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Comment by Slamchunk | Hacker News Reader

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Weddings are time sinks even small ones like mine, we viewed around 20 venues for example, multiple caterers etc. Anything you can do to save time is a good thing. Handwriting invitations, making 500 paper cranes by hand all are lovely gestures but we focussed on what was important to us - food! For example saved a bunch from ditching traditional wedding invites and table favors (we did have amazing flowers for the tables) that we could then reallocated to having the best food and wine for our guests.

Plus it may sound strange but we don't have all of our friends postal addresses noted down, so mailing out invites would have been even more cumbersome.

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We were repeatedly told that nobody remembers the food at a wedding and not to worry about it.

We insisted on a good caterer who could actually serve hot food, instead of that limp cold mush that usually ends up out of those serving trays.

It was amazing food and they did an amazing job with it.

And people remember it as one of the great parts of our wedding. Totally worth it.

Food, music, and making memories is the main thing I hear about. None have to be super expensive, just memorable.

I'd say don't try to get too exotic or fancy with the food. Just make sure it's good quality (doesn't have to be great, just good). Do that, and you'll have beaten over half of the wedding receptions I've been to.

If I can go to a local BBQ joint, spend $10 on a pulled pork sandwich and baked potato, and feel like I had a 3x tastier meal than the $40+ you spent per plate at the wedding (or whatever crazy number it is nowadays), then I think you screwed up.

And I am not a picky eater at all. There are a lot of people much much pickier than me.

When you try to get super fancy then a lot of people won't care for it, because they don't have the same palates that you do (when you average people out, they collectively have a very boring palate, it seems to me).

Food was by far our largest expense, but not because we choose the fancy fish and steak options. Instead we picked lots of food we wished we had been served at weddings we had been to. Tasty comfort foods, like a mashed potato bar (add your own toppings) and buffalo chicken sliders and lots of little tapas-style treats. We got so much positive feedback on the simple items, and continue to do so to this day. So glad we resisted the urge to serve uptight "fancy" selections!

Yeah, you did it right in my opinion. Good on you for resisting the urge to make everything fancy.

This was a fun read! When I got married the invitations were very important to my wife, but I built a website to handle RSVP (with my mother as a fallback phone#). It was a fun project, I had my wife help me design it and I also found the tally-at-a-glance helpful. I'm sorry you have to read all this bile about how you did your wedding, but I'm glad you had fun with it!

We did something similar for our wedding, except that I skipped SMS and used Google forms and sheets for all the organisation. I don't think we actually had the mobile numbers of all our guests... even some of the email addresses had to be pre-procured. My wife and I could keep track of things just by going to our Google drives, and I didn't feel the need to write any scripts. In your opinion, what was the main advantage of using SMS? Was it the part about keeping up to date on rsvp stats?

Speed of confirmation, stats were useful as a show off feature. I had considered using email but as with postal I didn't have everyones address (can't actually think of the last time I emailed friends), we had around 90% of peoples telephone numbers and so it became the logical mode of communication for this project.

I had thought about a phone call out with a prerecorded message to our guests and then collect their input via dtmf ;) But SMS was the easiest method for our needs, but it depends on what networks your guests use I guess.

I've seen many of my friends get married and it can be so expensive (tens of thousands) and for a single day!

Did you automate the Thank You's as well? That would be a time saver!

I did want to! However my wife put a stop to that idea....

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