One evening, while sitting around visiting with friends, a comment was made which became the inspiration for fly-post.com - a Website dedicated to the art and utility of the promotional flyer. The comment was, “I miss the good ole days when you could walk outside, look at the telephone pole, and know what was going on.” The resulting discussion honed in on one important element missing from the plethora of event based Websites which have become so ubiquitous in the recent years - they aren’t any fun to look at!
Of course, I am biased. I went to art school at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the early 90s, pre-Internet, and where every occasion from house parties, to yard sales to impromptu gorilla art exhibits warranted a flyer bordering on fine art. Around that same time, bands like Nine Inch Nails were emerging and working with talented artists like Derek Hess to turn the promotional flyer from utility to collector’s piece.
We conceived of fly-post as something in between the local city paper, the bulletin board found inside an art school or other visually inclined location, the neighborhood telephone pole and an invitation service like Evite. We wanted to provide tools to help the flyer makers promote their event or service, provide ways for the community to easily find and peruse these visual artvertisements, and celebrate the art of the flyer by allowing users to rate and comment. Lofty goals indeed, but after many months of brainstorming, designing, programming and testing, fly-post.com (beta) has launched!
We have been letting the beta site gain traction organically while we evaluate user interaction, gather feedback, make improvements, and slowly leak the word out via Twitter and Craigs List. While we want to blast it out to every blog and tech magazine out there, we are also cognizant of the power of growing slowly and being flexible enough to make improvements based on our community and user requests. So far, so good.
Fly-post has already had over 6,500 visits, with users spending an average of 3:09 on the site since it launched in beta last October. Word of mouth has served to help grow the user base, with many local businesses and organizations located in our home town of Baltimore being some of the most active early adopters. Regular posts from The Walters Art Museum, Atomic Books, and crowd favorites Dr. Sketchy (figure drawing class meets burlesque) and local band We Read Minds. As of this blog posting, fly-post flyers cover over 140 cities nationwide.
The site offers users many tools to help them share and promote their event, or an event they are interested in. Easy links allow users to post flyers to Facebook, insert into their MySpace pages, or email to a friend. Soon we will be including Craigs List friendly code snippets, and additional sharing tools for Twitter, Digg, etc. Comments and ratings will soon notify the flyer poster via email, and we hope to offer analytics for flyer creators to track their traffic. We also have plans to significantly enhance the RSVP system. We are in discussions with “green” printers, so we can enable flyer makers to place print orders at the same time as they are uploading to fly-post, if they are so inclined. And yes, an iPhone app is in the works - for those flyer fans who spot good ones out in the wild.
While we quietly work away in the background, focusing on improvements and enhancements, we welcome the growing community that will turn fly-post into the Web’s very own local telephone pole. So, looking for something going on in your neighborhood or city this weekend? Check fly-post.com, now you know.
