

Why our online startup releases a print product, and how we do it. - jewelia
http://weddinglovely.com/blog/why-our-online-startup-releases-a-print-product-and-how-we-do-it/

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bmccormack
I really like how the LookBook is viewed as a way of "increasing customer
happiness." You're essentially helping the customer validate how great they
feel about themselves for doing business with you, which I would expect goes a
long way to keep them around as a customer.

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limedaring
Yes, exactly. It's one of the best ways we've found to differentiate ourselves
in the wedding space — I'm really dedicated to being personal and real with
our vendors, and promoting them as much as possible (like the lookbook, the
blog is also primarily a promote-good-feelings-for-vendors tool). It just
makes sense, since it more than pays off for our company and our bottom line
in the long run.

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kadabra9
What other solutions did you look at for printing and distribution for your
print product, besides MagCloud?

I've been looking at different printing options and always seemed to get
weighed down by the trade-off between lower cost (e.g printing myself or
finding a large volume printer with low costs) or something more on-demand
like MagCloud, which costs a bit more but gives you greater flexibility.

~~~
limedaring
Since we're bootstrapping, we've pretty much only looked at MagCloud for the
past three editions, but for the Spring edition coming out next year, I'm
definitely looking into printing it ourselves. If I went that route, I'd
probably look into a local printer so I could ensure press quality rather than
another online solution.

I liked going with MagCloud to start too because it allows us to not worry at
all about the printing aspect to start — I feel a lot more comfortable with
the production of the lookbook so now we can branch out into printing
solutions which'll cost less but take more of our time.

Keep in mind that the cost through MagCloud is only when someone buys — free
to upload and distribute, and you can just tack on a "profit" to their base
cost per issue.

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arbuge
Very interesting. How did you go about signing up 1,600 vendors? Cold calling?
What tactics worked best in your experience?

Related question: how do you think the competition (WeddingWire) signed up
200k+ vendors?

Thanks!

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limedaring
It started as a bunch of cold-emailing — that's probably how we get the first
100 or so vendors on our directories. The rest comes from things like the
Lookbook (vendors sharing with their vendor friends), and our blog (we run a
long of vendor-promotional posts, then new vendors sign up with us so they can
participate). I try to keep vendor acquisition as easy as possible on our side
since again, we're only two people. We're also launching new features on the
directory side to further promote vendors encouraging other vendors to join.

WeddingWire does a LOT of vendor profile scraping — vendors can search for
their name and find that WeddingWire created a profile for them, which
encourages them to sign up and "claim" the profile. I won't deny it's a
working tactic for them, but it leaves a bad taste in vendor's mouths and I'm
not comfortable with it personally.

Another interesting thing they do is have a "WeddingWire Award" — which gets
sent out to every vendor, practically. These vendors display the award on
their websites, which gets more couples and vendors to sign up with WW. That's
a good vendor acquisition tactic that I'm looking forward to improving on soon
with WeddingLovely.

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arbuge
Interesting, thanks. Could you post an example of one of the vendor-
promotional posts that you mentioned? And how did you get the blog itself
going? - did you have to do plenty of SEO work there to get it off the ground?

Also, how many vendors sign up for free vs. paid accounts in your experience?

(We're thinking of doing something like this involving local merchants (not
wedding-related) - hence all the questions).

~~~
limedaring
Pretty much every post on <http://weddinglovely.com/blog/> is by one of our
vendors, uses our vendor's content, or promotes a vendor. :)

Blog just has been blogging at least 1x daily, getting the vendors who we
promote to promote the posts about them, and making sure the SEO is semi-right
(there is a big SEO issue I've yet to fix, but it's not disastrous).

Vendors almost always signup under a free account, and through these promotion
opportunities, we eventually encourage about 10% to upgrade.

Hope that helps!

~~~
arbuge
Sure does... thank you.

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veneratio
This is refreshing. The value of print gets lost too often, but here it finds
a very nice home. I'm impressed with the process to create the actual print
book with so many vendors in it. I expect there is a market for auto-
generating magazine-like publications from a database of some sort. Very cool.

~~~
limedaring
It's too bad EasyCatalog costs so much, but I expect that's they're targeting
big name, high-budget publishers. I was very pleased to see the trial, and
would love to buy if I could — it does what it says it does very well. That
said, I'm still on the lookout for better, cheaper solutions for next time.

~~~
smartt
It's not crazy expensive compared to the value of the labor you're automating;
but yes, it's steep for an individual if you're not yet producing revenue.

For something similar (and priced differently), we use software from
<http://emsoftware.com/> to import data into InDesign to automate some of the
production of Kirkus Reviews' print magazine.

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limedaring
I'm the author of the article — I'm happy to answer any questions or help
anyone out if this is something they want try out too!

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degenerate
I'm more interested in what lazyloading plugin you are using for jQuery -- is
there an out-of-the-box one that works in Nov 2012, or did you make your own?

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limedaring
Out of the entire article, that's the question? ;) I kid... it's a Wordpress
plugin - Lazy Load v0.5. We haven't had any issues with it, would definitely
recommend.

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saumil07
Well this is fun - thanks for sharing. Have you found anything that's similar
to MagCloud but operates on a push-button API basis? I didn't see an API link
on MagCloud when I clicked around for a bit.

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limedaring
Unfortunately, I haven't yet!

