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Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

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Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#1
WedWell (http://WedWell.co) helps couples hire the best vendors for their wedding by getting vendors iterate details electronically and to bid for their event.

A wedding brief, created by the couple, is a text based description of what they want to see for different aspects of their wedding. Initially we will breakdown the brief into the first wave of vendor types: (DJ's, Cakes, Flowers, Photos, Invites). The brief can include links to Pinterest boards, Spotify Play lists and Google Drive documents. Ideally, the brief becomes the digital representation of the couple’s wedding that they draw all inspiration from.

Couples can invite vendors to bid on their brief by viewing a list of the vendors and sending them messages. We will also solicit external vendors for the couple’s brief.

Vendors will respond with their proposals. The proposals will come in as text/hyperlinks to describe their services. It's up to them to sell themselves to the couples.

The couple will tell WedWell how much they want to pay for each vendor type. We may give suggestions for pricing based on analytics available to us. The couple will put a credit card down for each of the vendor they would like to book. After the week long bidding period the client will then have the choice to either confirm or cancel the awarded prize (50% of the payment).

We will normalize all the agreements. The vendors will receive 50% of the prize as the contest ends. We will then award the other 50% after the wedding. We will build in a rating system for each vendor to ensure the best vendors are rewarded with more contest wins.

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#4
I think this is a fantastic idea! The wedding industry is huge, expensive (and getting more and more so), and I've heard horror stories from friends when they picked the wrong vendor.

I'm confused by your use of the words "contest" and "prize". You've got a straightforward auction, why are you not calling it that?

What's the incentive for vendors to come to you, won't this force them to compete on price in a market where price often doesn't matter?

Do you know vendors will agree to take 50% after the wedding? How are these agreements structured today? How will you ensure vendors don't get ripped off?

How are you going to get customers and vendors to use your site?

Edit:

How will you make money?

What if you just act as a marketplace for vendors, handle the payments in full up front, and take a percentage?

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#5
post #3

Great idea. We're planning a wedding now, and the vendor acquisition process is insane. To what extent do you view this as a discovery platform versus a true marketplace? Will it ever go beyond bids?

Thanks!! We intend to have a vendor discovery page where you can invite vendors to bid on your wedding. Hard to plan beyond the phase 1, but we'll see how it evolves! Love for you to sign up for a free consultation or fill out our wedding brief!

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#6
Disclaimer: I am getting married soon, in SF.

The Brief is a great idea, but it needs to pass some QC before being bid on. At the time of your vendor selection for a standard wedding, you don't know what you don't know. Its tough to choose well when you are not sure what to optimize for. I suggest a LONG list of questions to answer to get the details on how the wedding should proceed.

2nd. Venue selection has a lot to do with which vendors you can use, since not all will travel to all locations, and not all venues have all the amenities that some vendors need (big driveway for shuttle bus, commercial kitchen for caterer).

My experience with vendors is that they all communicate in different styles, and mostly poorly. Compared to office work, their typical responsiveness by email/voice/text is irregular (and unnerving). Maintaining responsiveness standards would be the single biggest benefit I can imagine for making the process better.

Many of the best vendors from your wedding may not be wedding vendors - Uber/Chariot both put together better cost comparisons for transport to/from my rehearsal dinner for guests than did most of the dedicated transit companies that specialize in weddings.

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#7
post #4

I think this is a fantastic idea! The wedding industry is huge, expensive (and getting more and more so), and I've heard horror stories from friends when they picked the wrong vendor. I'm confused by your use of the words "contest" and "prize". You've got a straightforward auction, why are you not calling it that? What's the incentive for vendors to come to you, won't this force them to compete on price in a market w…

Thanks for the thoughtful questions! Let me go through them 1 by 1.

Wording: Contest/Prize vs Auction, we're evolving our copy as we go. The initial idea was that through the iteration process, the best (not necessarily the cheapest) vendor would win. So in our eyes, less like an auction. But point taken.

Vendor incentives: Vendors will be able to proactively approach events that fit their style/schedule. They can worry less and less about their own ads, and let their service tell the story (with a good review system- this will be possible). Also, we think that standardized agreements/money escrow, we can take some of the friction out of both sides.

50% before/after the wedding: We're working with just a small subset of wedding vendor silos at this point, and focused on vendors that can fit in with this 50/50 template. It may not work for every silo in the future. Vendors will be guaranteed 50%, we hold the other 50%. If something doesn't go off well at the wedding, we will look into an arbitration clause (still working out the details here), but our hope is to make sure both sides are happy.

Customer acquisition: This is the hardest (isn't it always?). Right now we're hyper focused on the NYC Wedding market (2x the average wedding costs). It's all super grass roots right now; face to face meetings, wedding events, also we're incentivizing new clients with $100 back and $100 for anyone they share the service with. We're also running a few targeted fb/google ads to see if they are helpful. If you have any other ideas, we're all ears!

How will you make money? What if you just act as a marketplace for vendors, handle the payments in full up front, and take a percentage? <- This is in large part our idea on how to make money.

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#8
post #6

Disclaimer: I am getting married soon, in SF. The Brief is a great idea, but it needs to pass some QC before being bid on. At the time of your vendor selection for a standard wedding, you don't know what you don't know. Its tough to choose well when you are not sure what to optimize for. I suggest a LONG list of questions to answer to get the details on how the wedding should proceed. 2nd. Venue selection has a lot t…

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

We're experimenting with on-boarding. We're doing "Wedding Consultations"- phone calls and walk through a clients ideas for each vendor. And also a wedding brief, which is that long list of questions. We're experimenting with something a bit more visual vs words. Love for your to give our current version a try and give us feedback!

Locations: While we haven't really said it on the site, we're highly focused on NYC weddings (where weddings are 2x the cost of average weddings). The interesting thing here is that most vendors are willing to travel within the 5 boroughs.

Vendor responsiveness is a huge issue from what we've heard. One of our metrics on the vendors will be responsiveness. Similar to Airbnb hosts.

Best vendors not being pure wedding vendors. It's a point well taken. We're currently focused on the silos covered by small, disparate vendors, and providing solutions for those vendors. A client may not book all vendor types through us, but we will be the grease between the friction that exists with the old school vendors.

Thanks again for your thoughts, love for you to give it a try. Even if it's just to provide more feedback!

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#9
Interesting concept. I was married in New York last September so I think I understand the pain points. Getting married today probably isn't much different then it was in the early to mid 2000s. The vendors have simple websites and all sales processes involve multiple emails, phone calls or in person visits. My (now) wife and I both hated dealing with the vendor sales process.

That said, one thing you may to to think about is people don’t just want to find the cheapest vendor. Of course they want to save money but at the same time, they want it done right. You only do this once. When we got married we wanted to find vendors we could trust that also were affordable. To do that my wife mostly spoke to her friends and asked them who they used for various tasks.

I personally think you will be better building this platform first as a way for friends to share vendor details & reviews. If executed right this builds the demand side of your platform and vendor data. Since sharing would be a core part of the experience once the ball is rolling you should be able to increase the number of active users quickly. When you have a ton of users on the platform swapping vendor info it’s going to be much easier for you to convince vendors to hop on board.

Re: Apply HN: WedWell - Vendors bid for your wedding

#10
This is a cool idea, there are lots of problems in this space.

I worked on Rentabilities (https://angel.co/rentabilities) which we ultimately shut down after 3 years. We focused on product rentals, which is just a sliver of the things you need for a wedding. We ran into lots of issues being a marketplace. We were able to scale the demand side nicely with 150k long tail visitors each month (things like "backyard wedding tent rental" or "scooby doo bouncy castle") and hundreds of quote requests each day. I'd say 15-20% of requests mentioned weddings. We were able to get merchants to sign up, but only by calling them on the phone (email just didn't work). The merchants were pretty bad at responding to emails. We tried a bidding system where we exposed the vendor names but the overall response was negative. We iterated to a product that looked alot like Operator or Magic, with merchants and consumers texting with a small group of customer service people (starting with our internal team) in the middle. One thing you're up against with rentals or event services is a timeline: In general a wedding or birthday party is an emotional event and people want to get everything booked fast. This means that often times we'd spend hours researching an event for someone, only to have them not book because it wasn't fast enough. Booking rates were higher for requests we could fill multiple quotes on faster, but it was really hard to fill them fast because the merchants were slow. At one point we did some research into weddings and found that wedding coordinators like to work with trusted vendors, usually over the phone or in person, directly. They really care about making sure the wedding goes exactly as planned. We relentlessly pursued the product and I'd say one of our biggest struggles was the resistance from merchants to adopt technology. We were able to scale to about $50k/mo in revenue before we ran out of cash/energy.

I still think there's something here and you may be able to make it work, maybe as wedding planning software.

Hope this is helpful in some way. This was just my experience at the time I worked on it. Feel free to hit me up anytime. aacook@aacook.co.

Good luck!

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