And Then He Said: Let's Fly Like an Eagle!

Hi there, I'm Vadim, founder of Wedding Planning Assitant, and this is my three short stories about that.

Not follow your competitors.

When you saw what your competitors already have done, you are trying to do the same, but a bit or much better. This is a trap! The stamp of how it should work already sticks in your mind. The better thing that you can do is not see how it works before you have your own vision and opinion.

A few years ago, I played with drawing SVG programmatically, and it turned into a table layout builder. I asked myself, who need this? And the obvious answer was - weddings! I was married, and I know how it was not easy to plan my wedding. Thus, the Wedding Planner Assistant was born.

Scale it!

It's really easy to make the wedding guests seated. And then export this information to PDF or Excel file.

Day by day, I polished the table layout builder feature. And when I checked what on the market exists, I have seen my solution goes much further.

I'm sure... If I had explored competitors first, it was a struggle to build what I have right now. To hack something, you need to follow your own way with an empty head. Without luggage!

Follow your competitors.

On the other hand, everyone can get stuck in non-competence if being isolated from exploring competitors. Observing the world makes us more experienced, that is a fact.

When I realized that I build the wedding planning tools, I started to explore the wedding sector. The big players were established in the 00s, already huge. How to compete with them? I have seen hundreds of wedding websites and portals. My research showed me that all these wedding websites look the same. All as one! White colors, many images, web 3.0.

But we need to stand out... Nothing can be better than black text on a white background. I always thought so! I have decided to make an experimental design.

1. Use gradient background for the entire website
2. Monochromatic colors
3. No images! (except uploaded content)
4. Only SVG illustrations.
5. Reactive UI, let's name it web 4.0

Here is the result:

Shoot! This is crazy stuff! It seems like you try olives for the first time in childhood. You can't understand you like this taste or not. But when you tried your N olive, you definitely love it.

If you are going to make your product better, you have to know your competitors, how they look, and how they operate.

Negotiate

Give a dog a bad name and hang him.

I would like to replace "dog" with "ship", it sounds more organically.

The ship is the domain name. When you start building a new business, first you want to give a name for your ship and get the domain. My goal was to make it simple. I found out that the domains .wedding exist. And I bought http://assistant.wedding, that seems great, but not perfect.

After a while, I understood the newlyweds-to-be involved in the wedding planning process. And the word planning is an essential key! Literally a good fit for SEO also.

The domain planning.wedding was occupied and was on sale. The price started at $800, but I expected to spend around $300. I sent a short message to the seller: "I have expected to spend ~$300, but this system is set the minimum by default $400. Therefore It's coming over my budget =) I don't have extra money for this acquisition. If you can sell it for $400, I will be grateful to you. If no, I'm ok with it. I'll keep searching for alternatives." That's it!

I got the response:

You received a $400 counteroffer on planning.wedding

If you see that something is expensive that you can't pay for, you can always try to negotiate!

I bought https://planning.wedding

In the end, my business name is Wedding Planning Assistant. You might notice. This domain name makes branding blurry. Since no unique direct business keywords there, but this is one more experimental thing I try. So, I suppose that Wedding Planning can be a brand itself.

Let's fly like an eagle!

Ladies and geeks. I would be grateful if you can place the https://planning.wedding link to your website (even if you are not in the wedding sector). The purpose is to try crowd marketing, get a back-link, and become higher in the search results. Let's kick off the wedding party together.

I can suggest text anchors.

1. Wedding planning
2. The best wedding website
3. Online wedding planner
4. Wedding ideas and tools
5. Wedding venues near me

This is my first story on the Hakernoon.

Happy hacking! And stay safe!

- Vadim (founder of Wedding Planning Assistant)