Thought it was time that I announce my next project, currently under development. Wedding Crowd is a social wedding planning site that is going to change the way brides choose their vendors.
I originally approached the development of this idea from the social side. I didn't think facebook was a good platform for sharing details about your wedding as you were planning it. I talked to a number of past and future brides who confirmed my assumption. A lot of brides get help from their bridesmaid, but most of that is coordinated via text message and email. So I set out to build a site where brides can communicate with their bridal parties and anyone else they wanted to include in the discussion.
As I began to research the market, I kept reading about pinterest and how many women were using it to organize ideas for their weddings. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that would be a perfect way to let vendors know exactly what you want for your wedding.
So my basic concept is to build a site where the bride and anyone else she wants to invite can privately discuss, rate and share ideas and pictures. The bride could then organize different boards that the images were classified into. For example she could have one board with all the pictures of flowers, one for dresses, another for hair and makeup, for each of the aspects of her wedding she would need to a vendor for.
Once she organized the board how she wants, she could then publish the board which makes the details of what she wants viewable by local wedding vendors that also subscribe to the site. These vendors could respond with a proposal that includes comments that describe how they could help her bring her ideas to fruition and even include pictures from their gallery that demonstrate this.
She could even share a public url for the board with local vendors of her choosing who would be able to respond as well without having to subscribe to the site.
That's the 1000 foot view of the concept we're building. I'm working with my sister on this one, who is getting married in the fall. She's already blogging and tweeting. And I put up a landing page at WeddingCrowd.com where you can see our shiny new logo and sign up to be notified when we launch.
I'll post more on the technical details later, but implementation wise, we'll be building it using MVC 3, Azure, SQL Azure, Table and Queue Storage, Facebook API among other technologies.
If you're recently married, planning your wedding or a wedding vendor, I'd love to hear from you.
