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Comment by kumarski | Hacker News Reader

I worked in the wedding space for 6 months.

This one's tough because weddings are close to the hearts, wallets, and our natural discretion on nepotism.

Finding new couples each and every day is the most expensive thing about this business.

ThumbTack attempts to do something like this. As a super ghetto immature growth tactic to let wedding DJ's know about the app I was marketing, I "requested bids" in 47 states for a wedding that was priced high for the app's founders. The requirement for the DJ's was they had to download the app and go through a quiz on how it works.

Lots of reasons why this is a tough space, but primarily anyone bidding on weddings probably is of low quality. Tough decision/motivation matrix here. I'd graph it out on a whiteboard and talk to all players.

DJs, caterers, etc... good thing is they're all reachable to have conversations with and many are struggling to find consistent gigs.

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Agreed. Weddings are tough. You can't just win on price, it needs to be a win on expirience.

Client acquisition in the couple space is also not easy. Once you acquire the customer, the value has to come with that one wedding. We've considering creating this as a vendor solution that reduces friction between the vendor and clients. Then we can acquire vendors, and work on vendor retention. We're still really early here, so we're doing a bunch of trial an error as we launch.

Thanks again

Are there any other marketplace platforms for consumers for large scale projects that you can look to for inspiration?

Maybe you focus on connecting the couple and wedding planners? This way the planners can be the central point and you don't have so many moving parts?

One of our initial marketplace platform inspirations was 99designs. I was really drawn to the idea of building a brief that was a text/link based representation of what I wanted our design to be. As I began my own time/money planning for marriage (I'm thinking ahead, but I'm at that age..), I kept asking.. Why can't I do something like what I did with 99 designs, and get a bunch of vendors to use my brief and respond back with proposals of service?

Re: connecting couples to wedding planners. Currently we find that only a small number of wedding actually use planners (< 20%). Evolving our initial thought of connecting couples to vendors, we could connect our clients to these wedding planners. Our initial thought was to offer something like this as a premium service, which would be our initial service plus a wedding planner who would help pull everything together. They would handle all the back and forth, pulling all of the details out of the couple, and also be there physically the day of to make sure it all goes off smoothly. The real question is do we start up market or down market? We're experimenting now.

Thanks for your points, they may really help evolve the product.

Where do you see the ability to break into a market that is heavily driven by peer recommendations?

Thanks for the question!

One idea was to incentivize couples who've already had weddings to share their details of their weddings/vendors with us. We in turn we would build and host a wedding web page that the couple can always reference back to. The vendors would be evaluated by the couples there. We've considered even giving them credits if someone in their social circle booked a vendor that a friend has used through our service.

Either way, socially validated reviews/recommendations need to be a big part of this platform.

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