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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I wish you the best of luck, but considering that you will be up against the bridal industrial complex in attempting to reach inexpert customers who are by nature transients in the field, I would suggest rethinking the price. With the average cost of a wedding in the north-of-$25k region, you might find that the difference between $25 and $100 matters very little to the customer but very much to your ability to afford advertising for it.

Also, talk to Andy Brice from Perfect Table Plan and pump him for information on who the ultimate customers of his software are.

P.S. The fact that a particular woman is marrying a particular man on a particular day is, in itself, worth more than $25. It can also be sold to multiple people. Just throwing that out there -- lead generation often isn't held in particularly high esteem, but it is big money.

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$25 is pulled from the top of my head — a lot of testing is going to happen once the application is built. :) Thanks for the advice!

I would say in the long run you should give out the PDF for free and charge for sending out the prints on proper card/paper. Most people are going to pay for something will want it printed properly. Also, I imagine the main advantage would be time saving not cost saving.

There is vanishingly little incentive to the business in giving that much value away for free. It autocommoditizes your offering and lets any idiot with a printer compete with you.

Give the PDF for ~10 guests away for free. This demonstrates that your solution will work, but nobody worth worrying has their invitation need filled by 10 invites.

Charge appropriate to value for PDFing the full guest list. Charge extraordinarily dearly for completely taking one annoying task off the overworked bride's plate and sending the invites yourself.

Ultimately the price of the PDF is going to tend to zero anyway, that's why I said in the long run. If you charge for the PDF someone will charge less and someone else will charge even less. I don't think people will want the PDFs since their printers are not very good + they don't have the right paper + ink is expensive.

The free PR you get from offering the free PDFs will drive sales of the printed versions and providing some free PDFs to low value customers will be much cheaper than Google ad-words and wedding magazine adverts. If you think about it magazines / blogs are going to point to the place you get good invitations for free, ultimately a lot of the people going there will pay for them to be printed and sent out.

If you charge for the PDF someone will charge less and someone else will charge even less.

Let them. Your pathological customers have to go somewhere -- send them to that sucker. If they cut their prices, you raise yours. I promise you you will come out ahead on that exchange. (It even works for bingo cards, which the customer has not spent an entire lifetime envisioning as the ultimate in socially acceptable public demonstrations of lavish consumption.)

It should be possible to partner with someone to do the actual printing and mailing. Ugly PDFs might sell for zero. But gorgeous PDFs will not. Also PDFs by people who actually understand what the customers want might be worth much more.

Apparently FarmVille makes more money selling ringtones and credit cards and such than they do by actually charging people for things in the game. (So said Jesse Schell of Schell Games.)

[Citation Needed] (please ^_^)

I think he's referring to Schell's talk at DICE 2010: http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-bo...

He mentions around the 3 min mark that lead generation generates more revenue than direct payments (and then goes on that topic for a bit).

That's cute, but Jesse Schell is entirely wrong. Users overwhelmingly prefer direct payments.

Mark Pincus talks about it here - http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2009/11/my-take-on-...

Peanut Labs backs it up with independent research - http://peanutlabsmedia.net/2009/11/02/survey-finds-arrington...

Sounds right, we watched the video and Schell actually says social games "probably" make more money from lead generation. Thanks for the links, Teej. I was really curious about that.

''With the average cost of a wedding in the north-of-$25k region, you might find that the difference between $25 and $100 matters very little to the customer''

i agree with this - her wedding is a special event that she will spend as much as she can - she already has a mental budget calculated by a complex process known only to her - some variables include -the cost of the wedding of her best friend -average cost of wedding in her social graph -how much she can afford to spend - then she will spend double of her budget so that she can complain about how guilty she feels for spending soo much for a wedding --but in no way-- her wedding will cost less than -and her planning process will last less than- the wedding of her best friend - she will get the most expensive of everything including invitations - she may buy groceries with coupons to look chic but this is -her- event - she will not look cheap - consider that even when she wants to -look- cheap she does not buy jeans and rip them at home herself -no- she buys -branded- jeans already ripped with style for her -also- it is a mistake to think that she is buying a -product- when she orders invitations - she is buying a -story- presented to her as -marketing- that she can share with her friends - for her to buy cheap invitations that she will spend time to create manually herself - there better be a -cool- story she can share with her frieds why she made this decision to go cheap - this story the founder must supply to her through marketing convincing her that buying cheap invitations does not make her look cheap - this is more difficult than building the site -also- maybe more important - she is -outsourcing- her wedding event - by definition she is the queen and the center of the universe and she will not do anything herself -except- giving orders - there is a lot of pride and competition involved in planning a wedding - she will not condescend to do manual work for her own invitations to save money - i think tracy in this case is thinking like the groom not the bride - but the decision to spend is made by the bride - so i believe this not to be a sound business model

Guys, take whatever upvotes you were going to give to me for my next 100 comments and give them to this line:

It is a mistake to think that she is buying a product when she orders invitations. She is buying a story presented to her as marketing that she can share with her friends. For her to buy cheap invitations that she will spend time to create manually herself, there better be a cool story she can share with her friends why she made this decision to go cheap.

Every idiot can print. What about handwritten invitations? Well, not all the invitation, just the name of each guest.(We had this in our wedding, mainly because a very good friend with gorgeous writing was willing to volunteer and do this as a personal favor).

In the context of Limedaring's business. How do you make something like this happen? Unique typesetting? Outsource and arbitrage? Printing on a plotter machine?

Maybe my example is not very practical... but the question is: what in your product makes each guest feel special?

Please consider using the Enter key once in a while.

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