The BBQ ribs are looking good and looks like I don’t have to go to the store! I can just sit back, watch the Olympics (women’s volleyball on right now) and tend to the ribs. Just checked our cookout sign up sheet and it looks like all of our friends are bringing everything else! This is what I like to see:
Time to go flip the ribs! Go USA!
I’m going to ignore the fact that a large majority of the users of Thing2Bring at this point are my friends. I’m also choosing not to use this fact as some sort of indication of my friends’ bad habits. Disclaimers aside, the item that most often ends up on an event’s sign up sheet up to this point is BEER! From Lagers to Porters, the event planners have overwhelmingly indicated that beer is essential for their event and they are asking their friends to sign up to bring it themselves.
Again, I’m not judging and I agree, beer (and bacon) makes most things better. I’m just stating the facts! Stay thirsty…
What is the first thing someone asks when you invite them to a party? “What can we bring?”, right? If you are like me, you spend the entire week heading up to the event on the phone coordinating who is bringing what. Either that, or you just tell everyone you’ll handle all of it just to avoid the coordination nightmare. If you are like me and even if you do elect to become the who is bringing what coordinator, you probably end up bringing a lot of extra stuff just to avoid the ‘1 bag of chips for 30 people’ situation.
After years of frustration (ok, not TOO frustrating, I just like side projects), I finally decided I needed an easier way to create a sign up sheet for my events. I wanted to create something that allowed me to create an event either on my iPhone or online and then let me track who is bringing what and make changes from either my phone or a web browser. ThingToBring.com and the ThingToBring iPhone app are the results of this project and they are all about who is bringing what. Now I can easily create a sign up sheet for what I want people to bring to the party:
My friends get an email saying they “have a thing to bring” to my event. The email contains a link that allows them to sign up to bring something:
I just check ThingToBring on my iPhone throughout the week and supply the rest. Party planning perfection!
ThingToBring is all about who is bringing what to the party. No fancy themed graphics (I’m a crappy graphics designer anyway) or anything else that gets in the way of you creating a quick sign up sheet to send to your invite list so they can start contributing to the event. I like to have cookouts and I am obsessed with tailgating for college football (USF Bulls, GO BULLS!). My friends want to bring their favorite pasta salad and their amazing hummus and I want to empower them to do so. When I see someone at halftime and they say they want to bring their 10 friends to the next tailgate, I want to be able to pull my phone out of my pocket and add them to the next tailgating signup sheet. Bring all of the friends you want, here’s what you all can bring!