[dbot]

Startups win on creating efficiency: saving time and/or money. Compare that to a hobby, almost the entire point of which is to consume time and money...

Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, "dates" at caterers, looking at flowers, picking out attire, etc. Yes, there were some stressful moments, but if we had a startup that was designed to "streamline" everything, we would have missed out on that experience.

[LoSboccacc]

Weddings are deeply personal experiences. That's the hard part to scale, every one of them is pratically built to order.

What I learned on organizing mine is that service providers self organize in networks that refer each other not just as "favourtisement" but because they shared previous jobs and integrated well and that reduces their friction on delivering the client requests.

That something that a startup should target more than the end clients. Disrupting wedding planners seems more efficient than disrupting the wedding industry whole.

[SiempreViernes]

Yes, market size for people who don't want to put a lot of themselves into a wedding but also are willing to put in decent amount of money into paying someone else to do it for them seems rather slim.

If you don't want to bother so much about the wedding it seems likely you don't want to pay enough for a middleman to make a profit.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Maybe all of the discrete parts (the venue, the entree, the dessert) are more-or-less commodities, but it's how we package these things together that prevents an end-to-end commoditization of "wedding as a service".

It cheapens the experience if planning a wedding is as simple as going to a McDonald's drive-thru. For something that's supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime, I don't think people would want an app where they could just customize a few options, and have an entire wedding planned. The point of it, really, is that it isn't supposed to easy.

[basch]

Maybe I'm a minority, but I love a management layer between me any anything. Any sort of software that offers a checklist, reviews, comparisons, contact management, status updates, progress bars, gantt charts, budgets, registries, seating, warnings about conflict or missed deadlines. I should be able to open the "my wedding app" click food, and within a click be able to contact any of my vendors. People helping me plan should be able to read each others communications so they can pick up where I left off. I should be able to add anyone in the wedding party, and even guests, and they see information that is relevant to them. Yelp+Slant+Mint+Intercom for the planning industry sounds great.

The thing that just a budget and schedule lacks is being able to watch each others progress and preferences.

[ghaff]

I assumed (and I see there are) all sorts of online tools that purport to help with planning. Many people also set up websites these days. I assume these have affiliate links and the like but they're not exactly disruptive applications.

[basch]

Some of them all do one or a couple parts of what I described, but they are all designed to be "easy and simple" more than powerful. And I really doubt most of them do things like watch my credit card to keep track of how much has been paid out.

There's plenty of room for innovation, with some more imagination.

[dragonwriter]

> Maybe all of the discrete parts (the venue, the entree, the dessert) are more-or-less commodities, but it's how we package these things together that prevents an end-to-end commoditization of "wedding as a service".

I think you are partially right, but the key components aren't commodities, at least, for the clientele willing to spend enough money to be worth serving. Venues for ceremony and/or reception are quite often not, for instance