A wedding gift for our co-founder became our startup's newest product.
thrilledforyou.com
thrilledforyou.com
- Instead of a "bulk discount for professionals", you should just sell them a $399 version that they can use to modify each title (looks like it's just a PNG file in the resources anyway).
- I can't see a bride and groom buying this very often–they are already busy and budget-conscious ... but I could see a best man, parent or bridesmaid doing it (assuming they had a macbook available). They often are bringing a laptop for a slideshow anyway, so it could work.
- I think the price might be a little high ... $49 to $79 seems more reasonable to me–especially since I'm still doing all the editing/uploading/sharing work myself afterwards.
- Use wedding blogs to get the word out and offer up some free demos or prizes. There are blogs for fancy weddings, green weddings, DIY weddings, budget weddings, etc.–and they are very popular with brides. It's a good way to get noticed.
- I can probably help you spread the word among some wedding photographers (including some who have well-read blogs). A lot of them are doing video too (as many SLRs now do HD video) so they could easily incorporate these into a DVD. Plus, several are doing photobooths or slideshows at receptions.
I'll blog about it too if you'd like–feel free to get in touch. I could get some photographers using it this weekend and giving you feedback.
But if this was something our videographer or photographer had offered I would've jumped on it in an instant.
[Edit: just thought of another one - military people posted overseas, I can see people at the family gatherings like Thanksgiving wanting to send individual video greetings]
It’s really not that difficult to haul a laptop to a wedding, there’s so much to setup already it’d be a drop in the bucket. Also, I had one of my best men (they were all best men) in charge of the slideshow, I think another one of them could have been in charge of the video laptop. I think having a MacBook is the major barrier to entry here.
I realize I’m probably slightly more technically savvy than the average groom, but I honestly got excited when I saw this and thought “Man! Where was this when I got married?”
http://www.costhelper.com/cost/wedding/flowers.html
I think the price is fine for the market he's targeting. Hell, given how irrational people are when it comes to weddings, he might actually sell more if he doubles the price.
I'm not saying some people won't pay $99 ... I just think its slightly above a "no brainer" price. Also, I don't think this qualifies as a "substitute" for a real (i.e. paper and ink) guestbook–most brides will still want that.
This should be STUPIDLY easy to sell as a subscription service to wedding photographers, incidentally. Three words: incremental marginal revenue. After you've already landed the photography gig you can pitch the lucky lady on the video guestbook "for only $150 more"
One thing though is that, from the site, I'm not really sure what I would get and in what form: where are the videos? are you hosting them? how do I change the settings of the app? do I get some kind of video album?
I see that the demo file left a couple of videos in my Movies folder, so I get it: I pay $99 to have the custom software with the right names and date, and it saves everything as local files in my Movies folder.
But, in that case, $99 is a lot of money! Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a one-time use app, right? I only get that one customized version for one wedding? That feels very very expensive… it's a nice packaging for PhotoBooth pretty much. And yes, for a wedding, that packaging makes a big difference, but I don't think I could buy it myself.
That being said, as Brian Cooley said, $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, so I think that you could make some money with that (as I said, for a wedding the packaging is very important, thus the money will follow).
edit: to sum up, I'd say that it's a nice idea but to justify the $99 I think it would need to actually produce some kind of "video guestbook", something similar to an iMovie template, or what Animoto does. After the event, I just get a bunch of video files that I need to do something with…
- the names on the image looks super badly compressed, you might want to make sure the image looks super clean and sharp
- I found the buttons kind of confusing while recording: "Review", "Re-do", "I'm done!". The first time, I clicked "I'm done" to stop the recording… and ended up at the beginning, not being able to review what I did. I would put only "Stop" while recording, with automatic preview afterwards and then "Re-do" and "I'm done!" (or "Save" to make it even clearer)
- add a Cancel button actually.
- the countdown tended to skip "2"
- make the cursor a pointer when it's hovering buttons
- I'd make the "Recording" state more obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the recording starts with "… oh it started!" Maybe a blinking red border around the video feed? The blinking "Recording" is a little faint to me, and it might be even more in a reception room.
One thing that stuck out to me was that the guy in the purple tie was a little out of frame. That would have made my wife object to this idea for fear that everyone would end up with their heads cut off. FWIW, I'd maybe move that part to the end or cut it altogether.
Like the music, too.
Sad but true.
You should have a "photo booth" option where someone could just walk up, click the photo booth option, and the system takes four timed photos (usually about 5 seconds in between poses). http://www.rentphotobooths.com/
You could then put those photos in the album.
Not everyone wants to give a personal video message (especially if you're shy and in an open reception hall), but maybe more (especially if drunk) would like to get a little crazy and contribute some goofy photos.
I got goosebumps watching the demo. I can see myself using this at my wedding.. the next step now is finding a wife! haha
Intrinsic product! Please do all you can to keep your idea in publics eye. I bookmarked your service, but i'm not sure I will remember the name when it comes to actually needing it.
The music on the video threw me a little bit, maybe I'm just too much of an english centric guy. Also, I'd love to have heard the voices of the people come through a little bit. Maybe as a sample, but maybe just because if someone is talking at a camera I want to know it they are saying for some reason?
Again, very cool!
But I have one recommendation that I think, though it would certainly take effort, especially if your company is mostly Mac programmers, would pay off bigtime. Offer hardware. Knock together an Atom-based system that comes preloaded with the software (obviously this would not be an OSX machine, a free stripped-down Linux distro would probably be a much better idea) that can be sold to the professional videographers or photographers, or even venue owners. This would open up the people that don't own Macs and, more importantly, the market of people uncomfortable with computers who wouldn't feel comfortable with investing this kind of money and importance in a software product and their computer.
http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook
You could do the video and hand written guest notes on the same device.
I'm not having too good a time with the demo though. I ran the program and it popped up the thingy with the video stream and the name box, but then keyboard didn't seem to work. The record your message button just pops up the "whoops you forgot to type your names" message and there appears to be no other way of shutting the darn thing down. I was just about to switch off the mac (and lose unsaved work in Photoshop) when the 10 minute timer kicked in and it shut itself down.
Still, sort out that bit and I think it's a great idea.
http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for-you-...
Basically, a year and a half ago we decided to focus more on software we could charge for (vs. ad/sponsorhsip supported). At the top of our list was a storytelling app called A Story Before Bed (www.astorybeforebed.com) which we shipped this past November. But Jenny (our co-founder) was getting married last August so we paused our development on our primary product and spent some time developing Thrilled for You - a video guestbook for Jenny's wedding reception.
Things have calmed down a little since we shipped A Story Before Bed, and we realized we still have the app we wrote for Jenny. With wedding season coming in a few months we did some more testing, tweaked the UI, came up with a bunch of themes, and put together the website for Thrilled for You (www.thrilledforyou.com) and offered it for sale as of yesterday. :)
There are so many things we love about having our own startup... the ability to do things like this is definitely one of them. We feel the software we make is so personal when it comes out of a need we had ourselves.
Thanks for asking for more details. :)
Talk about a nice pivot - Wedding software is a great niche. Once your software is in the reception, it could do lots of other cool stuff. Guest lists, aggregation of iPhone / photo content from guests and speech programs come to mind.
It could even live-blog the content it gets into a timeline online during the reception. You could have a stack of 100 cards with a key on them next to the PC, accessing the online site requires a card as the login for privacy. Purchasing 100 more cards is a $10 transaction online and covers the timeline service.
That being said, this seems like the type of product that Mac users would be more likely to go for, so you could just hold off on a Windows version until you know whether the product is viable (based on sales)
One more thing: The "buy" button is not obviously for that purpose, and I was about to comment asking whether you can only buy from within the demo. Consider rewording the button to make it clear that that's where you buy the product from.
Yes, if there's one more thing I wish I had to do at my wedding, it would have to be tech support for the web cam that wasn't working properly on the Guestbook Mac.
I also wish that every one of my guests put their hands all over my computer as they walked in and out the door.
Also, when they get drunk, I don't want them trying to film something for me while they stumble over my expensive computer with an open container.
Now, enough being a jerk.
I think some kind of mashup between live streaming and wedding templates is more appropriate since people already have video recorders in their pockets on their phones now.
Why not setup a public DropBox folder that everyone can drop their iPhone photos into while at the wedding?
I just don't think this idea was very thoroughly thought out. Putting your expensive Mac at the front door of the reception hall just seems ridiculous.
... but my mac's camera has always Just Worked.