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Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

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Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#1

Post by teejae »

Is anyone having a big wedding reception/event with assigned seating soon? Or know anyone who will?

I've been working on a tool to optimize seating charts for assigned seat events, such as weddings. I'm hoping this site will save people enough time and stress, to charge for the service for larger events.

At the moment, there's no login required, and the service saves no data.

  Why?
    * Save time, rearranging people automatically
    * Help with politics of large gatherings
    * Try moving people and quickly seeing how everything shakes out

  Currently, it will try to optimize for:
    * Keeping groups together as much as possible
    * Use fewer total tables
    * Keep people either together or apart, as indicated

  Current Capabilities:
    * Import guest list/table capacity information from Excel file (there's a template)
      * Generate fake guest list to play around
    * Dragging people to different tables and reoptimize
    * Selecting sets of people who you want to keep together or apart
    * Locking people to certain tables
    * Edit history

  On roadmap:
    * Prioritizing people to seat at "better tables" (VIPs, close family, etc)
    * Rearranging tables visually
What do you all think? Is this valuable? How's the UX?

I haven't come up with a great name for it yet, so naming it "Better Seater" for now.

All feedback and suggestions welcome and appreciated! Let me know what would be useful for you!

Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer
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Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#2

Post by kasperni »

I would reach out to some wedding planners/wedding venues and see if it would be useful for them. I think that would probably be your biggest market, if you nailed it. Could be pretty cool as a venue to provide the tool to your clients to plan the seating (I don't know what is out there already)

I definitely think you need to work on the UX if you want want to make on it

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#3

Post by teejae »

kasperni wrote: post #2

I would reach out to some wedding planners/wedding venues and see if it would be useful for them. I think that would probably be your biggest market, if you nailed it. Could be pretty cool as a venue to provide the tool to your clients to plan the seating (I don't know what is out there already) I definitely think you need to work on the UX if you want want to make on it

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#7

Post by teejae »

haroldp wrote: post #4

Isn't "Keep people either together or apart" an NP-Hard problem, and basically unsolvable for more than a couple preferences?

Yep, NP-hard! This is using an optimization engine. It's not brute forcing. But hopefully it's getting pretty good approximate results.

You can keep trying harder from the state, just click again on the Optimize buttons.

I admit, I haven't optimized the optimizer yet.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#9

Post by teejae »

lja wrote: post #5

This looks so much like the bin packing problem [0] if you generalized it you could do a lot with it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem

Yep, I'm targeting an optimization engine at a more specific problem that might be useful to lots of consumers.
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