I'm getting married in May in Sonoma. I will have somewhere around 150 guests which is sizable. I've already booked pretty much every service needed for the wedding: venue, caterer, photographer, videographer, DJ, wedding planner, florist, hairdresser, makeup artist etc.
Feedback:
1. I'm the groom. The truth is, weddings are really for brides. Yes, we're both getting married, but it's all about the bride. My fiancée is a typical SF professional. I can tell you right now she would be skeptical about a "bidding" process. Believe it or not, the wedding planning process for her is fun. It's a lot of work, but "curating" her own wedding is enjoyable. Although I can totally understand why from a groom's perspective we just want to 99designs the problem away. :)
2. I'm not sure how you will convince the better vendors to join your program. It sounds like this is a great platform for up and coming wedding vendors, but once they get good - they won't need your service anymore. They'll have clout on Yelp or theknot or weddingwire. And people that are looking for good vendors will go seek them out.
3. Putting down a credit card is a scary thing - most of the contract stuff comes way later. Many of our vendors went through honeybook.com. What's to stop them from just going outside of your system and giving the bride and groom a better deal? How do you ensure you will have lock-in?
4. Maybe you'll charge money for the bidding process? Or try to place ads?
This is a great space to disrupt...I hope a product like this becomes popular at some point because weddings can be really tough to plan.
Some thoughts on your comments:
1. I don't necessarily think that our solution is for everyone. We're looking to find our little niche in the market where a couple is ok with forgo-ing some of the work involved with the planning process in the hope to save time and potentially money. It's not for everyone, the same way airbnb wasn't for everyone when it first came out. If we can unlock a small market, we think we can grow it. Time will tell!
2. Very similar issue here with vendors as well. We're looking at a niche vendor group at first. Ideally it's top notch vendors who need help getting the word out. Also will help if they are tech savvy and willing to respond quickly electronically.
3. We really like honeybook.com, we may consider using them until payments are fully built out. In terms of lock in, we're looking to get the clients to really work on the iteration back and forth with the vendors (in many silos) at the same time. The goal will be that they see the technology/payment/insurance/etc all integral to the process. It's ideally similar to the feeling you feel when you book an apartment with airbnb, sure.. you could just message the host through airbnb and try to pay them directly, but with the services they offer, it wouldn't make sense. We're still at an early stage, so yea.. it's a danger in the beginning.
4. We're brainstorming the many different monetization points possible. We may just lower the barriers as much as possible initially to find customers, then look to monetize more heavily when we have actual data.
Thanks for the thoughts here. Would love for you to check out wedwell.co and give the wedding brief a try (even just as a test). It's evolving over the next few days with feedback we've received here, but please do give it a try!
I work on a very special team in Product Marketing. We build some demonstrations and prototypes that showcase our upcoming technologies. The team is small and we are looking for a senior developer that will help us streamline our development processes and help us build really cool demos.
This job is not for everyone. We operate very much like a startup and have lots of space for innovation. Because we are not within R&D we don't have to deal with red tape, bureaucracy, or politics. It's a cool gig...you will get to travel a few times a year.
Places we go: London, Paris, New York, Munich, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, Boston, Las Vegas, and more...
Our headquarters is located in San Francisco near the Ferry Building.
My team is hiring a front-end UI developer/designer to work in Product Marketing. We build cool demos that leverage the latest technologies out there such as backbone.js, CoffeeScript, etc. We also build a ton of our apps on Heroku, our new Ruby cloud. :)
You'll be working out of our HQ which is pretty much located in the best part of the financial district across the street from the Ferry Building and close to transportation.
We pay very, very well and we have great benefits. Medical, dental, vision + fitness reimbursement. You can choose between Club One membership or $100/mo towards any gym you want.
We want someone who is passionate about technology but also has a bit of an "edge" for business. If this sounds like you, send me your resume: kwu@salesforce.com
P.S. I've been interviewed by YC four times but never got through. Got accepted once, but was not able to join due to family circumstances. I'm an entrepreneur at heart offering someone out there a chance to move to SF and learn something about enterprise software.
I used to work at NVIDIA as a hardware engineer and would go to nearby university career fairs to recruit new college grads. There's no absolute rule regarding GPA but generally 3.5 was the minimum cut off.
NVIDIA was also the only company I knew of that required candidates to take a written exam on the spot at the career fair. Scary stuff. The problem is there are too many applicants to look at so any kind of filter (administered fairly) is better than none at all.
I use gmap-pedometer to route all of my runs. I probably use it about 2-3 times a week so I've been waiting for someone to build something a bit more versatile and possibly even let me create routes from a mobile phone (this would be a cool feature and differentiate for you).
I've been staring at your site for the last 2 minutes and I can't figure out how to create a route. I think I glanced at one of the comments here and they said single click to drop a marker.... I'll give that a shot. But if I can't figure out how to create a route within 5 seconds you need to find a better way to communicate it.
Okay I just created a typical route I usually create in gmap-pedometer using single clicks. Feedback:
1. The routes don't follow the street...this is good when I go off the road but not so good when I am 100% roads. I like how gmap follows the street as much as possible until you switch it to "off road" which lets you route wherever you want.
2. I really like your elevation chart. Nice job. What would be even better is if the elevation chart had an X-axis that mapped the elevation to the current distance in the run. That way I know that the hill will hit me at mile 4, etc.
3. Public link to route should automatically highlight and copy for me. (click to copy)
Additional ideas for features:
-let me drop a note at a certain place along the route to share info
-let the community specify areas of high traffic, tourists, etc.
-share routes with the community, get feedback
-one problem which I haven't thought about too much yet. when we share routes with each other, everyone has a different "starting" location. it would be good if your site knew my starting location and then when I viewed someone else's route it would automatically re-route and re-calculate the fastest way for me to join his route and at which point to join.... I hope that makes sense.
I agree with everything eventhough wrote. I normally use gmap-pedometer and the number one issue keeping me from using your app was 1) on eventhough's list: I need the route to stick to the roads unless I choose otherwise.
you can be a great copywriter and be out of work in a good economy. in contrast, when the economy is good, anyone with a pulse can get SOME programming job. when the economy is bad, you have to know how to do fizzbuzz...
> People lose their kids in places like supermarkets all the time ... I haven't (yet) but it's a possibility (because kids by definition don't stay put) and I'd appreciate that if you found my child instead of stealing it from me to sell it to the highest bidder, you'd return it to me, because otherwise I might just burn down your house with you in it :)
Please, let's not compare our children with iPhones. Maybe choose a better analogy?
> Yeah, it's a bad analogy because for most people a phone is not equal to a child, but for passionate engineers the line is kind of blurry, isn't it?
Yes, it is a bad analogy, so why did you use it? If you are going to claim that passionate engineers equate products to living humans, at least qualify that by saying "a small proportion".
> No, the attitude is that it's not OK to steal property, even if that person you're stealing from is drunk ... and to make matters worse the buyer also made the story public, for no public good whatsoever.
The guy who had the phone tried to return it. He did more than most people would. On top of that, he was unable to get any contact information off the phone because they wiped it.
Yes he could have returned it to the bar but who knows how trustworthy those bar owners are?
Feedback:
1. I'm the groom. The truth is, weddings are really for brides. Yes, we're both getting married, but it's all about the bride. My fiancée is a typical SF professional. I can tell you right now she would be skeptical about a "bidding" process. Believe it or not, the wedding planning process for her is fun. It's a lot of work, but "curating" her own wedding is enjoyable. Although I can totally understand why from a groom's perspective we just want to 99designs the problem away. :)
2. I'm not sure how you will convince the better vendors to join your program. It sounds like this is a great platform for up and coming wedding vendors, but once they get good - they won't need your service anymore. They'll have clout on Yelp or theknot or weddingwire. And people that are looking for good vendors will go seek them out.
3. Putting down a credit card is a scary thing - most of the contract stuff comes way later. Many of our vendors went through honeybook.com. What's to stop them from just going outside of your system and giving the bride and groom a better deal? How do you ensure you will have lock-in?
4. Maybe you'll charge money for the bidding process? Or try to place ads?
This is a great space to disrupt...I hope a product like this becomes popular at some point because weddings can be really tough to plan.