
Show HN: Send the Date – Automate mailing wedding save the dates - thumbtacks
http://app.sendthedate.com
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thumbtacks
Hi HN! This is a project I've been working on that has just hit the MVP stage
and I'd love your feedback on!

I was actually inspired by a post I found here almost three years ago on
automating wedding invitations via Twilio[1]. A lot of commenters pointed out
that especially for older relatives a physical medium is still best for things
like this and so I wanted to build something that would make it just as easy
as the approach outlined in that post but still send physical mail.

Over time, I cut the scope back from save the dates + invitations + updates to
just the minimum I thought would actually be a useable and helpful solution
and landed on save the dates. The fact that you don't need to RSVP to a save
the date radically simplified the design and cut down the features required,
and since I have a lot of trouble maintaining steam on side projects I thought
it seemed wise to cut down as much scope as I could. Actually getting
something out the door is a big personal accomplishment for me regardless of
how it now performs as an actual business.

The tech stack I made as boring as I could for operational reasons. Most of
the stack mirrors what I used at work so that I could just focus on building
and not fighting new tooling. The backend is Django deployed on AWS Fargate
and the frontend is just a React app deployed to an S3 bucket with CloudFront.

Any tips or feedback would be greatly appreciated, and if you have a
particular favourite article on marketing a product like this I'm all ears.

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14101699)

