Opinion
James Hirschfeld: Ad-supported monetization degrades digital event invitation products
“I wanted it to be a premium product from the outset because the kind of incumbent competitive options were free and ad-supported, and I thought that there was, it was a really bad idea to try to monetize an invitation product, which by definition- It just look…”
Insight
James Hirschfeld: Excess early capital often causes startups to fund wrong strategies
“The thing about having a lot of capital When you're a small company is that you can put it behind the wrong strategy and you don't, you lose touch with the practical reality of the business.”
Assertion Partly supported
Hirschfeld: Paperless Post's lead seed investor discovered startup via an invitation
“Our first investors came to us through the product. Our first, the lead investor of our seed financing round was This was a someone from a fund called Moose Partners and he received an invitation, and he just got it.”
Disclosure
Hirschfeld: Paperless Post raised seed funding on an event ticketing model
“So we raised money on the back of this revenue stream around ticketing, but the organizations that were using us for ticketed events were harder to acquire and much harder to serve.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
James Hirschfeld: Paperless Post did $100,000 in sales in December 2009
“I remember in December of 2009 that we did a 100,000 dollars in sales.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Paperless Post reached full-year profitability in 2021 after years of seasonal spikes
“We had had, we had always been running kind of close to profitability, and we would have court, we would always be profitable in Q four probably since 2000 and Christmas. Yeah. Since 2010, we'd have a huge surge, but we, we've been profitable since 20, 21 in t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Paperless Post's physical stationery generated $500,000 in its first 10 weeks
“I think we did five, 500,000 dollars in sales in the first, like, 10 weeks of paper.”
Disclosure
Hirschfeld: Paperless Post never runs ads or sells user data
“We have no advertising ever, and we don't sell people's data.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Paperless Post's sales dropped 85% in April 2020 due to the pandemic
“What really happened was that sales dropped by 85% in April, and then over the summer, they settled it around 50% down to the prior year, as we saw people figured out how to have parties that were outdoor parties, or drive-by parties, or virtual parties. So, s…”
Disclosure
James Hirschfeld: Paperless Post cut pay and raised bridge funds during COVID
“We started with pay cuts which was, you know, everyone was a pretty good support about that. And so we kind of heard, we heard about PPP loans. We were one of the first companies to get PPP loans and we, they were pretty generous. We negotiated with our landlo…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hirschfeld: Professional and Wedding Event Hosts Have Higher LTV and Repeat Rates
“We noticed that,
Two segments were kind of standing apart from the rest, professional events and wedding events, and we were thinking about the fact that these customers, these business customers, are really appealing.
Like, they're great customers.
They have …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Paperless Post is now double its pre-COVID size and fully profitable
“We're around the size we were before COVID, but we're double the size we're profitable.”
Opinion
Hirschfeld: Early online RSVP platforms were ad-riddled and poorly designed
“Those were riddled with ads and not very beautiful, and you couldn't really achieve the sort of self-expression or the design value that I was going for”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
James Hirschfeld: Paperless Post Bootstrapped Early Product With Boston Firm and Brown Students
“The first people we brought in were a design firm in Boston that kind of helped us create wireframes in a flow. And we paid for that with the savings that, you know, my sister and I had, which was a little bit of money that our grandparents had given us or had…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
James Hirschfeld: In 2007, digital invites were socially unacceptable for formal events
“Back in 2007, if you can remember, there really was a limit to, there were certain types of events where you could not use an online product to communicate. It was not legitimate.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
James Hirschfeld: Paperless Post Barely Spent on Marketing Until Recent Years
“And honestly, we didn't really spend much money on marketing until a few years ago. We kind of thought that marketing was like fake news. We were really onto product-led growth and kind of, you know, these viral growth dynamics very, very, you know, a lot.”
