vishalkgupta

Vishal from WedWell here. Really appreciated the input from everyone who commented, and the votes. We're charging forward. Hopefully you'll see us in the next YC round ;)

Overall liked having an open forum for people to give feedback on our idea. We used some of that feedback to evolve the product, we even got some new clients from HN.

Changes for next year? I'd love the final run off to be a bit more like the final four, where you pit one start-up against another until there are only a few standing. Then YC can pick from the cream of the crop.

Thanks again

True-- Efficiency may not be the best term for marketing this thing (to anyone beyond the YC community). I'm all ears for sure.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me at [email protected]

Thanks again, we're still early here. Plenty of room to evolve the product. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

I second the idea that a facesmash like approach could really be a much better idea of how to handle this. It's easier to view one startup vs another instead of looking at voting on 20.

There are some stand outs that may just run over their opponents, but maybe there's some way to normalize that to some degree.

Thank you! Very helpful for our message

We're still iterating, but right now we reach out to vendors proactively. So ideally it's little/no work for the vendors to have to search for events, we post them on events that they should be able to handle. The work that they do to create a proposal is no different from the work needed for any clients, if anything our templates may make it easier.

Thanks for the comment. We really do think its less about finding the cheapest vendor and helping streamline the process. Elsewhere here it was coined as "vendor dating", which is something I really like. On top of the fact that vendors can start to see what other vendors are doing, allow for collaboration earlier in the process.

We started with the week long bidding contest, but for now are keeping it open to allow as many vendors in as possible. That may change over time.

Vishal from WedWell here. This competition was a bit unstructured in general. So not surprised that many teams didn't talk too much about their teams, and spoke more about their ideas.

We're a small team lead by myself. I am technical (computer engineer by education), but have a more technical partner (full stack engineer) onboard, and my sister is helping as well. My sister has had to plan her own wedding from start to finish without a wedding planner. She's helping a lot with on boarding.

I have a background in building electronic trading businesses with a specialization in market structures. Marketplaces like Airbnb, and how they start are something that I love to study.

There are more details about me on my profile here. I think in the future, it may make sense to put a bit of structure to how people describe their idea/team.

RE WedWell: Thanks for the comment. Funny enough we're moving slightly from "WedWell: Vendors bid for your wedding" more towards "WedWell: A more efficient way to plan your wedding". (Dang- Depending on how long the voting is going, we'd love to change our title!)

It's really less about cost savings (which may happen anyway with scale/competition among vendors), but more about efficiencies in the process. Less face to face meetings, less paper checks, more collaboration among vendors before the day of the event. So, as a potential client, I think you're hitting it on the head. It is more like vendor dating than anything else. Love for you to give the platform a go, and give us some feedback.

RE WedWell: I think it's less about unique insight, and more about timing/positioning. Couples expect to communicate with vendors over the phone/text, they don't want to write paper checks, they want vendors to find them. We're doing a lot of things that do not scale right now, but doing our best to keep clients happy.

I will say that initial customer acquisition in NYC is our hyper focus right now. The great thing about opening this discussion up on HN is that there are so many minds out there looking at your problems. I'd be happy to hear any ideas on how to best acquire these clients initially. We're doing a bit of FB ads, and think this will be a heavy marketing lift. But as we monetize our first couple clients, we are getting a clearer picture of customer value.

Vishal from WedWell here. Lol.. Zenefits was boring.. so thank you?

RE:WedWell - no good vendor would put themselves through his - they’d be too busy making money.

>Not what we're seeing. Were initially focused on the NYC area. There are a huge amount of great vendors who are constantly battling for each wedding here. Plenty are excited to extend their reach. Each market is different, but it makes sense right now in bigger cities.

Also RE: the RFP process. Initially vendors are using their own proposals to iterate with the clients, eventually we see this being baked into the system. Either way, drawing up a proposal has to be done whether you meet the client in person or via our platform. The time savings is the initial iteration is done electronically vs face to face.

Thanks gills. Love to pick your brain a bit about this. Happy to move to email at some point. What was your solution called?

We think that this is a process problem vs a technology problem at first. We're trying to distill the client's ideas into a wedding brief that can be viewed by vendors. Vendors then upload a proposal on Google docs (initially), that allow for comments by the couple. We allow the couple to iterate with the vendors and we go from there. We're trying our best to not just blindly build out tech, but to really focus on on boarding clients/vendors, then build technology around the bottle necks. We're experimenting right now.

Thanks again for being a client! We're really lucky to have clients like you and your fiancé. Your feedback is helping us make a better product.