Jingles, Contracts, & More

The summer seems to be going by in a flash. But finally some warm weather! I spent this past weekend at my parent’s house at Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. For those that know me, Newfound Lake, perhaps above all other places, holds a special status with me. My parents bought their house there back when I was a sophomore in college (circa 1990), and it has been the site of many memorable family gatherings over the years. Summers are best with the lake right outside their back door. But fall is incredible too and winters are also great when we fire up the wood burning stove. I don’t get up there nearly as much as I’d like these days, but whenever I am able to go, its always well worth it.

But now the weekend is in the books, and its back to the important task of hand – GigMasters. There are a couple of big things happening this week which I will run down:

1) Jingle Contest - Time To Vote! – Several weeks back we had launched a jingle contest for our performers. Their challenge was to come up with a catchy GigMasters jingle that featured our tagline ‘The Life Of The Party’. The winner gets a free one year gold membership as well as being featured on the GigMasters homepage for an entire month. I must say I have been blown away by the quality (and quantity) of entrants and it was a challenge for us to narrow it down to 10 finalists. Nevertheless we did so and now its time for everyone to vote. I strongly encourage everyone to take a few minutes to listen to the different options – there’s quite a wide variety of musical styles to choose from.

2) Downloadable Contracts Are Finally Here! – The week is finally here that we launch the beta version of downloadable PDF contracts. Our developers have been working on this for several months, so I’m psyched its going live. The contracts will be a completely optional feature accessible only for now by our performers. Recognizing that many of our performers already have their own contracts that they are happy with, we are emphasizing that this is optional so those performers that don’t have their own contracts can use ours. Its also a more balanced contract than many that are out there – in other words it has things in there that protect the performer as well as things that protect the client. Some contracts are often very skewed one way or another.

3) New 'Performer In Demand' Feature - I’m also excited about the rollout of a new enhancement to our performer bids – something that we’ve coined ‘Performer In Demand’ Basically the idea here is that if customer contacts one of our performers for a particular date, we are now letting the customer know when there are other GigMasters customers who have also contacted this performer for the very same date. We’re not revealing customer names or private information – just the # of other customers who have inquired about this performer for the date in question. The idea here is to encourage bookings and create a sense of urgency on the part of customers to book our performers. And for those performers who don’t for whatever reason like this new feature, they can opt out. I’m very curious to see how the performers react to this new feature. Hopefully they’ll like it.

So that's about it for this week. Summer will be winding down before you know it, so it's time to work hard during the week, and play hard on the weekends. And maybe if I play my cards right, they'll be another trip to Newfound Lake just around the corner...