Open Me

Ilya Pozin was ready to launch his new greeting card web application and needed a website management platform that could help him launch quickly. He couldn’t afford to take his developers away from dev work for system administration, so he turned down a $10,000 hosting credit and launched a core product in just two months on Pantheon.

I had to make a choice. Should I take resources away from building our site to set up a hosting environment? Is that $10,000 credit worth the opportunity and development costs?

Ilya Pozin, Founder, Open Me

A Greeting Card Company for People Who Never Shop For Cards

Ilya Pozin was frustrated with the inconvenience of going to the store and trying to find a greeting card that wasn’t terrible. He had always been the kind of guy that bought greeting cards because he had to, not because he wanted to. He knew there had to be an easier way, and thus the idea for Open Me was born.

The traditional card industry is declining at 5% a year, while the online segment is growing at 20% a year. The concept of greeting cards is nothing new, but the market is shifting against this lack of convenience.

Pozin pitched the idea to the founder of Threadless, who happened to be in the same entrepreneur group. Threadless crowdsources designs from more than 200,000 artists around the world and partners with Open Me to provide designs for their cards. The Open Me system allows you to order ecards for free, and to ship physical printed cards directly to the recipient for $4. The web app spares the inconvenience of buying a stamp and a card, filling out the card, adding a photo and dropping it in the mail.

Why They Left a $10,000 Hosting Credit on the Table

Open Me received $10,000 in Amazon hosting credit from Amplify, a Los-Angeles-based incubator/accelerator. But even though this credit would have knocked a year off of their hosting costs, they decided not to use it.

Pozin needed a customized, out-of-the-box Drupal environment, but Amazon’s platform would require the Open Me team to run a script to build the environment themselves. A script that would require too much setup and configuration.

After analyzing the cost of what it would take to develop the right environment and scale, Pozin found that Amazon would be less cost efficient, even with the $10,000 credit. Open Me decided to use Pantheon’s Drupal platform solution because it was out-of-the-box and ready-to-go, built for the environment they would be launching with.

A Core Product Built in 2 Months, Start to Finish  

The site was built quickly—in five weeks with five full-time people. From start to finish, the entire core product was done in less than two months.

I credit our speed to Pantheon and Coplex’s agile process of not taking on more than one project at a time. The entire team was able to focus on our launch.

Pantheon’s dev-test-live environment made the transition to live simple, and allowed Pozin’s team to focus on dev work, not system administration and other setup.

Best Practices for Other Founders

Here are a few tips from Pozin:

1. Design and Build for Viral Social Growth

Viral social growth is a big focus for Open Me. "We don’t want to rely on PR to grow our business. We want it to grow organically. The whole reason of our existence is to create traffic spikes—they should never bring the site down." Open Me's group card feature is designed to generate that kind of viral social growth. They're planning to rolling out more viral features as they grow.  

2. Give non-technical people equal rights to updates

Our Head of Product, Brad Sharkey, is not a developer at all. With Pantheon, he’s working through the environment like he is. He’s very comfortable with it. Pantheon is very clear, well-built, and user-friendly.

3. Focus on the business—let Pantheon handle servers and performance

"Now that the Coplex team is done building the site, it’s great to have a solution with people who proactively check in, rather than us having to create tickets", says Pozin. The team gets to focus on what they do best while Pantheon proactively monitors the website