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This is a cool idea, there are lots of problems in this space. I worked on Rentabilities (https://angel.co/rentabilities https://angel.co/rentabilities) which

by aacook 11y ago

This is a cool idea, there are lots of problems in this space. I worked on Rentabilities (https://angel.co/rentabilities https://angel.co/rentabilities) which we ultimately shut down after 3 years. We focused on product rentals, which is just a sliver of the things you need for a wedding. We ran into lots of issues being a marketplace. We were able to scale the demand side nicely with 150k long tail visitors each month (things like "backyard wedding tent rental" or "scooby doo bouncy castle") and hundreds of quote requests each day. I'd say 15-20% of requests mentioned weddings. We were able to get merchants to sign up, but only by calling them on the phone (email just didn't work). The merchants were pretty bad at responding to emails. We tried a bidding system where we exposed the vendor names but the overall response was negative. We iterated to a product that looked alot like Operator or Magic, with merchants and consumers texting with a small group of customer service people (starting with our internal team) in the middle. One thing you're up against with rentals or event services is a timeline: In general a wedding or birthday party is an emotional event and people want to get everything booked fast. This means that often times we'd spend hours researching an event for someone, only to have them not book because it wasn't fast enough. Booking rates were higher for requests we could fill multiple quotes on faster, but it was really hard to fill them fast because the merchants were slow. At one point we did some research into weddings and found that wedding coordinators like to work with trusted vendors, usually over the phone or in person, directly. They really care about making sure the wedding goes exactly as planned. We relentlessly pursued the product and I'd say one of our biggest struggles was the resistance from merchants to adopt technology. We were able to scale to about $50k/mo in revenue before we ran out of cash/energy. I still think there's something here and you may be able to make it work, maybe as wedding planning software. Hope this is helpful in some way. This was just my experience at the time I worked on it. Feel free to hit me up anytime. aacook@aacook.co. Good luck!

danieltillett 11y ago
Have you written up this story in longer form? The problems you ran into are rather universal to any C2B marketplace.
- aacook 11y ago
  I've thought about writing a post mortem but could never bring myself to do it. After we decided to shut down I entered kind of a dark time of my life. I needed a break to really separate myself from the startup. I might tear of small stories, though. In particular some of the things that did go well. Doing a whole write up is probably too much to bite off though.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I really encourage you to do so - so many mistakes can be avoided by learning from the experiences of others. Anyway thanks for sharing what you have of your experience.
    - vishalkgupta 11y ago
      Definitely agree w/ danieltillett, a post mortem of some sort could help a lot of startups in the C2B space. Although, I know how painful it can be. Thanks again for the help you've already given us.
vishalkgupta 11y ago
Wow.. Thanks for the insight here. I'll definitely take you up on some more advice as we get going. Like you, we're finding that largely vendors need to be reached out manually through phone calls. Our first phase is to focus in on vendor silos that can be largely iterated via chat/email/photos. We'd love to hear about what specifically failed when you introduced the bidding services. We're seeing that the pain we feel with on boarding vendors is the exact pain that couples go through over and over trying to iterate with vendors today. We're hoping that vendors that accept technology will be rewarded with more business. In terms of booking fast, we're considering running this auction with some sort of time limit, but that will likely only happen when we feel like there are enough vendors looking at the auctions. Re: Trusted Vendors - One surprising number we found was how few people actually use wedding planners (sub 20%). That means 80% of the time couples are going out there and having to make their own judgement on which vendors to trust for this one-time gig. It's pretty nerve wrecking for them. Similar to something like Airbnb hosts, we think that vendors need to reviewed, socially validated, and rated on response times. I'll definitely keep in touch as we get past this version 1.0. I'll drop you a line as we go. Thanks for your direction here!

by aacook 11y ago

danieltillett 11y ago

Have you written up this story in longer form? The problems you ran into are rather universal to any C2B marketplace.

aacook 11y ago
I've thought about writing a post mortem but could never bring myself to do it. After we decided to shut down I entered kind of a dark time of my life. I needed a break to really separate myself from the startup. I might tear of small stories, though. In particular some of the things that did go well. Doing a whole write up is probably too much to bite off though.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I really encourage you to do so - so many mistakes can be avoided by learning from the experiences of others. Anyway thanks for sharing what you have of your experience.
  - vishalkgupta 11y ago
    Definitely agree w/ danieltillett, a post mortem of some sort could help a lot of startups in the C2B space. Although, I know how painful it can be. Thanks again for the help you've already given us.

vishalkgupta 11y ago

Wow.. Thanks for the insight here. I'll definitely take you up on some more advice as we get going. Like you, we're finding that largely vendors need to be reached out manually through phone calls. Our first phase is to focus in on vendor silos that can be largely iterated via chat/email/photos. We'd love to hear about what specifically failed when you introduced the bidding services. We're seeing that the pain we feel with on boarding vendors is the exact pain that couples go through over and over trying to iterate with vendors today. We're hoping that vendors that accept technology will be rewarded with more business. In terms of booking fast, we're considering running this auction with some sort of time limit, but that will likely only happen when we feel like there are enough vendors looking at the auctions. Re: Trusted Vendors - One surprising number we found was how few people actually use wedding planners (sub 20%). That means 80% of the time couples are going out there and having to make their own judgement on which vendors to trust for this one-time gig. It's pretty nerve wrecking for them. Similar to something like Airbnb hosts, we think that vendors need to reviewed, socially validated, and rated on response times. I'll definitely keep in touch as we get past this version 1.0. I'll drop you a line as we go. Thanks for your direction here!