Comment by verelo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by verelo | Hacker News Reader

My wife and i just went through this for our wedding. A few remarks from that experience that might be helpful:

1. Versions matter - she'd often make a draft and want to tell me "ok tell me if you like this better than the previous version". Id just compare the cells above to the cells below.

2. We organized people based on common interests - these people are very into music, these are very into home renovations, these people work in tech...etc. Tagging people with "attributes" and letting the system try optimize for as much overlap as possible would have been amazing.

3. Warn me of duplicates - sometimes in the copy paste madeness, we'd double up someone.

4. Import - We almost missed someone due to me skipping a line in the initial transription of their name into the spreadsheet.

5. At the end of the day guests need to find their seat. I made a QR code that linked to a website where people could type their name to find their table (https://andrewmcgrath.info/wedding) we didn't want to use a big board, it was 1 more thing to make (the website was a 2 hr project i did the day before) and the QR codes were just print outs we put in dollar store photo frames at the entrance, the bar and at the end of the day...we got great feedback over this. With the guest lists, you could easily automate making someone this website.

Good luck!

As someone who organized very popular parties back in my teenage years: Whatever you optimize for, don't overdo it. Good social events are all about the right mixture between familar/safe and the unknown/dangerous. Match people too closely and you will bore people, I am not saying you should seat people randomly, but also consider which interests might add to each other.

I agree that having serendipity adds to the mix. This tool is more an iterative tool, meant to help guide the decisions, rather than being prescriptive.

> I am not saying you should seat people randomly

With the exception of people who would throw hands at each other, this actually doesn't seem like an awful idea.

It is an awful idea because it will make most people sad not to be next to the ones they love, like spouses and friends

I mean grouping people that want to be together and then mixing those at random might not be the worst approach.

Yeah it’s very tricky and an art for sure. We spent a lot of time on it, i feel like we really nailed it because it was all about finding overlap but also creating introductions. We intentionally split up many friend groups because we knew they’d gravitate at the bar and dance floor anyway, so ideally getting them to meet new people over dinner was going to create an even bigger party - and it for sure did.

So yeah all to say, you’re right and it’s very unique for each gathering and its audience as to which approach you should take.

Thanks for the great feedback!

I agree with versions mattering. At the top, there's every version right now. Probably needs better UX.

Yea, I agree with adding attributes. I wasn't sure if most people would understand that UX. But it's on the roadmap, in lieu of groups.

Yep, dupes are definitely a thing. There's lots of places where everyone has the same names, though, so it could get annoying. Think Bali (5 names cycled), Korea (everyone's last name is similar). I haven't worked on this UX yet.

Great idea with the QR code generator! I'll have to look into this feature.

Ah yeah i see the versioning now. I didnt get what was happening there before but i do now. This feels more to me like an audit log, which while helpful doesnt really do what i had hoped. Seeing 1 person move at a time isnt super practical, our edits were more like "these 10 people are now in different spots" and i just want to compare before to after, the in between while interesting isn't the visual im hoping to discover.

Interesting point about duplicates and names. We had a lot of Andrew's (including me) but we didn't have any identical matches if we included last names (which fortunatly everyone had). I guess as long as you can acknowledge them and have the warnings go away that would be enough.

Checkout the UX of the auto-complete for that website i made. My goal was so it would basically find your table as quick as possible, and the website is designed only for phones as i assumed the number of guests that brought a laptop would be somewhat limited :P

I considered turning that website into it's own little startup, but frankly, the idea of running a business with no repeat customers (or...with a duration between purchases so low that i'd basically be acquiring them every time) was not very attractive to me. Then again, everything else i've worked on in between has been worthless, so i might as well have haha!

Yea, I agree the versioning isn't really there yet.

Definitely great idea for the autocomplete and seat finder. Right now, I'm not storing any data on the server, so can't do lookup. Also I worry about personal data leakage.

I was thinking this could turn into a business of referrals, as anyone who uses it will probably know others who need it. And I was going to do this for free for smaller events.

You'd need to pay subscription to keep data, or for more advanced tools. Simple events don't really need much though.

Anyway, would love to hear any other thoughts you have! Your site looks very lovely and usable, which is what really matters!

Sounds great, yeah i think having a free lead gen offering that you can somehow cross-sell into another product line is the way to work here. Once you have some "customer data" like "size of wedding" you are positioned to experiment with suggestions.

Good luck!

Wedding Planners seems like the ideal target market for this. It's a task that must be a opinion for wedding planners, since the couple have to do it, and they put it off (cause its hard).

Making it friction free for the couple (the planner pays, the couple use a planner assigned login), plus making it easy, allows the planner to gather the information from the couple, and then keep pushing plans at them.

A simple guest-list integration (suggested, invited, rsvpd) seems like the next step, and I expect diet requirements etc.

Then again I expect this software already exists and existing planners already use it, so this route may be full. Do some research first.

I agree that "plan your own wedding" .com would be hard to sell because it's one-time customers so acquisition cost us high, and lifetime value per customer is low. So best done as a side-project.

Agree! There's TAM, TAC, and Churn at play here. Total Addressable Market, Traffic Acquisition Costs, and "Churn".

TAM - How many people can you serve "all people getting married || just planners"

TAC - How costly is it to make a sale your TAM? "word-of-mouth-individuals || trade-magazine-planners"

Churn - How many people will still be using your software one month or one year from now? "0% || 75%"

The numbers on the right hand side are soooo much better for a healthy business than on the left hand side.

Target this to party planners, wedding planners, event planners (at hotels, eg: Mariott, etc).

Assume you are the back-office magician for the "group events" manager at an all-inclusive hotel. You need to have super-on-point branding so that all GUESTS know to ask for "super-seating-chart-9000", which is only available to "party planning professionals", and has the appropriate QR codes, logos, URL's, etc.

Make sure that you have both paper and digital "intake forms" (99% of events managers will want to send them a spreadsheet, or copy/paste from a spreadsheet)... make sure that you have appropriate branding, etc (eg: a google sheets template with instructions on the first tab, etc.)

Your TAM for individuals is "everyone getting married this year" or "sometimes a conference or family reunion". Your TAM for planners is like 1/100000th and your TAC is higher (you have to convince them to spend a monthly retainer fee and/or pass along charges to the happy couple as if you were a vendor, eg: $50 seating chart fee invoice)... buuuuut each planner that you acquire is effectively recurring revenue (or recurring usage) compared to working directly with individuals, so your churn is much much lower.

The business you'd be getting into is kindof "fake back office support for luxury hotel event planners", which means do you branch out to also be kindof a vendor portal (eg: digital photo booths, printable/shippable table stands, digital name tags printing, etc.).

As a matter of fact, look around at conference/convention software (especially name tags!) as I remember hearing that's a surprisingly complicated market that no one really specializes in. Getting a foothold there would be helpful. Super-agree with parent comment "bruce" w.r.t. dietary restrictions, tagging/attributes, managing some sort of digital RSVP (live w/ the google sheet?) would be really helpful.

Also think about the negative case - which people should not sit on the same table because they don't get along too well or will start a neverending dialogue?

Yep, there's already a way to select guests and keep them separated in the UI. Give it a try and lemme know what you think!

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