On all fronts it’s been a great year for Paperless Post and we’re really proud of the way we’ve grown our team, our product, and our business. We thought we’d wrap up 2012 by sharing some lessons we’ve learned, along with a dose of some fun numbers we dug up during our end-of-the year retrospectives.

Paperless Post’s series of tech talks will continue at the end of October with a talk by programmer, blogger, and tech leader Alex “al3x” Payne, formerly of Simple and Twitter.

Tuesday, October 30th at 7PM

Paperless Post, 151 W. 25th St, 9th Floor, New York, NY

Space is limited and RSVP’s are required. Please RSVP here: http://paperless.ly/VXuyAn

One of my favorite parts of working at Paperless Post is being involved in our internship program. Each summer for the past three years, we’ve brought on an increasing number of students who are at various points in their college careers, but have one important thing in common: they want to see how a startup works from the inside. We do everything we can to get these students in front of real work as soon as possible, starting off with a “bootcamp” that introduces them to our process and technology stack, and then immediately assigning them to one of our internal teams. We asked two of our interns to talk a bit about what they worked on. They were excited to share and so are we!

Over the summer, I’ve been traveling around a bit speaking at meetups and conferences sharing how Paperless Post thinks about metrics. Its been a fun and interesting experience and not only have I gotten some great feedback, it’s helped me formulate my thoughts to bring back to the team.

Our interface designers came up with several registration form views, but didn’t know which view would perform the best and wanted to compare them in the field. A/B testing with Google Website Optimizer was kicked around as a solution, but I stumbled across this excellent article by Steve Hanov explaining how to easily implement a “multi-armed bandit” library (we used more than 20 lines). This article is excellent, and I encourge you to implement something similar on your website if you have multiple UIs and doubts about which is the best.