently in alpha stages, our userbase which was grown organically is predominantly in the Chicago area where we are based, but we are starting to get users in other metros as well as from overseas.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

Planypus: We see Planypus becoming the de-facto planning solution on the web. You will be able to make Planypus plans from most major event blogs and event sites, rss feeds, and so on.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Planypus: The challenge is to stay on focus and not get distracted by competition which is better funded and full-time. So far being part-time and having no VC’s behind us has only made us stronger.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Planypus: We’re looking for more users so that we can better leverage the userbase to create our strategic partnerships.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Planypus: We have several strategies, ranging from an affiliate sales model (we offer our users concert tickets and built in dinner reservations which are monetized), to strategic partnerships, to selling featured spots for entertainment venues and a viral marketing program for event organizers.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Planypus: We are currently in alpha stage, and have not yet begun marketing to the public. With our small test userbase we are seeing about 2000 hits a day.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Planypus: We’re proud that we have been able to outpace the competition while using less resources and that we’re actually going to launch.  We’re also proud of the awesome support our alpha users have been giving us and hope not to disappoint them.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Planypus: The web has radically changed the way we talk to each other. We now have access to more people, more conversations, more topics. This is changing the way we socialize as well as the way we do business. The new generation of web tools is more democratic, more open, more about a large number of people engaged in a conversation than a small group making all the decisions.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Planypus: I get most of my info from rss feeds, so I don’t so much visit sites. Some of my favorite blogs are 37 signals SvN, techcrunch and eHub :). I also enjoy digg.com

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Planypus: Six or seven.

Thanks to Yan Pritzker and the rest of the team at Planypus for this email interview.

Visit Planypus
Originally added to eHub on Oct 30, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan