Satish Kanwar is a compulsive marketer, technology enthusiast, and just a plain ol’ geek that’s happy to be one. An RSS, Facebook, and Twitter junkie, he’s been known to dream big, work hard, and live life through his passions.

Verne Ho is a marketer, designer, and entrepreneur at heart, but underneath it all he’s just an all-round nice guy. He enjoys sitting back and letting his passions do the driving, while he quietly shares his creative ramblings on his blog.

The two young entrepreneurs also each have business degrees from the University of Toronto and have backgrounds working with large technology firms. As current managing partners of their fast growing creative marketing agency, Satish and Verne have had a long history of collaboration through various organizations, initiatives, and ventures before embarking on their latest project, cantwaitforchristmas.com.

How did you come up with the idea for cantwaitforchristmas.com?

Satish: It started off as really just another Saturday night on the web. After a long discussion about our agency work and some side projects we’d been considering for a while, it just came out of nowhere as a “you know what would be cool” message - as many of our ideas usually emerge. Starting with the core idea of a giant Christmas countdown site, we considered flash games, naughty/nice lists, big graphics, and general ways for people to interact. What was different though was the sudden enthusiasm to just do it. Unlike many of our ideas before this, we didn’t want to overthink it. And that was the base philosophy: “stop overthinking, let’s just make it and see what happens”.

Verne: We did, however, have a general vision of what we wanted to accomplish. Firstly, we knew it had to be a user-centric site with a very simple value offering. Secondly, we knew we’d have to have a viral strategy in place that would get people talking about the site. And lastly, we wanted to do it all in less than 24 hours. And that’s as far as our planning really went. No numbers, no concrete goals, and no roadmap - just the urge to get going immediately.

Satish: Verne and I simply worked virtually over MSN through the process and it was cool to see the site come to life piece by piece. And from the moment we launched, our social media experiment truly began. Every day since seems to have offered new lessons and more metrics that we’ll certainly keep as takeaways for our future projects.

What sort of answers did you expect to get, and what have you been getting so far?

Verne: We weren’t all that sure what to expect to begin with, to be honest. We thought most responses would simply be materialistic wishes, but we’ve had the pleasure of seeing that and so much more.

Satish: After 4 days of being live, we’ve had more than 170 holiday wishes come through the site. They’ve been a great mix of material items, great food, family and friend reunions, and big wishes to the world. We’ve posted a few of our favorites below.

• Travis at December 9th, 2007 5:55 pm: The largest snowfall ever. Enough to make the world stop, appreciate, and capture the stillness. Enough to forget about deadlines and bills. Enough to make everyone act like a child, even if only for one day.
• Anonymous at December 9th, 2007 6:15 pm: can’t wait for my girlfriend to feel sexy again after her knee surgery.
• pistalwhipped at December 12th, 2007 10:24 pm: The look on my fiance’s face when she opens her gift.
• Ma Hoop at December 13th, 2007 9:12 am: My daughter and her husband (and the puppy!) to come home on the 15th. She serves as a nurse in the Air Force in Colorado. And making family favorite foods-cream puffs, caramels!
• Dave Wright at December 13th, 2007 12:57 pm: My son, due on December 19th!

(and of course,)

• Hatchthat.com at December 10th, 2007 10:52 pm: My massive relaunch! With a new template, and many more exciting things. (although it might be next Christmas before that happens!)

Verne: We had also agreed from the start that we wanted the site to be friendly to everyone (PG-13?). Despite saying “share responsibly”, however, we’ve had to filter out about 30 odd responses (though we did let some clever ones through). Those have been interesting in their own way. Let’s just say that there’s something out there with 2 females and 1 drinking utensil that young males are freakishly obsessing over. Message to them: I don’t think Santa will produce a part 2.Satish: But we definitely encourage everyone reading to get on the site and share their wishes with their friends, family, and the world. There’s something special about putting “what you can’t wait for” out there, and we think that’s really resonating with people.

How was it possible to launch a whole new website in just 12 hours?

Verne: Evidently, I’m the new WordPress rockstar! Just kidding (much love to Adii). To be honest, a combination of the site’s simplicity and WordPress’ flexibility made it easy to put together in a matter of hours. When we had first set out, we wanted to launch within 24 hours of starting. Design took about 2 hours (there were a number of different layout alternatives we toyed around with), the CSS/XHTML took 1 hour, and WordPressing and tweaking took about another 2-3 hours. Add in some copy writing time, and some prep time for the marketing launches (emails, tweets, Facebook messages, contacting people in our network, etc.), and it all sums up to be about 12 hours of work.

Satish: We did squeeze sleep and food breaks in between all the work as well, but still launched comfortably within our 24 hour mark (19 hours to be precise).

HatchThat: The site has buttons to help people promote it through social bookmarking services such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious - what have been the results of that so far? What works and what doesn’t?

Satish: Everything we thought would work, didn’t. The things we doubted or knew very little about, surprised us big time.

• RSS - We created a feed out of all the holiday wishes that were going to be posted. It was a last minute decision because we really didn’t anticipate there being a demand for it. Surprisingly, in addition to a great number of returning site visitors, we’ve had more than 30 RSS subscribers to date that are actively checking the wishes coming through!
• Facebook - In addition to giving users a way to share the site on Facebook, we created a Facebook event for Christmas to promote the countdown. The event reach has been minimal, but we’re certain the viral effect of sharing on Facebook has made an impact. Though it’s funny to see people hit “Maybe Attending” for Christmas.
• Digg - We had high hopes for the notorious “Digg effect”, which never happened for us. Despite getting a popular Digg user to submit the story first, it never flew. Digg traffic, as a result, has been insignificant. If you’ve got ideas on how to give it another go, contact us.
• StumbleUpon - Gosh we love Stumblers. We knew nothing about StumbleUpon and had no expectations. But we went ahead and used an old account we had to give it a first review, and we’ve never looked back since. Stumble traffic has been PHENOMENAL, with 30+ thumbs and 10 reviews.
• Delicious - Again, something we weren’t too familiar with. But it’s been interesting to see people bookmark the site as “inspiration”, “ideas”, and “to do” among other things.
• Technorati - Though it’s not exactly a blog, being powered off WordPress we submitted it to Technorati as well to track reactions.

What’s been even better than all of this has been the attention from blogs and other websites. We were featured on CSS Mania among other design sites, personal blogs, and popular forums, which has really driven the numbers. If anyone writes about the website we also offer some link love and free exposure in our rotating header!

What happens on Christmas day?

Verne: The counter hits 00:00:00:00. And then the sky explodes with everyone’s wishes falling from the sky. It was tough building that custom WordPress plugin, but that’s essentially what we’re expecting to happen.

Satish: If that doesn’t work out, there may or may not be a plan B. I guess that’s another thing for people to countdown to.

HatchThat: What’s next for you? Are you going to be releasing any more projects?

Verne: Well we’re constantly working on projects with our agency, but the second we have another one of those “you know what would be cool” moments (or a pack of Red Bull… whichever comes first) you can bet we’ll be running another overnight marathon.

Satish: We’ve had such a blast working with WordPress that we’ve even gone ahead and rebuilt our entire agency site on the platform. We’re set to relaunch the site before the end of the year, so that’ll definitely be the next big launch.

Verne: I think even sooner you’ll see some post-launch commentary over on my blog. I’m going to breakdown some of the WordPress techniques I used to build the site, and Satish is going to examine the wins and losses of our social media experiment.

Satish: In any case, you definitely haven’t heard the last from us!

Thanks Verne and Satish. You can see the project at cantwaitforchristmas.com.

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Posted on December 14th, 2007 by Ross