[verelo]

Ah yeah i see the versioning now. I didnt get what was happening there before but i do now. This feels more to me like an audit log, which while helpful doesnt really do what i had hoped. Seeing 1 person move at a time isnt super practical, our edits were more like "these 10 people are now in different spots" and i just want to compare before to after, the in between while interesting isn't the visual im hoping to discover.

Interesting point about duplicates and names. We had a lot of Andrew's (including me) but we didn't have any identical matches if we included last names (which fortunatly everyone had). I guess as long as you can acknowledge them and have the warnings go away that would be enough.

Checkout the UX of the auto-complete for that website i made. My goal was so it would basically find your table as quick as possible, and the website is designed only for phones as i assumed the number of guests that brought a laptop would be somewhat limited :P

I considered turning that website into it's own little startup, but frankly, the idea of running a business with no repeat customers (or...with a duration between purchases so low that i'd basically be acquiring them every time) was not very attractive to me. Then again, everything else i've worked on in between has been worthless, so i might as well have haha!

[bruce511]

Wedding Planners seems like the ideal target market for this. It's a task that must be a opinion for wedding planners, since the couple have to do it, and they put it off (cause its hard).

Making it friction free for the couple (the planner pays, the couple use a planner assigned login), plus making it easy, allows the planner to gather the information from the couple, and then keep pushing plans at them.

A simple guest-list integration (suggested, invited, rsvpd) seems like the next step, and I expect diet requirements etc.

Then again I expect this software already exists and existing planners already use it, so this route may be full. Do some research first.

I agree that "plan your own wedding" .com would be hard to sell because it's one-time customers so acquisition cost us high, and lifetime value per customer is low. So best done as a side-project.

[ramses0]

Agree! There's TAM, TAC, and Churn at play here. Total Addressable Market, Traffic Acquisition Costs, and "Churn".

TAM - How many people can you serve "all people getting married || just planners"

TAC - How costly is it to make a sale your TAM? "word-of-mouth-individuals || trade-magazine-planners"

Churn - How many people will still be using your software one month or one year from now? "0% || 75%"

The numbers on the right hand side are soooo much better for a healthy business than on the left hand side.

Target this to party planners, wedding planners, event planners (at hotels, eg: Mariott, etc).

Assume you are the back-office magician for the "group events" manager at an all-inclusive hotel. You need to have super-on-point branding so that all GUESTS know to ask for "super-seating-chart-9000", which is only available to "party planning professionals", and has the appropriate QR codes, logos, URL's, etc.

Make sure that you have both paper and digital "intake forms" (99% of events managers will want to send them a spreadsheet, or copy/paste from a spreadsheet)... make sure that you have appropriate branding, etc (eg: a google sheets template with instructions on the first tab, etc.)

Your TAM for individuals is "everyone getting married this year" or "sometimes a conference or family reunion". Your TAM for planners is like 1/100000th and your TAC is higher (you have to convince them to spend a monthly retainer fee and/or pass along charges to the happy couple as if you were a vendor, eg: $50 seating chart fee invoice)... buuuuut each planner that you acquire is effectively recurring revenue (or recurring usage) compared to working directly with individuals, so your churn is much much lower.

The business you'd be getting into is kindof "fake back office support for luxury hotel event planners", which means do you branch out to also be kindof a vendor portal (eg: digital photo booths, printable/shippable table stands, digital name tags printing, etc.).

As a matter of fact, look around at conference/convention software (especially name tags!) as I remember hearing that's a surprisingly complicated market that no one really specializes in. Getting a foothold there would be helpful. Super-agree with parent comment "bruce" w.r.t. dietary restrictions, tagging/attributes, managing some sort of digital RSVP (live w/ the google sheet?) would be really helpful.

[teejae]

Yea, I agree the versioning isn't really there yet.

Definitely great idea for the autocomplete and seat finder. Right now, I'm not storing any data on the server, so can't do lookup. Also I worry about personal data leakage.

I was thinking this could turn into a business of referrals, as anyone who uses it will probably know others who need it. And I was going to do this for free for smaller events.

You'd need to pay subscription to keep data, or for more advanced tools. Simple events don't really need much though.

Anyway, would love to hear any other thoughts you have! Your site looks very lovely and usable, which is what really matters!

[verelo]

Sounds great, yeah i think having a free lead gen offering that you can somehow cross-sell into another product line is the way to work here. Once you have some "customer data" like "size of wedding" you are positioned to experiment with suggestions.

Good luck!