6 ms·

A wedding gift for our co-founder became our startup's newest product.

107 points by hillel 17y ago

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
very cool! can we get a blog post on more of the back story?
- hillel 17y ago
  Here's the announcement blog post: http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for-you-wedding-video-guestbook-kiosk-software-for-the-mac/ http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for-you-... Basically, a year and a half ago we decided to focus more on software we could charge for (vs. ad/sponsorhsip supported). At the top of our list was a storytelling app called A Story Before Bed (www.astorybeforebed.com) which we shipped this past November. But Jenny (our co-founder) was getting married last August so we paused our development on our primary product and spent some time developing Thrilled for You - a video guestbook for Jenny's wedding reception. Things have calmed down a little since we shipped A Story Before Bed, and we realized we still have the app we wrote for Jenny. With wedding season coming in a few months we did some more testing, tweaked the UI, came up with a bunch of themes, and put together the website for Thrilled for You (www.thrilledforyou.com) and offered it for sale as of yesterday. :) There are so many things we love about having our own startup... the ability to do things like this is definitely one of them. We feel the software we make is so personal when it comes out of a need we had ourselves. Thanks for asking for more details. :)
  - gridspy 17y ago
    What a cool story. Thanks for sharing it. Sounds like you followed the ideal from the SvN post on reusing your own 'by-products' http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products Talk about a nice pivot - Wedding software is a great niche. Once your software is in the reception, it could do lots of other cool stuff. Guest lists, aggregation of iPhone / photo content from guests and speech programs come to mind. It could even live-blog the content it gets into a timeline online during the reception. You could have a stack of 100 cards with a key on them next to the PC, accessing the online site requires a card as the login for privacy. Purchasing 100 more cards is a $10 transaction online and covers the timeline service.
yashodhan 17y ago
I'd love to hear more, too. I wish I had thought of this!
fname 17y ago
make it work for Windows?
- hillel 17y ago
  If there are enough requests we'll definitely consider making a Windows version. :)
  - Frazzydee 17y ago
    Keep in mind that many of your potential customers will see that it's Mac-only and just move on. Windows is still by far the market leader, and you're really limiting your potential market by not having Windows support. That being said, this seems like the type of product that Mac users would be more likely to go for, so you could just hold off on a Windows version until you know whether the product is viable (based on sales) One more thing: The "buy" button is not obviously for that purpose, and I was about to comment asking whether you can only buy from within the demo. Consider rewording the button to make it clear that that's where you buy the product from.
    - acgourley 17y ago
      But what does the market look like for "laptops with webcams"? Windows might still be winning, but I bet its not by much.
      - karanbhangui 17y ago
        What? Most windows laptops i've seen in stores have webcams.
ashishk 17y ago
wow what a great idea! nowhere close to getting married, but i'd love to have this at my wedding.
dpcan 17y ago
I'm going to be synical first, and it may come across as mean, but it's the honest truth in my opinion... Yes, if there's one more thing I wish I had to do at my wedding, it would have to be tech support for the web cam that wasn't working properly on the Guestbook Mac. I also wish that every one of my guests put their hands all over my computer as they walked in and out the door. Also, when they get drunk, I don't want them trying to film something for me while they stumble over my expensive computer with an open container. Now, enough being a jerk. I think some kind of mashup between live streaming and wedding templates is more appropriate since people already have video recorders in their pockets on their phones now. Why not setup a public DropBox folder that everyone can drop their iPhone photos into while at the wedding? I just don't think this idea was very thoroughly thought out. Putting your expensive Mac at the front door of the reception hall just seems ridiculous.
- pavel_lishin 17y ago
  I hate to be that guy... ... but my mac's camera has always Just Worked.
  - dagw 17y ago
    Even after someone poured a glass of wine over it?
cschep 17y ago
very cool! The music on the video threw me a little bit, maybe I'm just too much of an english centric guy. Also, I'd love to have heard the voices of the people come through a little bit. Maybe as a sample, but maybe just because if someone is talking at a camera I want to know it they are saying for some reason? Again, very cool!
briancooley 17y ago
I like this so much. $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, it's a big market, and this seems so much less intrusive than the traditional "Aunt Ethel with a camcorder" approach. One thing that stuck out to me was that the guy in the purple tie was a little out of frame. That would have made my wife object to this idea for fear that everyone would end up with their heads cut off. FWIW, I'd maybe move that part to the end or cut it altogether. Like the music, too.
- techiferous 17y ago
  "$99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings" Sad but true.
  - johns 17y ago
    It is sad. With how some weddings are you could probably get away with selling them a $1200 iMac with this preinstalled and configured and people wouldn't even notice the price.
    - yaacovtp 17y ago
      Adding an iMac to my registry right now...
ashishbharthi 17y ago
I love the idea. You people might want to talk to wedding photographers or planners to promote this idea.
spiffage 17y ago
This is a good call. My buddy had me put together a system like this for his wedding a few months ago. I was shocked that it didn't already exist.
callmeed 17y ago
As someone who sells products to several thousand wedding professionals (mostly photographers) and who has photographed plenty of weddings, here's what I think: - Instead of a "bulk discount for professionals", you should just sell them a $399 version that they can use to modify each title (looks like it's just a PNG file in the resources anyway). - I can't see a bride and groom buying this very often–they are already busy and budget-conscious ... but I could see a best man, parent or bridesmaid doing it (assuming they had a macbook available). They often are bringing a laptop for a slideshow anyway, so it could work. - I think the price might be a little high ... $49 to $79 seems more reasonable to me–especially since I'm still doing all the editing/uploading/sharing work myself afterwards. - Use wedding blogs to get the word out and offer up some free demos or prizes. There are blogs for fancy weddings, green weddings, DIY weddings, budget weddings, etc.–and they are very popular with brides. It's a good way to get noticed. - I can probably help you spread the word among some wedding photographers (including some who have well-read blogs). A lot of them are doing video too (as many SLRs now do HD video) so they could easily incorporate these into a DVD. Plus, several are doing photobooths or slideshows at receptions. I'll blog about it too if you'd like–feel free to get in touch. I could get some photographers using it this weekend and giving you feedback.
- IgorPartola 17y ago
  I don't own a Mac and I'm married already so might opinion might not matter that much, but if I was getting married, I'd want the videographer to set this up. Somehow I don't feel comfortable buying this kind of a thing for $99, but if a videographer charged me $99 to have a Macbook (better yet an iPad!) at my wedding where people could easily record video messages, I'd feel much better about it. The difference is that it becomes the videographer's problem if something breaks. Otherwise, if I bought it and brought my own computer to set it up I would (a) worry that somebody stole my beloved laptop and (b) something went wrong and nobody is actually able to record the videos. Targeting this at videographers might not bring in as much dough, but it seems to me it would have a higher chance of having satisfied end clients.
  - thinkzig 17y ago
    This. I was worried about so many other things on my wedding day. The last thing I'd want to fret over was doing tech support for a laptop and piece of video software. Most of my groomsmen were top-notch tech guys and I wouldn't even want them to worry about it. They were there for me, my wife, and our wedding day, not to play help desk tech. But if this was something our videographer or photographer had offered I would've jumped on it in an instant.
Timothee 17y ago
I really like the idea. And the design is very nice (be it for the site or the app) One thing though is that, from the site, I'm not really sure what I would get and in what form: where are the videos? are you hosting them? how do I change the settings of the app? do I get some kind of video album? I see that the demo file left a couple of videos in my Movies folder, so I get it: I pay $99 to have the custom software with the right names and date, and it saves everything as local files in my Movies folder. But, in that case, $99 is a lot of money! Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a one-time use app, right? I only get that one customized version for one wedding? That feels very very expensive… it's a nice packaging for PhotoBooth pretty much. And yes, for a wedding, that packaging makes a big difference, but I don't think I could buy it myself. That being said, as Brian Cooley said, $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, so I think that you could make some money with that (as I said, for a wedding the packaging is very important, thus the money will follow). edit: to sum up, I'd say that it's a nice idea but to justify the $99 I think it would need to actually produce some kind of "video guestbook", something similar to an iMovie template, or what Animoto does. After the event, I just get a bunch of video files that I need to do something with…
- Timothee 17y ago
  Let me add some comments on the interface: (based on the demo app) - the names on the image looks super badly compressed, you might want to make sure the image looks super clean and sharp - I found the buttons kind of confusing while recording: "Review", "Re-do", "I'm done!". The first time, I clicked "I'm done" to stop the recording… and ended up at the beginning, not being able to review what I did. I would put only "Stop" while recording, with automatic preview afterwards and then "Re-do" and "I'm done!" (or "Save" to make it even clearer) - add a Cancel button actually. - the countdown tended to skip "2" - make the cursor a pointer when it's hovering buttons - I'd make the "Recording" state more obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the recording starts with "… oh it started!" Maybe a blinking red border around the video feed? The blinking "Recording" is a little faint to me, and it might be even more in a reception room.
- c3o 17y ago
  Regarding the Animoto proposal: You should look into the Stupeflix API (http://www.stupeflix.com/api http://www.stupeflix.com/api), which could easily automatically stitch the videos together into something that looks impressive. Let me know if you would like a personal intro to the Stupeflix guys.
faramarz 17y ago
What a fantastic Idea! This little innovation here will probably create the most value the night of the wedding.. besides the obvious. I got goosebumps watching the demo. I can see myself using this at my wedding.. the next step now is finding a wife! haha Intrinsic product! Please do all you can to keep your idea in publics eye. I bookmarked your service, but i'm not sure I will remember the name when it comes to actually needing it.
winter_blue 17y ago
imho $99 is a bit too steep..
aantix 17y ago
Photo booths have been mentioned and it's probably worth repeating. I've been to a couple of weddings where they rented out a photo booth and allowed the wedding attendees to take photos of themselves with their significant others. Of course by the end of the night, they're really goofy. The bride&groom got one copy of the photos, the picture takers got the other copy. You should have a "photo booth" option where someone could just walk up, click the photo booth option, and the system takes four timed photos (usually about 5 seconds in between poses). http://www.rentphotobooths.com/ http://www.rentphotobooths.com/ You could then put those photos in the album. Not everyone wants to give a personal video message (especially if you're shy and in an open reception hall), but maybe more (especially if drunk) would like to get a little crazy and contribute some goofy photos.
- aantix 17y ago
  Oh, and allow them to type a little message to accompany their goofy photos. :)
howcool 17y ago
Great idea, but you should make one for plain and simpel "parties" and not just limit it to weddings IMHO I would buy one for my Bday party probably for example
- hillel 17y ago
  Agreed. With enough demand... we'll add more versions. :)
mcotton 17y ago
I'm about to get married and I love the idea. I need to think about who I am going to entrust my macbook to. I'll ask the mrs. and get her opinion on it. I think this is a great idea.
otakucode 17y ago
Great product idea! But I have one recommendation that I think, though it would certainly take effort, especially if your company is mostly Mac programmers, would pay off bigtime. Offer hardware. Knock together an Atom-based system that comes preloaded with the software (obviously this would not be an OSX machine, a free stripped-down Linux distro would probably be a much better idea) that can be sold to the professional videographers or photographers, or even venue owners. This would open up the people that don't own Macs and, more importantly, the market of people uncomfortable with computers who wouldn't feel comfortable with investing this kind of money and importance in a software product and their computer.
prbuckley 17y ago
If you were to offer a hardware system a modbook might be a good choice... http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook You could do the video and hand written guest notes on the same device.
almost 17y ago
It's my parent's sliver wedding soon and they're having a big party. This seems like quite a cool idea and I was considering setting it up for them. I'm not having too good a time with the demo though. I ran the program and it popped up the thingy with the video stream and the name box, but then keyboard didn't seem to work. The record your message button just pops up the "whoops you forgot to type your names" message and there appears to be no other way of shutting the darn thing down. I was just about to switch off the mac (and lose unsaved work in Photoshop) when the 10 minute timer kicked in and it shut itself down. Still, sort out that bit and I think it's a great idea.

107 points by hillel 17y ago

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

very cool! can we get a blog post on more of the back story?

hillel 17y ago
Here's the announcement blog post: http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for-you-wedding-video-guestbook-kiosk-software-for-the-mac/ http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2010/02/07/thrilled-for-you-... Basically, a year and a half ago we decided to focus more on software we could charge for (vs. ad/sponsorhsip supported). At the top of our list was a storytelling app called A Story Before Bed (www.astorybeforebed.com) which we shipped this past November. But Jenny (our co-founder) was getting married last August so we paused our development on our primary product and spent some time developing Thrilled for You - a video guestbook for Jenny's wedding reception. Things have calmed down a little since we shipped A Story Before Bed, and we realized we still have the app we wrote for Jenny. With wedding season coming in a few months we did some more testing, tweaked the UI, came up with a bunch of themes, and put together the website for Thrilled for You (www.thrilledforyou.com) and offered it for sale as of yesterday. :) There are so many things we love about having our own startup... the ability to do things like this is definitely one of them. We feel the software we make is so personal when it comes out of a need we had ourselves. Thanks for asking for more details. :)
- gridspy 17y ago
  What a cool story. Thanks for sharing it. Sounds like you followed the ideal from the SvN post on reusing your own 'by-products' http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products Talk about a nice pivot - Wedding software is a great niche. Once your software is in the reception, it could do lots of other cool stuff. Guest lists, aggregation of iPhone / photo content from guests and speech programs come to mind. It could even live-blog the content it gets into a timeline online during the reception. You could have a stack of 100 cards with a key on them next to the PC, accessing the online site requires a card as the login for privacy. Purchasing 100 more cards is a $10 transaction online and covers the timeline service.

yashodhan 17y ago

I'd love to hear more, too. I wish I had thought of this!

fname 17y ago

make it work for Windows?

hillel 17y ago
If there are enough requests we'll definitely consider making a Windows version. :)
- Frazzydee 17y ago
  Keep in mind that many of your potential customers will see that it's Mac-only and just move on. Windows is still by far the market leader, and you're really limiting your potential market by not having Windows support. That being said, this seems like the type of product that Mac users would be more likely to go for, so you could just hold off on a Windows version until you know whether the product is viable (based on sales) One more thing: The "buy" button is not obviously for that purpose, and I was about to comment asking whether you can only buy from within the demo. Consider rewording the button to make it clear that that's where you buy the product from.
  - acgourley 17y ago
    But what does the market look like for "laptops with webcams"? Windows might still be winning, but I bet its not by much.
    - karanbhangui 17y ago
      What? Most windows laptops i've seen in stores have webcams.

ashishk 17y ago

wow what a great idea! nowhere close to getting married, but i'd love to have this at my wedding.

dpcan 17y ago

I'm going to be synical first, and it may come across as mean, but it's the honest truth in my opinion... Yes, if there's one more thing I wish I had to do at my wedding, it would have to be tech support for the web cam that wasn't working properly on the Guestbook Mac. I also wish that every one of my guests put their hands all over my computer as they walked in and out the door. Also, when they get drunk, I don't want them trying to film something for me while they stumble over my expensive computer with an open container. Now, enough being a jerk. I think some kind of mashup between live streaming and wedding templates is more appropriate since people already have video recorders in their pockets on their phones now. Why not setup a public DropBox folder that everyone can drop their iPhone photos into while at the wedding? I just don't think this idea was very thoroughly thought out. Putting your expensive Mac at the front door of the reception hall just seems ridiculous.

pavel_lishin 17y ago
I hate to be that guy... ... but my mac's camera has always Just Worked.
- dagw 17y ago
  Even after someone poured a glass of wine over it?

cschep 17y ago

very cool! The music on the video threw me a little bit, maybe I'm just too much of an english centric guy. Also, I'd love to have heard the voices of the people come through a little bit. Maybe as a sample, but maybe just because if someone is talking at a camera I want to know it they are saying for some reason? Again, very cool!

briancooley 17y ago

I like this so much. $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, it's a big market, and this seems so much less intrusive than the traditional "Aunt Ethel with a camcorder" approach. One thing that stuck out to me was that the guy in the purple tie was a little out of frame. That would have made my wife object to this idea for fear that everyone would end up with their heads cut off. FWIW, I'd maybe move that part to the end or cut it altogether. Like the music, too.

techiferous 17y ago
"$99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings" Sad but true.
- johns 17y ago
  It is sad. With how some weddings are you could probably get away with selling them a $1200 iMac with this preinstalled and configured and people wouldn't even notice the price.
  - yaacovtp 17y ago
    Adding an iMac to my registry right now...

ashishbharthi 17y ago

I love the idea. You people might want to talk to wedding photographers or planners to promote this idea.

spiffage 17y ago

This is a good call. My buddy had me put together a system like this for his wedding a few months ago. I was shocked that it didn't already exist.

callmeed 17y ago

As someone who sells products to several thousand wedding professionals (mostly photographers) and who has photographed plenty of weddings, here's what I think: - Instead of a "bulk discount for professionals", you should just sell them a $399 version that they can use to modify each title (looks like it's just a PNG file in the resources anyway). - I can't see a bride and groom buying this very often–they are already busy and budget-conscious ... but I could see a best man, parent or bridesmaid doing it (assuming they had a macbook available). They often are bringing a laptop for a slideshow anyway, so it could work. - I think the price might be a little high ... $49 to $79 seems more reasonable to me–especially since I'm still doing all the editing/uploading/sharing work myself afterwards. - Use wedding blogs to get the word out and offer up some free demos or prizes. There are blogs for fancy weddings, green weddings, DIY weddings, budget weddings, etc.–and they are very popular with brides. It's a good way to get noticed. - I can probably help you spread the word among some wedding photographers (including some who have well-read blogs). A lot of them are doing video too (as many SLRs now do HD video) so they could easily incorporate these into a DVD. Plus, several are doing photobooths or slideshows at receptions. I'll blog about it too if you'd like–feel free to get in touch. I could get some photographers using it this weekend and giving you feedback.

IgorPartola 17y ago
I don't own a Mac and I'm married already so might opinion might not matter that much, but if I was getting married, I'd want the videographer to set this up. Somehow I don't feel comfortable buying this kind of a thing for $99, but if a videographer charged me $99 to have a Macbook (better yet an iPad!) at my wedding where people could easily record video messages, I'd feel much better about it. The difference is that it becomes the videographer's problem if something breaks. Otherwise, if I bought it and brought my own computer to set it up I would (a) worry that somebody stole my beloved laptop and (b) something went wrong and nobody is actually able to record the videos. Targeting this at videographers might not bring in as much dough, but it seems to me it would have a higher chance of having satisfied end clients.
- thinkzig 17y ago
  This. I was worried about so many other things on my wedding day. The last thing I'd want to fret over was doing tech support for a laptop and piece of video software. Most of my groomsmen were top-notch tech guys and I wouldn't even want them to worry about it. They were there for me, my wife, and our wedding day, not to play help desk tech. But if this was something our videographer or photographer had offered I would've jumped on it in an instant.

Timothee 17y ago

I really like the idea. And the design is very nice (be it for the site or the app) One thing though is that, from the site, I'm not really sure what I would get and in what form: where are the videos? are you hosting them? how do I change the settings of the app? do I get some kind of video album? I see that the demo file left a couple of videos in my Movies folder, so I get it: I pay $99 to have the custom software with the right names and date, and it saves everything as local files in my Movies folder. But, in that case, $99 is a lot of money! Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a one-time use app, right? I only get that one customized version for one wedding? That feels very very expensive… it's a nice packaging for PhotoBooth pretty much. And yes, for a wedding, that packaging makes a big difference, but I don't think I could buy it myself. That being said, as Brian Cooley said, $99 is a drop in the bucket for most weddings, so I think that you could make some money with that (as I said, for a wedding the packaging is very important, thus the money will follow). edit: to sum up, I'd say that it's a nice idea but to justify the $99 I think it would need to actually produce some kind of "video guestbook", something similar to an iMovie template, or what Animoto does. After the event, I just get a bunch of video files that I need to do something with…

Timothee 17y ago
Let me add some comments on the interface: (based on the demo app) - the names on the image looks super badly compressed, you might want to make sure the image looks super clean and sharp - I found the buttons kind of confusing while recording: "Review", "Re-do", "I'm done!". The first time, I clicked "I'm done" to stop the recording… and ended up at the beginning, not being able to review what I did. I would put only "Stop" while recording, with automatic preview afterwards and then "Re-do" and "I'm done!" (or "Save" to make it even clearer) - add a Cancel button actually. - the countdown tended to skip "2" - make the cursor a pointer when it's hovering buttons - I'd make the "Recording" state more obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the recording starts with "… oh it started!" Maybe a blinking red border around the video feed? The blinking "Recording" is a little faint to me, and it might be even more in a reception room.
c3o 17y ago
Regarding the Animoto proposal: You should look into the Stupeflix API (http://www.stupeflix.com/api http://www.stupeflix.com/api), which could easily automatically stitch the videos together into something that looks impressive. Let me know if you would like a personal intro to the Stupeflix guys.

faramarz 17y ago

What a fantastic Idea! This little innovation here will probably create the most value the night of the wedding.. besides the obvious. I got goosebumps watching the demo. I can see myself using this at my wedding.. the next step now is finding a wife! haha Intrinsic product! Please do all you can to keep your idea in publics eye. I bookmarked your service, but i'm not sure I will remember the name when it comes to actually needing it.

winter_blue 17y ago

imho $99 is a bit too steep..

aantix 17y ago

Photo booths have been mentioned and it's probably worth repeating. I've been to a couple of weddings where they rented out a photo booth and allowed the wedding attendees to take photos of themselves with their significant others. Of course by the end of the night, they're really goofy. The bride&groom got one copy of the photos, the picture takers got the other copy. You should have a "photo booth" option where someone could just walk up, click the photo booth option, and the system takes four timed photos (usually about 5 seconds in between poses). http://www.rentphotobooths.com/ http://www.rentphotobooths.com/ You could then put those photos in the album. Not everyone wants to give a personal video message (especially if you're shy and in an open reception hall), but maybe more (especially if drunk) would like to get a little crazy and contribute some goofy photos.

aantix 17y ago
Oh, and allow them to type a little message to accompany their goofy photos. :)

howcool 17y ago

Great idea, but you should make one for plain and simpel "parties" and not just limit it to weddings IMHO I would buy one for my Bday party probably for example

hillel 17y ago
Agreed. With enough demand... we'll add more versions. :)

mcotton 17y ago

I'm about to get married and I love the idea. I need to think about who I am going to entrust my macbook to. I'll ask the mrs. and get her opinion on it. I think this is a great idea.

otakucode 17y ago

Great product idea! But I have one recommendation that I think, though it would certainly take effort, especially if your company is mostly Mac programmers, would pay off bigtime. Offer hardware. Knock together an Atom-based system that comes preloaded with the software (obviously this would not be an OSX machine, a free stripped-down Linux distro would probably be a much better idea) that can be sold to the professional videographers or photographers, or even venue owners. This would open up the people that don't own Macs and, more importantly, the market of people uncomfortable with computers who wouldn't feel comfortable with investing this kind of money and importance in a software product and their computer.

prbuckley 17y ago

If you were to offer a hardware system a modbook might be a good choice... http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook You could do the video and hand written guest notes on the same device.

almost 17y ago

It's my parent's sliver wedding soon and they're having a big party. This seems like quite a cool idea and I was considering setting it up for them. I'm not having too good a time with the demo though. I ran the program and it popped up the thingy with the video stream and the name box, but then keyboard didn't seem to work. The record your message button just pops up the "whoops you forgot to type your names" message and there appears to be no other way of shutting the darn thing down. I was just about to switch off the mac (and lose unsaved work in Photoshop) when the 10 minute timer kicked in and it shut itself down. Still, sort out that bit and I think it's a great idea.