Show HN: How HN helped us pay for our wedding.

So my fiance and I are addicted to Hacker News and we have learned a lot about startups on here. We had an idea for a startup that would have taken a lot of time and resources to build but thanks to Hacker News we have learned about people like Eric Ries, Steven Blank and the whole customer development strategy.

We decided to build the MVP for our startup to see if there was a market for our original idea and also raise money for our wedding. We shaved off all of the crazy features and launched https://www.crowdbundle.com/

Hacker News taught us to build a MVP and make sure there was a market first: By getting people to make purchases so far we have been able to validate that we are providing something of value and the right people are being targeted.

We learned you need to charge money from day one when you are bootstrapping. This was an easy decision because we want to know if we are providing something of value to the right people. If people are willing to actually take out the credit card and pay us for something then we can measure how valuable they find our product.

We learned about social hooks for making a product or service go viral. We all know push marketing is not very effective but personal recommendations are. That is why we have integrated twitter and facebook into the checkout process. If someone is willing to let us tweet or update the facebook wall on their behalf to show a personal recommendation for our product we now have personal recommendations towards their friends. To promote this activity we built a system that gives major discounts for such behavior.

If anyone has any other suggestions to help validate our MVP please let use know. :-)