CEO Stephen Weir told me that the reason for the new direction is simply an economical one.

More specifically, he stated that he took a good look at the balance sheet earlier this year and ultimately decided the cost of acquiring a customer for the ‘old’ MadeIT was far too high compared to the projected revenue from selling ads based on their traffic projections, and that Facebook was effectively going to kill the event social networks / invitations service providers one by one anyway. Basically, he painted a pretty dark picture for startups like Evite (Ticketmaster), Eventful, MyPunchbowl, Socializr and a slew of other similar services.

Rather than giving up, Weir and co-founder Jonny Hendriksen decided to rethink the service from scratch and came up with a low-priced solution for helping organizers of small and medium-sized events sell tickets online. MadeIT aims to provide them with a set of tools for end-to-end event management, including publishing, promoting and collecting online payments for events (the latter comes with PayPal and Google Checkout integration). The service doesn’t cost a thing for free events, but MadeIT retains a commission of 2.5% for paid events, with a minimum charge of $0.99 and a maximum of $9.99.

Like many of their competitors, which include Eventbrite, TicketLeap, amiando and Eventbee, they face a chicken-and-egg problem: you need high volumes of events to generate enough, often non-recurring, revenue out of commissions on ticket sales, while the costs of marketing the service to potential customers is relatively high. The company claims to have come up with “innovative customer acquisition strategies” that bring in a lot of qualified leads for them to build a sales model around.

Personally, I applaud the fact that they’re going at it without taking a dime of funding from anyone else but themselves, but time will tell if MadeIT has what it takes to stand out in the crowded space they’ve entered, which is filled with similar startups who have a bit more breathing room thanks to institutional and angel investors.

(Disclosure: I am a partner in a soon-to-launch Belgian ticketing/event startup, and will be facing some of these challenges myself).

This is a very small event – just 30 attendees total (hopefully they’ll video so that more people can watch it afterwards). The tickets are now gone – but the last five have been reserved for TechCrunch readers (and are free). If you want to go, please leave a comment below telling us why you think you would benefit from the event or have something interesting to contribute. Also, given that there are so few seats available, please don’t ask for a ticket unless you are sure you can attend. I’ll choose five in 24 hours.

So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not.

St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc.

Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself.

The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc.

The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly.

See the demo/overview video here. There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped Media.

Let’s say you want to plan a party or some other get together. You have no shortage of options as to how you can get the word out to your guests. Your most reliable solution is probably just to spam your friends via email.

But if you want to create a standing destination for your guests to get more involved with the event ahead of time, you’ll need to set up an website-based invitation. As a pre-2005 college graduate, you’d probably use Evite. Otherwise, you might be more drawn to Facebook’s own event application.

Or, starting Thursday, you might opt to use MadeIt, a new invitation service/social network. The service, which on paper resembles Socializr, aims to eat away at the large market share of Evite, whose 6.7 million unique visitors per month (according to Comscore) consist largely of mid-30 year old females.

MadeIt takes on Evite by providing more customizable invitations and a social network within which guests can interact before and after events take place.

Invitations feature a custom background, an embedded video clip, general information, photos, a guest discussion area (with threaded comments), and RSVP options. Notably, MadeIt lets guests embed whatever objects they want into their discussion comments, so they can contribute images, videos, etc. just like in MySpace (in fact, the entire site seems aesthetically as though it will appeal to the MySpace crowd). Event planners can create their invites from scratch or choose from a variety of user-submitted templates.

More importantly, an event persists on MadeIt even after it transpires. The invitation turns into a page dubbed the “aftermath” where guests can add and comment on photos and videos from the event, friend each other, and check out each others’ profiles. Due to the ability of guests to connect with each other after events, MadeIt bills itself as a friends discovery system, unlike a traditional social network where you mostly interact with people you already know.

MadeIt’s integration of social networking does make it a more compelling option than Evite. However, I wonder whether MadeIt has made it too late to the party. As things stand, it (admittedly) has the greatest chance of capturing Evite users who are in their mid-20s to early-30s…which is all fine and good, but that demographic may be all the company can hope for.

Many users more towards Evite’s median age of 37 will not be inclined to switch over despite MadeIt’s advantages simply because they won’t demand its extra features strongly enough. And crowds younger than, say, 25 years old will increasingly choose to use Facebook, which itself serves as a massive “aftermath” area wherein people can tag each other in party photos and leave notes for each other about how wild the weekend was. As more and more people get sucked into the Facebook ecosphere, fewer and fewer of them will pick social services that exist outside of the network where all of their friends already reside. Of course, this could all change if “open” social networking becomes a reality, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

For all its competition, MadeIt provides a pretty solid service. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how their mobile invitation system, which will be deployed over the next few months, helps to differentiate themselves even more.

MadeIt has been under development for seven months and will, naturally, debut with a party (check out the invitation here). We’ve embedded the company’s promotional video below.

See our previous coverage of Skobee, Socializr, MyPunchBowl, Renkoo, and Windows Live.