Ask HN: How to innovate the Wedding space?

[parkern2]

Weddings are big business off the net and seem like they are ripe with innovation. While theknot.com has set itself up as the major player online - anyone who visits that site will see how awful it is.

So here are my questions for discussions:

1) How could you innovate this space and take advantage of cumbersome sites like the knot?

2) What other industries lend parallels to the Wedding space?

[nudge]

It's a very complex thing for people to have to go through, organizing a wedding, so anything you could do to simplify the whole process would help. Most websites do this by aggregating useful information, but there are still ways to do this better (show me all the venues suitable for 130 guests within a 30 minute drive from church X, for example). Perhaps also it would be good to get customer reviews of venues, tripadviser-style. People want to know who will go the extra mile for them on the big day.

You're starting from the feeling that existing sites are cumbersome. Do you think this is a problem? They are presumably packed with information. Could you present the same information more cleanly, or dedicate your site to a certain kind of information?

Are you married yourself? If not, I would talk to a bunch of people who are to find out what they found difficult organizing it all. You might get some insights that way.

[lukesandberg]

Registry aggregation service. I see friends register for the same thing at multiple store (maybe that's their fault, but whatever) so I think there is space for a service that either aggregates registries from different stores or serves as a central registry and recommends stores for people to buy the items at.

[nudge]

MAAS (marriage as a service). Everything's better as a service.

Monthly payment (nobody likes to pay upfront when they're not sure about whether the product is any good, and especially when it doesn't seem to work out for many people).

Be sure to offer different pricing schemes, from $99 a month for a happy, contented marriage with a perfectly suited life partner, down to $7 a month for a bitter, distrusting eternity with an unfaithful, mendacious thief. Make sure people can upgrade or downgrade at any time. Offer a corporate product so companies can enable their employees to become married to their jobs.

edit: I have no idea why it's necessary to say this, but I am joking.

[byoung2 → nudge]

There is a big difference between weddings and marriage.

[nudge → byoung2]

What's with the sense of humour failure? Do you actually think I was proposing what I wrote as a serious business idea?

Anyway, well done for sucking the fun out of it. If you weren't amused you could have just ignored it.

[byoung2 → nudge]

I totally got the joke, hence my followup joke (punchline: wedding = time of celebration, marriage = life of misery).