Why we rebuilt Paperless Post for kids' birthday parties in a day

Hooray (hoorayinvites.com) is a free digital invitation site for kids' birthday parties. The Space team built it in one day at an internal hackathon.

What was the hackathon challenge?

The brief fit on a sticky note. Pick an internet business that owns its corner of the market, where the customer experience has gone stale. Then rebuild it in a day.

We kicked around a few targets. Shutterfly made the list, for photo books that take an evening to build. So did Ticketmaster, for fees that cost more than the seat. Paperless Post won fast.

Why did we pick Paperless Post?

We're the customers. A bunch of us are parents, and kids' birthday season never really ends. Paperless Post (paperlesspost.com) is the default for parents throwing kids' birthdays. Ours too.

Paperless Post is a big company. It launched in 2009, so it has been at this for 17 years. It has raised about $47 million in venture funding; LinkedIn lists more than 100 employees.

So we focused on one job: a better invite for parents throwing their kids' birthdays.

We knew the pain by heart. Every party, the bill crept toward $20 once we picked a design worth sending; their pricing runs on coins, charged per guest, with extras like envelope liners and stamps costing more. The designs felt like 2012 (paper envelopes, for an email). And the flow was long. Each screen offered another upsell before we could hit send.

An invite to a seven-year-old's party should be free. That's the opinion we built on.

How does Hooray fix the price?

Hooray is free. There are no coins, premium tiers, or per-guest fees. Invite the whole class.

How does Hooray make invites more fun?

Albert, our designer, went back to the clay and felt animation we grew up with (think Pingu or Wallace and Gromit). Then he built a world out of it.

We started with a classic envelope that opened with sound. It felt as dated as the thing we were replacing, so we cut it.

Every invite is a scene now. Going to an arcade? The invite shows up on the screen of an arcade machine. Karate party? Guests land in a dojo full of ninjas, with the details on a scroll. Pirates, football, and unicorns each get their own world too.

About 50 more cards go live next week. They cover laser tag, princesses, and plenty more.

How is the Hooray flow faster?

Pick a card and type the details (name, age, where, when). The card fills in live as you type.

Adding guests takes seconds. Upload a spreadsheet, pull from your contacts, or paste the class list straight in.

Then hit send. Every guest gets a link by email or text. They RSVP in one tap, with no app and no account. No upsell screens sit anywhere in between.

What does Hooray do for RSVPs?

A yes or no is only half of what a party host needs. Hooray collects the rest in one place:

• allergies and dietary needs (nut, dairy, kosher, halal), plus a free-text box
• special requests
• whether siblings are coming
• clear counts of parents and kids
• drop-off or stay, with an emergency contact for every drop-off

Hosts can nudge anyone who hasn't replied in one click. Nudges cap at two, so no parent gets spammed. Siblings get their own invite, so nobody has to ask awkwardly in the group chat.

Guests add the party to their calendar the moment they say yes. Everyone gets a reminder the day before and the day of, with a map link.

Next year, the invite to the same class fills itself in. Allergy and emergency contact details stay encrypted; parents can delete them anytime.

How did we build it in a day?

Albert designed it. Adi, one of our senior engineers, built it. I played strategist. We worked with the proprietary AI tools Space built for itself (we've written about 20 of them in Inside an AI-Native Agency).

The tools took the grunt work. They don't understand the problem, though. What do parents want an invite to look like? What would make the chaos of a kid's birthday less stressful? A model has no idea. Answering takes top 1% talent.

Albert brought the vision and taste to nail the UX and UI in a day (it's why he cut the envelope). Adi brought the know-how to build something fast, secure, reliable, and private. I brought the parent's eye: what gets in a host's way, plus what they wish they had. That's where the drop-off contacts, sibling invites, allergy chips, and nudge caps came from.

AI on its own gives you a vibe-coded app. It looks generic. It ships with security and privacy holes no parent should accept. Paired with top talent, the same tools build a real business in a day.

Hooray has a secure back end, encrypted allergy data, and an admin panel for parents. We can upload new cards ourselves with no extra code. (We drew that line between prototype and product in Can you run a business on a vibe-coded app?).

For decades, agencies told clients to pick two: fast, cheap, or good. Hooray smashes that triangle. Paperless Post took 17 years and $47 million to get where it is. A designer, an engineer, and a strategist with the right tools built a better version for parents in a day, for the price of that day.

If we did it again, we'd cut the envelope sooner. It ate hours before we admitted it felt dated.

What's next for Hooray?

Hooray now lives on its own domain, hoorayinvites.com.