
Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding - vishalkgupta
WedWell (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;WedWell.co) helps couples hire the best vendors for their wedding by getting vendors iterate details electronically and to bid for their event.<p>A wedding brief, created by the couple, is a text based description of what they want to see for different aspects of their wedding. Initially we will breakdown the brief into the first wave of vendor types: (DJ&#x27;s, Cakes, Flowers, Photos, Invites). The brief can include links to Pinterest boards, Spotify Play lists and Google Drive documents. Ideally, the brief becomes the digital representation of the couple’s wedding that they draw all inspiration from.<p>Couples can invite vendors to bid on their brief by viewing a list of the vendors and sending them messages. We will also solicit external vendors for the couple’s brief.<p>Vendors will respond with their proposals. The proposals will come in as text&#x2F;hyperlinks to describe their services. It&#x27;s up to them to sell themselves to the couples.<p>The couple will tell WedWell how much they want to pay for each vendor type. We may give suggestions for pricing based on analytics available to us. The couple will put a credit card down for each of the vendor they would like to book. After the week long bidding period the client will then have the choice to either confirm or cancel the awarded prize (50% of the payment).<p>We will normalize all the agreements. The vendors will receive 50% of the prize as the contest ends. We will then award the other 50% after the wedding. We will build in a rating system for each vendor to ensure the best vendors are rewarded with more contest wins.
======
abakker
Disclaimer: I am getting married soon, in SF.

The Brief is a great idea, but it needs to pass some QC before being bid on.
At the time of your vendor selection for a standard wedding, you don't know
what you don't know. Its tough to choose well when you are not sure what to
optimize for. I suggest a LONG list of questions to answer to get the details
on how the wedding should proceed.

2nd. Venue selection has a lot to do with which vendors you can use, since not
all will travel to all locations, and not all venues have all the amenities
that some vendors need (big driveway for shuttle bus, commercial kitchen for
caterer).

My experience with vendors is that they all communicate in different styles,
and mostly poorly. Compared to office work, their typical responsiveness by
email/voice/text is irregular (and unnerving). Maintaining responsiveness
standards would be the single biggest benefit I can imagine for making the
process better.

Many of the best vendors from your wedding may not be wedding vendors -
Uber/Chariot both put together better cost comparisons for transport to/from
my rehearsal dinner for guests than did most of the dedicated transit
companies that specialize in weddings.

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

We're experimenting with on-boarding. We're doing "Wedding Consultations"\-
phone calls and walk through a clients ideas for each vendor. And also a
wedding brief, which is that long list of questions. We're experimenting with
something a bit more visual vs words. Love for your to give our current
version a try and give us feedback!

Locations: While we haven't really said it on the site, we're highly focused
on NYC weddings (where weddings are 2x the cost of average weddings). The
interesting thing here is that most vendors are willing to travel within the 5
boroughs.

Vendor responsiveness is a huge issue from what we've heard. One of our
metrics on the vendors will be responsiveness. Similar to Airbnb hosts.

Best vendors not being pure wedding vendors. It's a point well taken. We're
currently focused on the silos covered by small, disparate vendors, and
providing solutions for those vendors. A client may not book all vendor types
through us, but we will be the grease between the friction that exists with
the old school vendors.

Thanks again for your thoughts, love for you to give it a try. Even if it's
just to provide more feedback!

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ptasci67
I am curious about the alignment of incentives here. As others have pointed
out, this industry is notoriously expensive with vendors enjoying comfortable
profits without having to go through this direct competition platform amongst
their peers. What incentive do they have for joining the platform?

Furthermore, what incentive does a couple about to get married have for
joining the platform? It sounds like they are somewhat locked into the vendors
that come to them. I think you mention that they can cancel but then there is
then no incentive for the couple to take it seriously. It turns into quote
shopping instead of an actual marketplace.

I like the idea because this space is ripe for change. There is a lot of money
flowing around and people who get married are confused about where is the
best/most affordable/most reputable place to put it. I think if you can align
the incentives on both side properly, this could be a real winner.

~~~
vishalkgupta
I think you're on target. The hardest thing here is getting this the
incentives aligned here. Our incentives for the couple need to be need to be
more focused on ease of use/process, less on being cheaper. We may steer that
way in our messaging as we iterate.

On the vendor side, one thought is that we may need to consider being less of
a market place and more of a tool that allows couples to quickly iterate and
pay for services with any vendor. So the discovery of the vendors could happen
outside of our service, and we help with the pain points of initial iteration
and payments. Eventually we could open up the market place as an addition to
our services.

We're super early, so your thoughts and others are helping us shape our
development. Thanks again.

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kumarski
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.

~~~
vishalkgupta
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

~~~
dundas
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?

~~~
vishalkgupta
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.

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

~~~
vishalkgupta
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.

------
buss
I think this is a fantastic idea! The wedding industry is huge, expensive (and
getting more and more so), and I've heard horror stories from friends when
they picked the wrong vendor.

I'm confused by your use of the words "contest" and "prize". You've got a
straightforward auction, why are you not calling it that?

What's the incentive for vendors to come to you, won't this force them to
compete on price in a market where price often doesn't matter?

Do you know vendors will agree to take 50% after the wedding? How are these
agreements structured today? How will you ensure vendors don't get ripped off?

How are you going to get customers and vendors to use your site?

Edit:

How will you make money?

What if you just act as a marketplace for vendors, handle the payments in full
up front, and take a percentage?

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks for the thoughtful questions! Let me go through them 1 by 1.

Wording: Contest/Prize vs Auction, we're evolving our copy as we go. The
initial idea was that through the iteration process, the best (not necessarily
the cheapest) vendor would win. So in our eyes, less like an auction. But
point taken.

Vendor incentives: Vendors will be able to proactively approach events that
fit their style/schedule. They can worry less and less about their own ads,
and let their service tell the story (with a good review system- this will be
possible). Also, we think that standardized agreements/money escrow, we can
take some of the friction out of both sides.

50% before/after the wedding: We're working with just a small subset of
wedding vendor silos at this point, and focused on vendors that can fit in
with this 50/50 template. It may not work for every silo in the future.
Vendors will be guaranteed 50%, we hold the other 50%. If something doesn't go
off well at the wedding, we will look into an arbitration clause (still
working out the details here), but our hope is to make sure both sides are
happy.

Customer acquisition: This is the hardest (isn't it always?). Right now we're
hyper focused on the NYC Wedding market (2x the average wedding costs). It's
all super grass roots right now; face to face meetings, wedding events, also
we're incentivizing new clients with $100 back and $100 for anyone they share
the service with. We're also running a few targeted fb/google ads to see if
they are helpful. If you have any other ideas, we're all ears!

How will you make money? What if you just act as a marketplace for vendors,
handle the payments in full up front, and take a percentage? <\- This is in
large part our idea on how to make money.

------
aacook
This is a cool idea, there are lots of problems in this space.

I worked on Rentabilities
([https://angel.co/rentabilities](https://angel.co/rentabilities)) which we
ultimately shut down after 3 years. We focused on product rentals, which is
just a sliver of the things you need for a wedding. We ran into lots of issues
being a marketplace. We were able to scale the demand side nicely with 150k
long tail visitors each month (things like "backyard wedding tent rental" or
"scooby doo bouncy castle") and hundreds of quote requests each day. I'd say
15-20% of requests mentioned weddings. We were able to get merchants to sign
up, but only by calling them on the phone (email just didn't work). The
merchants were pretty bad at responding to emails. We tried a bidding system
where we exposed the vendor names but the overall response was negative. We
iterated to a product that looked alot like Operator or Magic, with merchants
and consumers texting with a small group of customer service people (starting
with our internal team) in the middle. One thing you're up against with
rentals or event services is a timeline: In general a wedding or birthday
party is an emotional event and people want to get everything booked fast.
This means that often times we'd spend hours researching an event for someone,
only to have them not book because it wasn't fast enough. Booking rates were
higher for requests we could fill multiple quotes on faster, but it was really
hard to fill them fast because the merchants were slow. At one point we did
some research into weddings and found that wedding coordinators like to work
with trusted vendors, usually over the phone or in person, directly. They
really care about making sure the wedding goes exactly as planned. We
relentlessly pursued the product and I'd say one of our biggest struggles was
the resistance from merchants to adopt technology. We were able to scale to
about $50k/mo in revenue before we ran out of cash/energy.

I still think there's something here and you may be able to make it work,
maybe as wedding planning software.

Hope this is helpful in some way. This was just my experience at the time I
worked on it. Feel free to hit me up anytime. aacook@aacook.co.

Good luck!

~~~
danieltillett
Have you written up this story in longer form? The problems you ran into are
rather universal to any C2B marketplace.

~~~
aacook
I've thought about writing a post mortem but could never bring myself to do
it. After we decided to shut down I entered kind of a dark time of my life. I
needed a break to really separate myself from the startup.

I might tear of small stories, though. In particular some of the things that
did go well. Doing a whole write up is probably too much to bite off though.

~~~
danieltillett
I really encourage you to do so - so many mistakes can be avoided by learning
from the experiences of others. Anyway thanks for sharing what you have of
your experience.

~~~
vishalkgupta
Definitely agree w/ danieltillett, a post mortem of some sort could help a lot
of startups in the C2B space. Although, I know how painful it can be. Thanks
again for the help you've already given us.

------
eventhough
I'm getting married in May in Sonoma. I will have somewhere around 150 guests
which is sizable. I've already booked pretty much every service needed for the
wedding: venue, caterer, photographer, videographer, DJ, wedding planner,
florist, hairdresser, makeup artist etc.

Feedback:

1\. I'm the groom. The truth is, weddings are really for brides. Yes, we're
both getting married, but it's all about the bride. My fiancée is a typical SF
professional. I can tell you right now she would be skeptical about a
"bidding" process. Believe it or not, the wedding planning process for her is
fun. It's a lot of work, but "curating" her own wedding is enjoyable. Although
I can totally understand why from a groom's perspective we just want to
99designs the problem away. :)

2\. I'm not sure how you will convince the better vendors to join your
program. It sounds like this is a great platform for up and coming wedding
vendors, but once they get good - they won't need your service anymore.
They'll have clout on Yelp or theknot or weddingwire. And people that are
looking for good vendors will go seek them out.

3\. Putting down a credit card is a scary thing - most of the contract stuff
comes way later. Many of our vendors went through honeybook.com. What's to
stop them from just going outside of your system and giving the bride and
groom a better deal? How do you ensure you will have lock-in?

4\. Maybe you'll charge money for the bidding process? Or try to place ads?

This is a great space to disrupt...I hope a product like this becomes popular
at some point because weddings can be really tough to plan.

~~~
vishalkgupta
First, congrats on getting married!

Some thoughts on your comments: 1\. I don't necessarily think that our
solution is for everyone. We're looking to find our little niche in the market
where a couple is ok with forgo-ing some of the work involved with the
planning process in the hope to save time and potentially money. It's not for
everyone, the same way airbnb wasn't for everyone when it first came out. If
we can unlock a small market, we think we can grow it. Time will tell!

2\. Very similar issue here with vendors as well. We're looking at a niche
vendor group at first. Ideally it's top notch vendors who need help getting
the word out. Also will help if they are tech savvy and willing to respond
quickly electronically.

3\. We really like honeybook.com, we may consider using them until payments
are fully built out. In terms of lock in, we're looking to get the clients to
really work on the iteration back and forth with the vendors (in many silos)
at the same time. The goal will be that they see the
technology/payment/insurance/etc all integral to the process. It's ideally
similar to the feeling you feel when you book an apartment with airbnb, sure..
you could just message the host through airbnb and try to pay them directly,
but with the services they offer, it wouldn't make sense. We're still at an
early stage, so yea.. it's a danger in the beginning.

4\. We're brainstorming the many different monetization points possible. We
may just lower the barriers as much as possible initially to find customers,
then look to monetize more heavily when we have actual data.

Thanks for the thoughts here. Would love for you to check out wedwell.co and
give the wedding brief a try (even just as a test). It's evolving over the
next few days with feedback we've received here, but please do give it a try!

------
brentm
Interesting concept. I was married in New York last September so I think I
understand the pain points. Getting married today probably isn't much
different then it was in the early to mid 2000s. The vendors have simple
websites and all sales processes involve multiple emails, phone calls or in
person visits. My (now) wife and I both hated dealing with the vendor sales
process.

That said, one thing you may to to think about is people don’t just want to
find the cheapest vendor. Of course they want to save money but at the same
time, they want it done right. You only do this once. When we got married we
wanted to find vendors we could trust that also were affordable. To do that my
wife mostly spoke to her friends and asked them who they used for various
tasks.

I personally think you will be better building this platform first as a way
for friends to share vendor details & reviews. If executed right this builds
the demand side of your platform and vendor data. Since sharing would be a
core part of the experience once the ball is rolling you should be able to
increase the number of active users quickly. When you have a ton of users on
the platform swapping vendor info it’s going to be much easier for you to
convince vendors to hop on board.

~~~
vishalkgupta
Agree here, the only real innovation we've seen in this space came with web
1.0 (theknot.com, etc).

The way we look at WedWell is not to find you the cheapest vendor, but to
provide the vendor that will allow for the best experience. The better
experience comes with our technology and validated vendors. Our technology
allows for quicker/easier iteration on the initial idea and for quick/easy
payments for vendors.

I really like your idea of starting with a socially validated review system
early. We're considering building that out, and may do so.

Thanks again, we'll let you know how we progress here.

------
bing_dai
Interesting idea! A few thoughts to share: I would love to see a few "pre-
built" themes/templates to choose and draw inspirations from. I once saw a
youtube clip of a Star Wars-themed wedding and thought "hey that is not a bad
idea for my future wedding", so I think it may be interesting for your site to
curate those information first and build different themes.

The benefits are twofold: customers can get a flavour of what your platform
can offer (say, for my case, I would think "oh hey that Star Wars wedding
theme is listed here! My idea of such a wedding wasn't so crazy after all);
vendors that specialise in certain niche themes can have a chance to be
featured in your platform, which hopefully leads to more sales.

Well, best of luck to you! It's unusual to see couples building tech companies
together :)

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks for this. We've started experimenting with a brief that's a bit more
visual, allowing for a client to select weddings that look inline with what
they are looking to do.

Thanks, actually the team isn't a couple working together. Just a bunch of
friends.

------
andy_ppp
Amazing, I was going to build something around this area a while ago. I'll try
to find my notes on it and forward them on if they make any sense! I think
you'll also make a lot of money if you can do this right and you can
definitely take fees from both sides, there's no homejoy problem with this
(the cleaner getting employed directly for example).

I also like the idea of crowd sourcing recommendations from your friends and
being able to assign tasks and really plan out the wedding. Imagine there was
the whole thing from when you need to have a venue together and the app guides
you through the whole process.

Good luck with everything!

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks man! Any notes would be helpful. Like any startup, we're just trying to
figure this out as we go.

Agree, this is definitely not a homejoy type of business. I'd be interested to
hear your thoughts on how you think we should take fees on both sides?
Initially our thought was to model it like an Airbnb rental where as the
couple are the guests, and the vendors are the hosts. Build in the proper
technology to make the system work better and you can easily take a service
fee, which we will take from the couple looking for services.

Yea! We envision that the couple has a go to service to handle everything down
to the last payment. We envision the bride/groom signing off at the end and
paying all the vendors by pressing a button. Currently they literally write
checks at the end of the event.

Thanks for the help!

~~~
andy_ppp
When you are doing a task - say find a florist - you can charge people on the
exchange to advertise right there on a PPC model, you can charge for keeping
your wedding private (£50 say?) and you can charge for extras like auto
generating a website.

I would add that it's quite an interesting problem in its self to decide what
tasks are even in a wedding and what needs to be done. Maybe my idea is a
little different in that it's focused around having control over all aspect of
your wedding from the companies through to who will usher people into the
church and what hymns will be sung...

This then makes me start thinking are there differences in the planning of a
gay wedding, a baptist wedding, and Indian wedding...

Imagine if you could assign tasks and roles like groomsman/brides maid and you
can agree to help out...

There's millions of possibilities with it... Even things like seat planning.
Could be a lifetime of work.

Charging for the budgeting feature and allowing people who had already
overspent by the most access to special offers by tradesman. You would have to
be careful to filter out offers that were already being used!

~~~
vishalkgupta
For sure! The monetization points are endless. There is an endless task list
of things to do for a wedding. There are differences in every type of wedding,
that allows for people to get really creative here. It's definitely a rabbit
hole, with plenty to do! Thanks again, let's keep in touch.

------
manav
Interesting. I'm not yet married, but I've seen many friends struggle through
this process.

Recently, I've tried some similar services that connect businesses (in this
case home remodeling/contracting) to consumers and I've found that many of the
service providers use it as an advertising platform and avoid actually
fulfilling service through the site. Would you position yourself as a lead
generation site or a total platform for the entire process?

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks! Yea, I'm not married yet either.. but I kept seeing the same issues
being struggled with by my friends. As I started to model out how much time
and money I would need in the future (for my eventual wedding), I was hoping
to find a service like the one we're building with WedWell.

Our goal would be to eventually be an entire platform for a couple to book,
iterate details, and pay for vendors.

There are plenty of vendor sites out there, so not too concerned that someone
would search for vendors through our site and bypass our service, but it's
definitely something we will keep an eye out for.

------
ig1
A couple of questions:

How do you know people will want to use such a service, have you tried
manually running the process to see how it works in practice ?

What do you expect your user economics to be (how are you planning to acquire
users, how much revenue will you make per user, etc.) ?

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks for the questions.

How do we know people want such a service? I'm at that age where everyone is
getting married. (My two sisters, my best friends,etc). I started asking more
and more questions as I got closer to my own wedding- I found that the process
was super time consuming (meeting many vendors, then finding out they aren't
available for those dates, or they are way outside of your budget), and
expensive. The reason I know people want such a service, is because I want
it.. So I need to build this thing before I get married (not anytime soon-
thankfully).

Have we tried to run this manually? Yes. I hate to say we're in version 1.0..
we're honestly pre-mvp. We built this as quickly as possible and literally
every step is manual currently. We'll look to automate bottle necks as we find
them.

Customer acquisition is literally the hardest thing right now. It's a lot of
us manually looking for couples who are engaged and offering them our services
right now. Also we're running a few FB/Google ads. We're open to ideas here.
We're hyper focused on the NYC wedding market, because it's the most expensive
(2x an average wedding), and we live here. There are tons of vendors literally
outside of our doors.

So we don't have exact numbers for cost of customer acquisition, we do know
how to monetize them once in. We know the average cost of the goods our vendor
types (We're focused on 5 types right now;
Cakes/flowers/photos/invites/music), and we are aiming for our service fee to
be about 10% of the rendered fee.

Thanks for the questions. Love to hear if you have any ideas on how to best
get this started (and acquire more customers!)

------
jasondc
Providing this functionality by date would have been a major time-saver for us
as we were planning our wedding. Tons of vendors we were interested in did not
have availability for our wedding date, we would find out well after
researching their portfolio and fees.

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks! Similar to Airbnb and host availability, we think we can offer an up
to date calendar of when a vendor is available as we scale. It's really
surprising how little of this information (availability in this case) is
locked away, and not available readily.

Thanks for the input!

~~~
andy_ppp
Allowing the businesses themselves to operate/plan better/hire extra staff
when in need could be another great reason to be on the system!

~~~
vishalkgupta
Absolutely, there could be many aspects of planning that could be made easier
if they are tracking everything on one system.

------
bst287
Great idea. We're planning a wedding now, and the vendor acquisition process
is insane. To what extent do you view this as a discovery platform versus a
true marketplace? Will it ever go beyond bids?

~~~
vishalkgupta
Thanks!! We intend to have a vendor discovery page where you can invite
vendors to bid on your wedding. Hard to plan beyond the phase 1, but we'll see
how it evolves! Love for you to sign up for a free consultation or fill out
our wedding brief!

------
bestattack
I like this, I can imagine using it for a wedding. I'm worried about
distribution since weddings are so rare. Is there a channel you can use to get
your app into the couple's hands, that doesn't require them to tell their
friends?

~~~
vishalkgupta
Client acquisition is one of the biggest concerns we have with this idea. If
we're creating a solution for couples, we will have low/no user retention.

We have considered creating a vendor focused service, but there are a couple
of services in this space (Honeybook.com).

Love to hear any thoughts you or the rest of the HN audience has to say about
this.

------
camel_gopher
One barrier I see here is that the venue generally controls the available
vendors in most cases. They hold all the cards and set the rules.

~~~
vishalkgupta
It's a point well taken. From what we've seen here (NYC), even at the
strictest venues allow independant vendors needed for our initial silos
(cakes, flowers, photos, invites, music). Things like catering etc may be part
of the venue selection.

Our hope is to eventually graduate into handling venues as well, which will
allow us to bundle those services.

Thanks again for the input!

------
arijon
I don't know much about the wedding process and hopefully won't have to deal
with one for a couple of years but this sounds dope!!!!

------
vishalkgupta
[http://WedWell.co](http://WedWell.co)

------
Cherie78
Hmmm

~~~
vishalkgupta
Hey Cherie78! Happy to hear a comment here. Or better yet, can you use this
service?

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grutalampa
Who will guarantee that all the individual contracts works flawless? If you
hire a wedding Planners, anything that goes wrong you could go direct to him.
But, with that binding process, if just one thing go wrong, would be very
frustrating as the fiances would have to solve.

~~~
vishalkgupta
I think your question is about how to manage possible friction between the
vendors and the couples. Currently for weddings that have planners (about %20
of them do), people can use the planner to broker discussions. I think we see
a world where that planner is largely replaced by software/services. We've
also considered having a premium "concierge" to stand in as a wedding planner
at the time of the event.

