Hacking New Years Eve
Less than a month ago a small group of my friends including myself, Noah Brier, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Matthew Johnson, and Seth Gaffney got together and were discussing our upcoming plans for New Years Eve. We soon discovered that nobody liked being in NYC for New Years Eve due to the crowded bars, expensive parties, lack of transportation, lack of living up to the hype and overall aggravation leading up to the event. We soon decided to have a party the night before New years Eve.
Around December 7th we came up with the idea to have a party the night before New Years Eve which is in effect New Years Eve Eve and the planning began.

We launched the NYEE site December 8th (pictured above) without much fanfare telling a few friends and sending out a few Twitter messages and some short blog posts.
The goal was to get people to RSVP so that we could gauge some interest in the party. After all, we were not sure who (if anyone) would be around the night before New Years Eve and willing to go out. The promise of giving up a bigger party night is a lot to ask of anyone. We also soon put up a Facebook invitation and sent it out to our respective social circles inviting people to the NY Eve-EVE party. After all people like having their plans set in Facebook and not everyone is comfortable giving out their email address. This provided a great benchmark for seeing who was going to be around, and let others see which friends would be going as well.
Within a few days we had a few hundred visits to the site!
Signups were going well and we knew we could pull it off.
During the three weeks leading up to the event we got around 2,400 unique visitors to the site and over 500 RSVP’s! Not bad for an impromptu idea thrown together by a few friends.
Below is the final results from 12/08/08 – 12/30/08

We managed to pull it off and definitely had a blast! Thanks to all that showed up and made it a great night.

Happy New Year and enjoy the real New years eve if you are up for another night out!
Tags: Eric Friedman, Matt Johnson, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, New Years Eve, Noah Brier, Seth Gaffney