
How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding - SteveMorin
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/04/wedding-at-scale-how-i-used-twilio-python-and-google-to-automate-my-wedding.html
======
andrewguenther
In my opinion, this makes the whole process very impersonal. I invited people
to my wedding because I care about them and wanted them to share that day with
me. Although it was a lot of effort, I was happy to make save the dates,
invitations, and hand write thank you notes to every singe one of them. If
you're not willing to do that, then you're inviting too many people in my
opinion.

~~~
davidcbc
Not everyone cares about the same things you do. I used paperless post for my
wedding because it was easy, free, and physical wedding invitations are not
important to me or my wife in any way.

Nobody complained, it took a couple hours to get everything set up the way we
wanted it, and within a few days we had around a 90% response rate. Only 1
person RSVPed as no so it doesn't seem like anyone got the impression we
didn't care about them

~~~
cat199
> Nobody complained, it took a couple hours to get everything set up the way
> we wanted it, and within a few days we had around a 90% response rate. Only
> 1 person RSVPed as no so it doesn't seem like anyone got the impression we
> didn't care about them

wow - any idea on the conversion rate? if so, how many sigma are you talking
here? did you do any a/b testing for future iterations?

With this level of customer focus, it is easy to see why noone complained,
which by the way is totally a great metric for measuring ROI.

~~~
warent
Does this post add any value or just pointlessly assert your disgust in a
passive way? Because from my perspective it seems like it's the latter

~~~
Zpalmtree
Seemed like just a joke to me.

~~~
gcatalfamo
When did silicon valley lose every inch of sense of humour and started taking
everything super seriously?

~~~
ryancouto
January 1, 1970

~~~
kbutler
0

------
ktzar
I didn't go as far as using automated messages with my guests, but

\- organised everything, from guests attendance to guests in tables location,
in a huge Gsheets with my wife and a few close relatives.

\- did a mobile game for Android and iPhone that was a quiz about me and my
wife to be with over 200 questions, that still, 2 years later, people still
play at and try to get higher in the leaderboard.

\- programmed a Raspberry Pi that showed a slideshow of over 500 pictures of
us with our guests since like forever. These pictures were also printed and
hanged around the venue for them to find them and take them home.

I also did 10 programmes in 10 different programming languages that printed
the food menu (to be used as per table printed menus), but my wife wisely
thought it wasn't a good idea.

~~~
karmelapple
Example of the couples trivia game? Sounds like a fun project for me and my
fiancée!

------
Slamchunk
Author here.

Weddings are time sinks even small ones like mine, we viewed around 20 venues
for example, multiple caterers etc. Anything you can do to save time is a good
thing. Handwriting invitations, making 500 paper cranes by hand all are lovely
gestures but we focussed on what was important to us - food! For example saved
a bunch from ditching traditional wedding invites and table favors (we did
have amazing flowers for the tables) that we could then reallocated to having
the best food and wine for our guests.

Plus it may sound strange but we don't have all of our friends postal
addresses noted down, so mailing out invites would have been even more
cumbersome.

~~~
wccrawford
We were repeatedly told that nobody remembers the food at a wedding and not to
worry about it.

We insisted on a good caterer who could actually serve hot food, instead of
that limp cold mush that usually ends up out of those serving trays.

It was _amazing_ food and they did an amazing job with it.

And people remember it as one of the great parts of our wedding. Totally worth
it.

~~~
cableshaft
I'd say don't try to get too exotic or fancy with the food. Just make sure
it's good quality (doesn't have to be great, just good). Do that, and you'll
have beaten over half of the wedding receptions I've been to.

If I can go to a local BBQ joint, spend $10 on a pulled pork sandwich and
baked potato, and feel like I had a 3x tastier meal than the $40+ you spent
per plate at the wedding (or whatever crazy number it is nowadays), then I
think you screwed up.

And I am not a picky eater at all. There are a lot of people much much pickier
than me.

When you try to get super fancy then a lot of people won't care for it,
because they don't have the same palates that you do (when you average people
out, they collectively have a very boring palate, it seems to me).

~~~
jhardcastle
Food was by far our largest expense, but not because we choose the fancy fish
and steak options. Instead we picked lots of food we wished we had been served
at weddings we had been to. Tasty comfort foods, like a mashed potato bar (add
your own toppings) and buffalo chicken sliders and lots of little tapas-style
treats. We got so much positive feedback on the simple items, and continue to
do so to this day. So glad we resisted the urge to serve uptight "fancy"
selections!

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah, you did it right in my opinion. Good on you for resisting the urge to
make everything fancy.

------
jdpedrie
I like it, but I think if I'd sent out save the dates via SMS for my wedding
I'd have been sleeping alone for quite a while.

~~~
sly010
I am sure there are APIs for postcards. Heck, there are APIs for handwritten
postcards ;)

~~~
ProAm
You can also facetime the ceremony if you a groom but still insanely busy
working startup life...

~~~
amenghra
What about a bride having a busy startup life and facetiming the ceremony?

------
gunnihinn
And the divorce announcement will be an "Our incredible journey" post on
Medium.

~~~
shams93
With an article about how he used python and tensorflow to "hack tinder" and
replace his ex lol.

~~~
restalis
This may sound like a joke now, but as impersonal this guy got with his
wedding, I wouldn't be surprised if he'll use his strengths in this way to
manage his life further.

------
inputcoffee
For the whole pipeline, you should also connect:

Tinder + your calendar app + Opentable

to automate the dating process.

The output of that can be the input of this.

~~~
gricardo99
RaaS? Relationship as a Service.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
Add a couple more features, we might well have LaaS (Life as a Service)

~~~
froindt
And SaaS (Sex as a Service).

The day there's an app for people seeking prostitutes where both parties leave
stars and text reviews like Airbnb or Uber will be a weird day.

~~~
arthur_pryor
not that those rating systems can't be gamed, but yeah, this would definitely
be better than the current situation of criminalized prostitution. esp if
prostitutes could leave reviews of clients. i imagine there'd be less
scamming, violence, and disease transmission on both sides of that sort of
transaction if there were reputable rating services that let prostitutes and
clients vet one another. it would also lessen the value of pimps/madames/etc,
thus making it easier for prostitutes to work independently, which would
hopefully lessen the prevalence of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation.

so yeah, weird, but in a good "we finally got rid of a relic of our prudish
past" sort of way.

~~~
odbol_
You could even get a little blue "verified" checkmark next to your name after
you pass an STD test.

~~~
froindt
Holy shit this is a startup idea! Who is in?

~~~
rootsudo
I'm in. We'll call it Layd.

~~~
froindt
I'm thinking [http://layd.io](http://layd.io) would be an awesome title. I
think the IO really gets at what we're going for.

Domain is available, who's in?

------
upbeatlinux
Hmm, not entirely sure I would title this wedding at scale. It does seem like
a fairly standard wedding size. Great homebrew solution though.

I did something similar in 2009 with a custom Wordpress plugin. However,
guests were imported from a CSV of our Google Sheet guest list as Wordpress
users. Each guest was automatically assigned a randomly generated dinner code.
The code was included in the wedding invite card as we wanted to be fairly
traditional.

When a guest confirmed they received an email with custom directions from
their home address and a printable parking pass. Guests could cancel up to two
weeks before the event at which time an email was sent to the caterer. The
plugin also generated email reminders 7, 2, and 1 day prior with the same
links.

Two weeks prior to our wedding the guest food selections were compiled and
sent directly to the caterer for final numbers. Seating charts and name cards
with food selections were also printed using the WP database and PDF templates
via pdftk.

Guest who provided email addresses were sent photos from the event via Picasa
Web Albums 3 weeks after the event.

While this is much lighter weight and as others have expressed fairly
impersonal the grooms family and bride probably knew this.

Kudos on a quick and fun implementation! In retrospect I wish I had use Twilio
;)

------
cableshaft
I'm terrible at responding to physical invitations (I had two friends actually
have to ask me in person after I didn't get back to them for over a month).

But an SMS invite I most likely would get back to you within a day, most
likely, possibly within ten minutes. For people like me, it's so much easier
and much lower friction to respond to a text.

I can be just as bad with email. My parents get responses from me a lot more
quickly now that they've started getting into the habit of texting (yes, it's
taken that long).

------
unpythonic
Are you going to continue family life the automated way? Perhaps start a
family using Jenkins: an enjoyable build process, lots of tests along the way,
and release to production once they're out of college.

~~~
devonkim
I'm glad I'm not the only one in the world to have realized that the Duggar
family practices continuous deployment religiously.

------
zkanda
Hi, For people who want to do this but don't want to code anything, you can
use [https://www.engagespark.com/twilio-
alternative/](https://www.engagespark.com/twilio-alternative/)

* In this case you can do an SMS Poll asking who would like to come.

* If you want to do this a bit more personal, you could use an IVR Poll instead, so they'd hear your voice.

* You can even go further and build some logic, if they replied yes, then you ask them what food choice do they want, no need for interacting with google spreadsheet.

* You can view all this with some pretty graphs and download the spreadsheet with all the information that happened on the engagement.

* Or if you want fancier stuff, do the above, pass the results to Zapier, and manipulate them with any other apps linked into Zapier.

Disclaimer: I work on engageSPARK

------
nutanc
What are the odds, wrote this blog exactly 5 years ago,to the day,
[http://blog.kookoo.in/2012/04/wedding-
ivr.html](http://blog.kookoo.in/2012/04/wedding-ivr.html)

This was built using KooKoo, the Twilio for India and is more of an IVR rather
than SMS as India is a voice friendly country, and who does not like to hear
the invite in the groom's own voice :)

Its got options for directions etc too, people always seem to call to know the
directions to marriage hall :)

------
iblaine
Physical wedding invitations are still tradition such that people may get
offended if they do not get one in the mail.

~~~
davidcbc
Anyone so offended by the lack of a physical invitation that they don't come
to my wedding is someone I wouldn't want at my wedding anyway. Two birds, one
stone

~~~
x1798DE
I wasn't offended by lack of a physical invitation, but a friend of mine got
married and invited my wife and I in a very informal way with a text message.
We ended up waiting until way too late to book tickets, because my wife was
expecting a physical invitation to follow the informal SMS save-the-date, and
we ended up missing the wedding because flights got ungodly expensive (and
involved many complicated connections).

Anyway, it's not totally relevant to the main story here, since that was very
obviously a "This is the official invitation/confirmation" thing, but I think
it's worth considering that if you are going to buck tradition, you should try
to be absolutely clear that that's what you're doing so that people can
adjust.

~~~
zimzam
Isn't the point of the save-the-date so people can book travel in advance
though?

~~~
srtjstjsj
when they get an official save the date, not a tentative SMS about it

------
semi-extrinsic
I'm surprised that he didn't find another solution to the cost of sending ~
140 (70*2) invites for ~ £380 ($480), or $3.50 per invite. The profit margins
people make on those invite cards is huge.

My personal hack that I use for invitations/thank you notes/christmas
cards/etc. is this:

You can just create them yourself (any design! copy one off the internet!) in
Photoshop/Gimp/Illustrator/PowerPoint/whatever. I won't judge (except if it's
PowerPoint).

Then have them printed as 4x6 (or whatever) photos for $0.09 each. With
envelopes at $0.03 each and postage at $0.49 you're up to $0.61 per invite, or
$85 rather than $480 in OPs case.

~~~
paulcole
Don't most wedding invitations include a return envelope and stamp?

~~~
semi-extrinsic
IDK about the US. Where I'm from, we don't send a separate "save the date"
card, usually the physical invitation gets sent > 6 months in advance and has
a link to a website (e.g. maryandjohn2017.wordpress.com) that has up-to-date
info, maps etc., and we list one phone number each for the bride and groom
(either directly to them or to one of their parents) that people use to RSVP.

------
mivv
My wife and I did something a little similar. I built out our RSVP system on a
web app, but we still printed actual invitations pointing people to go to our
website, with a unique handwritten code on each one.

You can check out the code here if interested. It also includes the wedding
info site as part of it, so there is a bit of cruft, but I'm sure you could
repurpose it if you dug into it deep enough:
[https://github.com/mvarrieur/vovarrieur-dot-
com](https://github.com/mvarrieur/vovarrieur-dot-com)

------
odbol_
I did something similar: I made a little Javascript web game which you have to
play and win in order to RSVP. Made a spreadsheet of guests and their emails,
and emailed them all using the Mail Merge extension for Google Sheets.

Once you play and win the game, it links to a Google Form with your name pre-
filled. All the responses go into a spreadsheet, and I can easily do a query
against the original spreadsheet to see who still needs to RSVP. Then follow
up with those people personally. Overall people really enjoyed the game and
thought it was a unique invite.

Plus it saved a crapton of money and trees and gasoline, which was the most
important part for me. The wedding industry is built on waste and my fiance
and I don't want to support such an outdated, unsustainable tradition.

------
cheeze
> It is a cash bar, so please bring sufficient money with you as there is no
> nearby cash machine.

Are guests expected to purchase their own alcohol at their wedding?

~~~
randlet
I think the author is in the UK where I believe cash bars at weddings are more
socially acceptable.

I've been to a few weddings here in Canada with cash bars. Some people really
frown on it, but it's not a big deal to me. Some people just can't afford it.

~~~
Markoff
would not be then better to have smaller wedding with amount of guests one can
afford without asking them to pay for food or drinks? it's very odd idea for
me to invite me somewhere and then expect i will pay, of course i can give
some gift to couple, but expecting hard cash at bar or waiter, sorry but I'm
that case i will rather go to normal restaurant of my choice and pass on such
wedding

~~~
srtjstjsj
In some cultures+locations, alcoholism is so rampant and alcohol so expensive
that it's unreasonable for the host to pay for it.

If you're so alcoholic that you can't attend a single meal without being
served unlimited alcohol, you should understand that.

~~~
Markoff
what? just put bottles on tables and let guests manage sharing it and when
they run out of bottles bad luck

------
joshaidan
I'm working on a check-in system for our reception using a Raspberry Pi, a
RC522 reader and MIFARE RFID cards. Guests tap their card to check-in and the
monitor displays their table number. I'll log their check-in time among other
things. Is there a point to it? No, it's just to be fun and cool.

[https://github.com/joshaidan/wedding-
checkin](https://github.com/joshaidan/wedding-checkin)

~~~
tomschlick
Just make sure you have a hard backup. You don't want to be troubleshooting
tech on your wedding day.

Happy Wife = Happy Life.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Would have been better without the sexist cliche :)

------
nerdsaresingle
Lol. No wonder Nerds are single. There are events in life which are very
personal and people value it when you actually spend time for them and with
them.

------
Walf
What happens when some oldie replies "Sorry, I'd love to say yes but Wilbur's
having his heart surgery that weekend."?

~~~
AjithAntony
It had a case for "yes or no dammit!"

------
gigatexal
hah, I thought I was a nerd until I saw this. I wish I had done this for my
wedding. Kudos!

------
avip
Why do you need to "automate" an action you're expecting to perform, in the
happy case, once in a lifetime?

~~~
qzervaas
Because he can?

I'm not sure what the OP had to learn exactly in doing this, or whether he
knew it all already, but it's far easier to learn stuff when you have a
practical application to apply what you're learning to.

This is such an example, and other people could learn a thing by the approach.

(Although personally I agree, automating is often premature optimisation)

------
siliconc0w
You're missing the bitcoin registry.

------
securingsincity
I built a platform to manage invites using email for my wedding. We tracked
delivery and opens. On the wedding website itself, we were able to have RSVPs
for the people we sent to, intake song requests with Spotify with
autocomplete.

It was pretty successful. It saved a ~$1000 in paper invites with postage and
the stress of making sure people sent them back. We even had followed-up by
sending reminder emails. Which we definitely couldn't have done with paper.
The downside is that it's more informal but our guests appreciated the open
bar instead.

I'm building something similar for a friend's wedding right now with the
intention of having open to the public with features like SMS and table
seating generators.

------
paulcole
>invites are not environmentally friendly

As opposed to the sustainability of dozens of people traveling from near and
far.

~~~
plandis
Easy small wins are better than no wins. The goal should be improvement not
perfection.

~~~
abraae
The goal should also be sparking discussion. If a few guests starting having
the same thoughts that are going on here, that would be a win.

~~~
coldtea
Yes if everybody shared his post the environment would be so much better. Kind
of how Facebook "Likes" on sappy posts help the third world.

~~~
abraae
Discussion != likes. If someone twigs that they could cycle to work instead of
driving - win.

~~~
coldtea
>Discussion != likes.

No, but they have in common that both != action.

> _If someone twigs that they could cycle to work instead of driving - win._

I don't think those are actual wins. Those are empty feel good gestures when
350 million others will continue to just drive. Only coordinated action, and
even better legislation, matters.

------
hamandcheese
If and when I get married I probably won't take it to this extreme, but I can
imagine it might be nice to use some sort of CRM to manage my communications
with all the guests and wedding vendors.

~~~
wavefunction
"small pad of paper and a pencil"

It's a great CRM for the sort of thing you're considering.

------
Markoff
i get you did this as exercise but from efficiency point it seem like waste of
time just to invite around 60 people (have i got it right if 40 accepted means
acceptance around 70%), I would understand if you would have few hundred
guests that it's with automating bit if you calculate your invested time
compared doing it manually (send me group SMS and manually write in sheet who
accepted, refused or didn't answer) you are actually losing time

i wish i had such small wedding

------
zukunftsalick
If it hurts, do it more often so we feel the pain hard enough to justify
automating. I wonder how many weddings he has gone through in his life :)

------
j_s
I remember working too long on the email version of my wedding invitation for
those who chose to receive the electronic edition when they filled out the
Gogle Form to RSVP... trying to get fancy with email formatting is such a
pain! I sent out the initial "Save the Date" postcard by mail.

------
robk
Cash bar is poor form

~~~
srtjstjsj
Not in countries where "poor form" is part of the dialect and not an
affectation.

------
Cub3
I'm creating a process like this at the moment for my weddings RSVP, i'm using
a paper invite that will be mailed out directing guests to a simple website
that posts to a Google Form and generates an calendar invite for them with the
details.

------
anigbrowl
Who says that romance is dead

------
trengrj
I made a simple ruby Sinatra app using Google docs as my spreadsheet and then
used Mailchimp for emails. It worked fairly well and made it easy to play with
the data.

------
willyyr
So could somebody build this please? I can already see the pricing page in
front of me charging per invites and different features. I'd use it.

------
s3nnyy
Has someone an idea why Twilio stocks are going "sideways" for months?

------
dschep
Hah, my sister did something not too different, she wrote a small Flask app
hosted on PythonAnywhere[0] for guests to RSVP to her wedding.

[0] [https://www.pythonanywhere.com/](https://www.pythonanywhere.com/)

------
asdz
I've build the system already, now where's my bride?

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
I like the general spirit of automating things, but I find the attitude behind
some of this automation a little weird. The point of a lot of these courtesy
'messages' (whether invites, postcards, thank you notes etc.) are that they
were personal. The medium does not matter as much as the fact that they were
personal, and the money spent on it matters even less, at least to me.

There's no joy in receiving an automated message any more than there is joy in
listening to an IVRS voice or an automated sales call. I'd be happier if I
received a simple handwritten note or a phone call from a friend inviting me
to something than if I was one of 1000 automated recipients of fancy gold-
plated card.

For instance, a friend wrote a script to auto reply to people who had wished
him on his birthday (he wasn't hiding it, so I didn't have to guess that it
was an auto-reply).

Now, the way FB displays and folds posts made on your timeline makes it very
difficult and painstaking to reply to a lot of them (if you refresh your page
by mistake, you'd have to keep clicking on More... multiple times to get back
to where you left). So I'd be completely fine with him posting a common status
saying Thank You to everyone.

But knowing that it's a bot reply kinda took away the point of the reply, at
least for me.

~~~
qq66
But is there anything more personal than a computer programmer writing a bot
to send messages for him?

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Haha I'd agree it's more personal than using a random bot downloaded from the
net to achieve the same thing :D

------
dbg31415
SMS wedding invites... this needs to be a real thing.

I cringe at getting one of those hand-written save the date cards... knowing
full well each one cost the host $5+ and all the time of writing those
addresses. And all for what? So it can sit in my mailbox for a month with all
the spam grocery store coupons until the next time I check? So inefficient.

I love this so much. I love the simplicity of it. Someone needs to set this up
as a real service...

Upload a list of names and cell numbers...

Wedding tool confirms names, asks for photo so they can auto-sort photos of
you.

Stolen from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102182)
\-- Wedding tool posts pictures of people who RSVP'd as solo and let's them
Tinder each other. What a brilliant idea!

Along with lettings singles match up... the tool could let people say who they
wanted to sit next to, and who they didn't... taking a lot of the stress off
the bride for seating arrangements.

Wedding tool sends save the date RSVPs. Wedding tool sends status updates to
all guests in real time... allows people to see if other friends will be
there... (I know there are some weddings I only go to if I know enough other
friends from college are going.)

Wedding tool sends link to some pretty online invite... with some cute
backstory about the couple, or just their TheKnot page.

Wedding tool sends wedding registry to people... segmented would be hot. (I
hate how people send those sorts of lists with huge gifts on them to
everyone... a lot of that stuff should be targeted towards family, or long-
time friends. Toasters and other $50 items for people flying in from out of
state.)

Wedding tool figures out dinner options.

Wedding tool sends reminders, calendar invites, cute little pre-wedding
marketing posts to generate some excitement. Polls users to share stories
about the couple.

Wedding tool lets guests upload photos during the event, tracks back name to
their phone number so all they have to do is text photos to the designated
number. All photos are available in real time... and to all the guests after.
(Of course some level of cleanup could be manually applied after the wedding.)

Wedding tool sends out thank you, links to photos you sent, photos with you in
them... lets you say if you want your name tagged in it... or if you think
photo is objectionable and should be removed...

Man, I want to go to that wedding... I never want to see another hand-written
invite, having been suckered into writing about 500 of those once... yeah it's
just torture that the couple inflicts on their closest friends. When my buddy
who asked me to write cards was having some trouble, my first thought was
literally, "Bro, stay with this girl... I ain't writing invites for you ever
again... you'll die alone without her." Ha.

------
sauronlord
Good luck with that. Come back in a couple years and tell us how it went.

Maybe you can automate your divorce too.

------
inputcoffee
See? This is the future liberals want...

(note: this is a joking reference to a meme.

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-
future-l...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-future-
liberals-want)

Feel free to down-vote but at least realize what it is).

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102195)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
inputcoffee
It is a joking reference to a meme "this is the future liberals want"

see: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-
future-l...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-future-
liberals-want)

It is not really a political opinion on what liberals want!

Although out of context, of course, it doesn't make sense anymore. I would
delete it if I could.

