About a year and half ago, I married my wife and we had a huge wedding in the Washington D.C. area. It was one of the happiest days of my life, but the months of planning for it were actually kind of stressful. I just switched jobs and was working full-time at a new company while also taking classes for a Master’s program from George Mason University. Juggling work, school, family & friends, while also trying to plan a wedding wasn’t easy. Here were some of our pain points in the planning process:
- We had no idea of how much the wedding would cost. We wanted to know how much we should be saving to pay for the wedding. We would find random stats about how much weddings would cost in general, but every wedding seems so different based on services needed or location. There had to be a way where we could just provide some basic information about what we were looking for and get a good estimate of what we could expect to pay.
- We didn’t know where to start our search for vendors. I remember searching one of the online wedding directories and found over 10,000 wedding vendors in the Washington D.C area alone. It was pretty overwhelming.
- Just figuring our whether vendors were in our budget and available for our date was like dealing with a car salesman. This was probably the most annoying part. We had a pretty strict budget and did not want to waste time visiting and talking to vendors who were out of our price range. The problem was that you won’t know whether they are in your price range until you initiate the conversation first.
It reminded me of trying to book a hotel before websites like Hotwire or trying to get a car quote before TrueCar. I knew their had to be an easier way to connect with vendors and get the information we were looking for. Around that time, one of the classes I was taking was an E-commerce class which is where the idea of EventKickstart was born. I wanted to build a service that would make it easier for people planning events to connect with vendors. Instead of people planning events having to search and contact vendors, they would just have to provide information about their event (once instead of repeating the same info to every vendor they contact) and have interested vendors contact them with details about their services and quotes. I didn’t end up using EventKickstart for my class project, but I started working on it slowly in my spare time. I eventually made enough progress and founded EventKickstart LLC.