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Comment by limedaring | Hacker News Reader

I would love feedback about the product and any interesting ideas about growing/monetizing. Thanks HN! :)

First, beautiful design and implementation!

A couple ideas for growing and monetizing:

- partner with wedding planners to help grow your community of designers and users - start subtle (prime placement or pro's choice) advertising relationships with magazines, planners, and other communities - expand to include other aspects of the wedding "package", i.e photographers, florists, dressmakers/designers

Another point - I agree that adding customer reviews would be a nice addition, but how about a twist - allow for "trip advisor" style reviews to show off the designer's end product. This niche has a large emotional buying component to it and so a story and pictures would lend itself better than a 5 star system.

Good suggestion. As well as advertising, affiliate sales could also work well. In both cases the key point is that people looking at invitations will also be looking or other wedding-related services.

I left a comment, but it didn't have to do with monetizing.

You might be able to monetize it by, once having the designs completed, making it a one stop shop for doing the rest of the printing too.

However, this could be a logistical nightmare if you've never done printing before, so... tread lightly.

Yeah... that's a problem I'll be encountering with WeddingType someday. The printing aspect scares me, which is why v1 of WeddingType is PDF generation for print at home. :P

I think it might be a good idea to check out Mixergy's interview of Timothy Chi, one of the founders of WeddingWire.com http://mixergy.com/timothy-chi-weddingwire-interview/

Thanks for passing this on, I'll check it out!

What do you think about this?

Testimonials for each designer. A design someone posts might be beautiful but what if they lack in the delivery department. Some sort of customer reviews would be nice to have and let people know how dependable they are.

-update Going back and playing around with the site a little more its obvious that your the gateway for each of these designers. By incorporating a rating system for each designer you could be the "Angie's list" of wedding desigers

I like the customer reviews idea -- Airbnb- or Yelp-style come to mind, though by no means are they the only models which should be considered for influence -- and it's important to keep in mind opening these flood gates should never be taken lightly.

Interesting. Also creates a "chicken and the egg" problem — if someone wanted to rate their designer who didn't have a profile, what would happen? How would I convince people to rate their designers unless I tracked them finding the designer though the site in the first place, getting into a bigger middleman position that I originally wanted to be in?

Good questions to ask myself, thanks for the comment. :)

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