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Comment by dstorrs | Hacker News Reader

I like your idea with the invites, but I'd suggest that you're only going halfway with it.

1) Guide the customer through creating professional-grade invites. That part is relatively straightforward.

2) Print and mail the invites

3) Provide an RSVP service available to the couple and their vendors -- the caterer needs to know who wants vegan food but, honestly, the bride and groom don't care.

Finally, if you REALLY want to provide something disruptive: take a handwriting sample from the bride and/or groom, turn it into a font, and produce the thank-you notes (they need to look hand-written). I have no idea how you would do this, but having been through a wedding myself I remember utterly loathing this part.

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My "WeddingType at its biggest" idea was Moo.com for wedding invitations — the place to go if you're looking for professional invitations on a budget. Printing and mailing has an interesting problem — would many couples mail the invites without first seeing it? Would they prefer to have all the invitations on hand to mail themselves, rather than the service mail for them?

Just thought of this: What if they went through the service, had a "sample" of their finished invite sent to them, and once they approve, then the service could send out the individual invitations. Printing just one custom invitation for each customer might be problematic, though. But something to think about, indeed.

Taking it a step further, you should probably also be developing an 'evite' style approach to invitations.

Target the eco-friendly, or the progressives, or the tree-huggers, and just bypass the paper market altogether, while still creating a new niche in upscale digital invitations.

Natural extensions on that theme include a digital registry, guestbook, etc.

Cocodot already does this cheap wedding invite idea well.

> something disruptive

Not to pee on your parade, but what you described is a neat idea, but it is not disruptive. Making something that would cut down the cost of a wedding by 50% and be so overwhelmingly and obviously beneficial as to become viral - that is disruptive. Otherwise it's just a noise on a market.

It's a start. You can't topple a giant by smashing into them head-on.

Not true. Sometimes something is so entrenched in society that unless you smash into it head-on nothing will happen, and you might even be seen as something stupid.

I agree with the fact that this is not "disruptive", when I opened the post I expected to get something that can help you cater you wedding for a fraction of the price or something, or a mechanism for to shop and rate wedding planners, something.

Now a REAL wedding disruptor would be a tool that auto-generates video/photos of you and your family at a wedding so you can send those out and skip whole wedding nonsense, and go drinking with all your combined friends for the evening.

> Now a REAL wedding disruptor would be a tool that > auto-generates video/photos of you and your family at a > wedding so you can send those out and skip whole wedding > nonsense, and go drinking with all your combined friends > for the evening.

No offense but...you've never been married, have you?

A wedding is a lot like a startup -- there's a whole lot of pain and frustration getting it launched, but launch day is a hell of a lot of fun -- not just for the bride and groom, but for the family and friends too. (The difference is that most people want a wedding.)

Besides, even if you found a customer base that would be willing to buy this, your mother would shoot you for not having her to your wedding. :>

I've used yourfonts before at work to generate fonts from handwriting. It's easy to use and about $10 - though bear in mind that it renders as individual letters, so the observant guests will twig that you've cut a corner on thank you notes!

http://www.yourfonts.com/fontgenerator/896673.html

(Disclosure: that's an affiliate link. If you want to get there without the affiliate link, here it is: http://www.yourfonts.com/ )

If you really wanted to be disruptive you'd invite everyone via. Facebook with a stylised HTML style invite and it would be all be free and you'd make money on lead-gen.

The world is probably not ready for that yet though.

Lemme guess... you're not married?

My initial thought was that this idea sucks - would you want to be remembered as the couple who sent out facebook invitations because you were too broke/tight to do this properly, this once-in-a-lifetime event?

But then, could your suggestion be cast as a couple making a statement to reduce paper usage? And if enough couples do this, what kind of dent could it make on aggregate?

Pros:

- electronic invitations mean no paper, no postage.

Cons:

- chances are, people will print out the invitation and directions.

Why not do both? Some people will love the Facebook option and the ability to RSVP immediately AND have their calendar updated automatically. Some people don't have a social network connection or prefer the old fashioned way. Or make the choice manually; Mom & Dad want paper, high school pals want Facebook/Twitter/Buzz/etc.

I'd agree. On thinking about it a bit, some people like to put the wedding invitations up on their mantel pieces and such and others aren't really bothered.

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