HN Explorer

Ask HN: Tools for Planning a Wedding

2 points by feynmanalgo ↗ HN
I'm planning a wedding and need recommendations for project management tools I can use. At the moment I have set up a Google Sheets with a budget calculations, contacts, Q&A, nextcloud for file storage (contracts, offers etc) and kanban board for task tracking. It would be good to have something more powerful and integrated.

7 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 12.0 ms ] thread
brudgers
A wedding planner?

Because such people have familiarity with resources and relationships with vendors, they have experience.

Good luck.

muzani
I second this. You're likely to make mistakes. Wedding planners sometimes get relationship discounts on certain days things, the same way that tour agencies do, so they might not even be that expensive.

It was enough effort to learn that I tried to set up a wedding planning company after my wedding, only to find that everyone does that and it's not too profitable.

Come to think of it, it would make a good app. There's all kinds of baby shower and gift apps, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a good cheap wedding planner service.

brudgers
Baby shower gifts can come to Des Moines from a warehouse in Secaucus.

To a first approximation all the major elements of a wedding have to be in Des Moines. Whatever exceptions there are the church is not among them.

Weddings are local. Apps don’t scale down to that granularity because busy wedding photographers, florists, and caterers don’t need to sign up for an app to get referrals.

muzani
Oh, I forgot that weddings are done very differently across cultures. In some cultures it might be fixed at a church, but for us, the wedding is often at the bride's home or in some hall in town. So that means the logistics of getting things to that area - catering, chairs, tents.

"Apps don’t scale down to that granularity because busy wedding photographers, florists, and caterers don’t need to sign up for an app to get referrals."

This argument can apply to everything else people sign up on apps for. Localized is fine for food delivery, and busy restaurants sign up for them.

Part of the appeal is finding the non-busy ones. During wedding season, caterers and photographers are often fully booked, and one needs to make a lot of phone calls just to find one that isn't. And of course the new service providers want some way to do marketing. There is a successful app out here for finding wedding photographers but I'm not aware of one here to plan a whole wedding.

cableshaft
I think we used a combination of WeddingWire and Google sheets for us. I know we had a sheet with a column for each day and what needed to be done that day, and another sheet that kept track of contacts and addresses and RSVPs and whether we sent thank you cards or not, etc.

Doing everything for a wedding is already hard enough. You don't want to fight your tech at the same time. At least I didn't.