
Founder Stories: The Ups and Downs of Startup Life at WeddingLovely - johns
http://weddinglovely.com/blog/founder-stories-the-ups-and-downs-of-startup-life/
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shazow
Tracy previously posted about her former failed cofounder[0] experience
(before Julia came aboard), this one is about a failed hire, but she has a lot
more stories about failed acquisitions, fundraising, and products. I've
experienced some of these things with my own startup too but it never ceases
to amaze me how diverse and different, yet universal, the "hard parts" of
startups are.

I wish more people were brave enough to talk about that side.

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3776972>

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limedaring
Thanks. :) A lot of people at Startup School were more than happy to talk
about the troubles they went through, but only after the fact — it was really
hard for me to press submit to talk about _current_ troubles. So much pressure
for startup bullshit out there!

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yuhong
Reminds me of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2545823>

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limedaring
That's awesome, haven't seen that before. Funny because I was just at Brooklyn
Beta and Ben spoke at length about how he didn't know what he was doing and
attributed some of Svpply's "failure" to his run as CEO.

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wtvanhest
I'm interested to hear how you came up with your pricing. Likely you spent a
lot of time coming up with the packages, but it seems like your market is
really a tough market to price properly.

There is so much complexity in this industry that I would assume that the
right pricing strategy would make a huge difference in your business.

At first glance I would assume things like... you must be low enough to not
compete with wedding planners, so that would imply a max price of $2K to $3K.
But then your pricing is only $79 which is far below (what I think is the
average cost of a wedding planner). I'd be interested to find out what makes
up that difference.

Are there ways to close the gap?

I'm sure there are a lot of considerations in the pricing that I cannot even
think about properly, but it seems like there should be a lot of opportunity
here.

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limedaring
HA good question. Succinctly, our pricing is not set in stone is likely to
change.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of weddings these days do not have full
planners, and if they work with a planner, generally it's a month-of or day-of
planner, so that lowers the tiers of people we would be "competing" against.

WeddingLovely is also very new, so starting out at $14.99/month seemed ideal
to test out. $19.99 is actually an experiment in price anchoring. $119 is
because people usually work with us way before their wedding so we wanted to
have a tier that rewards people who start with us early.

Basically, _these are all guesses that we're testing_ , and will update and
improve both our pricing as well as our features as we work more with engaged
couples as well as gain more experience running an online wedding planning
app.

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radicalbyte
I got married a year ago, the organisation was so painful that I considered
(and quickly dismissed) and idea to go into this space myself..

If I had to do it again, I'd want (and pay good money for):

* RSVP: via web/email, Facebook and post. Charge for post.

* Wedding Website (incl gallery!)

* Gift management (use a partner)

Then you can add:

* Make deals with Photographers, possibly vet them. Maybe get them to fill your galleries? It could be a hard sell, especially if you try and compete with them (i.e. by offering prints). Actually, why not partner with them: give them the ability to sell their prints more easily, not just to the Bride & Groom, but to the guests!

Actually, building a wedding business around the problem-domain of Wedding
Photographers seems like an excellent strategy. If you increase their profits
then they'll evangelise your site.

* Wedding plans / inspiration. Nice because you can sell stuff there (via partners).

* Directory for Wedding locations: it was hard finding good pictures and prices of wedding locations.

* Directory for Reception locations: same problem as Wedding Locations. This is also a more general problem, the discoverability of these places is terrible.

* Diversify into cards. This'll be a massive win for men: never forget your wedding anniversary again. Heck, implement this as a simple reminder service. Make a fun "Groom" styled-skin to solve his problem (and double your market!). BTW this also works for anniversaries / birthdays etc. Men forget this stuff really quickly.

The post wouldn't be complete without some feedback:

I personally don't like the copy on your site. You sound like a Bridal
magazine. Your focus is on "curated links we found on google", but it should
be on how you actually solve the problem of organising a Wedding. I don't care
about the pretty things you've found on Google*

Question: why on earth are you charging a monthly fee for a one-off occasion?
Why not let people try your site out for a month, with a larger flat fee at
the end? Then offer to host the wedding picture gallery for N months, with the
option to buy N months extra hosting.

What is your conversion rate like?

I like what you're doing, there's certainly enough to support a small but
healthy business.. it would be cool to see you succeeding, especially if it
comes from advice from HN :)

* NOTE: I'm not your target market.

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limedaring
Hi, thanks so much for the feedback!!

This is great timing since I'm actually working on revamping ALL the marketing
copy. I agree completely with your points — I got wrapped up in "this is what
a wedding startup would say!" rather than what is actually awesome about us.

Why we're charging monthly for a one off occasion: We actually have a monthly
charge and a one-off charge, and our conversions are roughly split between the
two. People who are just a few months out from their wedding tend to pick the
monthly option, and people who are far out tend to pick the charge-once
option. That said, I'm not justifying this — we're still (and probably always
will be) in the process of testing out new pricing!

Good points about what you pay for. We actually work with a little over 1,500
wedding vendors (and almost 500 wedding photographers), and we're almost done
with our vendor integration into the planning app.

Thanks so much for poking at WeddingLovely and spending time writing your
feedback!

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wtvanhest
By offering the option to do either by month or a 1 time fee, your customers
are doing the following: 1) Calculating number of months to wedding day (since
they likely know the date) 2) Deciding which is cheaper 3) Purchasing the
cheaper option.

*You are probably also losing conversions to people who decide to wait to save money, then just forget to purchase.

I'm not suggesting you do this, but just think about what would happen if you
priced it in the opposite way. 6 months before the wedding, $80, 5 months
before the wedding $90, 4 months before the wedding $100 etc.

My guess is that you may end up making a bigger $/user, and may even increase
your conversion rate.

Looks like a good site and like you are offering real value. Best of luck!

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yogrish
Great Post Tracy. Great going for your startup and ATB. Thanks for being open
in talking about your current troubles and not giving a rosy picture about ur
startup.

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colinbartlett
Great post! And how refreshing: founders that don't just squander investors'
money, but actually live paltry lives while trying to grow.

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limedaring
Technically I've done both, since WeddingLovely was in the 500 Startups
incubator a year ago. ;) Just haven't raised any more money since, which is
another long and complex story that I should probably write about too!

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colinbartlett
Yes! You should! I, for one, would love to hear why.

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limedaring
Cliff notes: I don't feel comfortable raising money until the timing is
absolutely right, and the timing was not right at 500's demo day since this
online planning product hadn't launched yet, there was another weddings
company in my batch doing something similar, and another two prominent wedding
startups were fundraising at the same time too. :)

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azat_co
Nice post Tracy! :)

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limedaring
Thanks Azat! Had no idea this would get picked up by HN at all, it's quite the
compliment.

