Wedy releases the first social marketplace targeting the Brazilian wedding market
By: Daniel Tamiosso
Tags: Startup, Market Network, Marketplaces, Weddings, Network Effect

Brazil, August 6, 2019. Wedy has released its wedding social-marketplace. For the first time ever, it is now possible to find a real online one-stop-shopping for weddings. The marketplace allows couples to access a transparent, confident, diverse and secure environment to transact products and services related to a wedding. Each transaction between buyers and sellers is securely audited and certified by Wedy Platform.

A digital one-stop-shop for weddings

It is well-known that a company’s digital product could become more valuable as usage increases. For that purpose, the experimentation of product strategies that increases the user value delivering according to the number of others using it is mandatory. In the classical business game of marketplaces, sellers benefit from more buyers; buyers benefit from more sellers. It gets harder and harder to compete with who makes this wheel spin. Sellers want to be where buyers are and vice versa.

Wedy Marketplace

Although Wedy already has a strong community of couples, vendors, and guests, a business pivot just releasing new e-commerce or even a 2-sided marketplace should not be enough to get traction. Alright, there isn’t yet a company only focused on all things related to weddings. But there are great companies doing that job very well job for craftsmanship products, used dresses, new brand & cheaper dresses or even cataloging wedding vendors on digital yellow pages. Delivering ways to simplify or shorten that process for customers respecting the Wedy core-principles as transparency, credibility, and diversity could be its competitive advantage.

Many startups are doing very well on disrupting the way we shop for goods in the last years. Also, there are startups managing great marketplaces for simple services where the transactions are quick and low-valued. However, there aren’t many successful service marketplaces because those offerings have a lack of standardization and other issues. Evidently, services are complex and defining their success and quality in them is subjective. In addition, there is a lot of fragmentation, this means that vendors have no time to stay online and there is still a lot of customization and differentiation in similar services. And to further complicate, service transactions usually result in real-world interaction, making it difficult to make the transaction 100% digital. Even with all these difficulties and still in a slow progression, it is undeniable that the software will eat the service economy. Wedy is working hard on it.

Long and high-value transactions such as those found in the wedding market are not viable in the traditional marketplace model. For example, no one goes to a website and hires a wedding venue on the first online interactions. It is so complicated and meaningful. Because of that, the most frequent business model currently used by digital companies are the classical advertising strategies, where these companies limit themselves to just selling leads to wedding vendors. It means no transactions management and fees for those companies.

Wedy is now a one-stop platform for wedding planning, with solutions for all steps:

Discovering: research prices, get inspired, get vendors quotes, talk with specialists, interact with other couples and more! Figuring out the perfect wedding can be as simple as saying “I do”.

research prices, get inspired, get vendors quotes, talk with specialists, interact with other couples and more! Figuring out the perfect wedding can be as simple as saying “I do”. Planning: the ideal planning tools for an unforgettable wedding. Keep track of the budget, select the best vendors, prepare the honeymoon, make the to-do list and enjoy every step of the journey with a customized step-by-step guide. Live every moment like it’s the big day;

the ideal planning tools for an unforgettable wedding. Keep track of the budget, select the best vendors, prepare the honeymoon, make the to-do list and enjoy every step of the journey with a customized step-by-step guide. Live every moment like it’s the big day; Organizing: It’s time to get organized! Hire pre-selected vendors, create your gift registry, customize your wedding website and decide who will be present on this special date. The couples’ stories in every choice, their love in every detail.

It’s time to get organized! Hire pre-selected vendors, create your gift registry, customize your wedding website and decide who will be present on this special date. The couples’ stories in every choice, their love in every detail. Sharing: Spread the love with a fully customized wedding website, send invitations and save the dates, get attendance confirmations and receive the gifts you really want.

Spread the love with a fully customized wedding website, send invitations and save the dates, get attendance confirmations and receive the gifts you really want. Just-married: Help to build new successful wedding stories, evaluating the vendors, selling wedding items, and accessing exclusive offers and content for the newlyweds.

Right now, it is all possible at Wedy. All in one place, no headache.

From a social network to a market network

Weddings events are complex. Usually who is getting married has no previous experience with organizing events. These events require high coordination of multiple supply-side parties to provide a great experience for a single buyer, the couple. Because of that, wedding planners are a very important professional in that context. Market networks are platforms that combine elements of an n-sided marketplace as weddings, a network, and workflow solutions.

A Market Network combines the main elements of both networks and marketplaces. Also, it uses a SaaS workflow software to focus action around longer-term projects, not just a quick transaction, promoting the service provider [NFX]

Starting from a platform vision that put the couples on the center of the product, with strong identities in a social network, creating valuable-niche content from their users about inspirations, planning, vendor hiring and building a long-term relationship with the company, Wedy is planning to create defensive moats from network effects on a market network.

The last two quarters at Wedy were about releasing social features on our product moving from a single-player to a multi-player game, improving user retention and engagement and decreasing the consumer cost acquisition, before a premature scale. It means every new customer acquired at Wedy, increases the platform value for the next and gets the company away from the addiction of paid marketing.

Photo by Artsy Vibes on Unsplash

Features such as wedding real content (as inspirations and questions & answers) delivered on an infinite timeline and social profiles that project a couple’s identity and their weddings journeys allowing them to communicate in a 360-degree pattern with others on the Wedy network. At this moment, Wedy is plugging a marketplace to provide transactions between multiple buyers and multiple sellers, combining key elements of social networks, marketplaces, and the already successfully Wedy SaaS solutions for couples and soon for wedding business.

Market networks are also unique from a monetization standpoint. For example, a wedding vendor hiring is mostly made up of a long-term relationship. For that, the Wedy SaaS workflow software is the key resource to not just transacting quick and low-value products or services, but also getting the highest-value transactions inside the platform. Helping to build long-term relationships and creating habit-forming solutions, Wedy will combine the strong defensibility of network effects and the scalability of direct networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, along with lucrative SaaS revenue models.

There are 7 attributes that define successful market networks:

Target more complex services; ✅

People are the center of everything; ✅

Collaboration happens around a project; ✅

Unique profiles of the people involved; ✅

Help build long term relationships; ✅

Recommendations flow freely; ✅

Increase transaction speed and satisfaction. Over time, almost all independent professionals and their clients will conduct business through their industry’s network of markets. ⏰

How does it work in practice?

When we talk about weddings, we are talking about very personal dreams. Every new customer acquisition on Wedy has very specific desires to get a successful wedding event. However, modern real-life gets couples increasingly busy and stressed. Wondering about those nuances, Wedy Platform automatically creates a wedding project for each couple, where vendors compete to participate in each project. Couples in the same tool manage the budgets, finances, and hiring of these services.

Vendors could request to join on those events, sending their availability and quoting their contribution to the project. They send the payment stream inside a Wedy SaaS tool (Wedy Business) and manage the event’s participation in a single communication channel, collaborating with all other event vendors.

Digital Wedding Stationery

All those long-term relationships are backed by a strong community of couples. The community is already sharing real inspiration every day helping the decision-making of the buyers. Also, things like reviews and warranties make buyers trust they’ll get what they pay for, and sellers know they’ll get paid if they deliver the service.

Also, network effects are one of the most important concepts for business in general and especially for tech businesses, as it’s the key dynamic behind many successful software-based companies. Understanding network effects not only help us to build a better product, but it will help us to build moats and protect our company against competitors’. Each couple in the network is both a producer and a consumer. A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is "come for the tool, stay for the network". That’s what’s happening at Wedy.

Wedy Network Effects

Wedding Market Issues

According to a report from WeddingWire, 83 percent of couples plan their wedding online rather than with a wedding planner; the top three sources millennials use to search for vendors are wedding-related websites and online searches. Pinterest says 40 million of engaged people are getting inspiration every year on its platform. Also, no two weddings are alike. This is even more true for millennials — who account for 80% of today’s marrying couples, doing a lot of guest experience customization on food, music, and digital stuff.

Finding a “good price” for a wedding vendor is a huge challenge. Daily, thousands of couples are searching the Internet for how much it really costs to get married and what is the average price of each of the dozens of services available in the wedding market. It’s a sad reality, but wedding parties have a separate pricing table, whose costs first-time couples only figure out after long research. As a company goal, in addition to delivering greater decision-making power in the hands of our users and helping them discover their perfect marriage, we believe in the strategy of using engineering as a marketing engine. The project How Much Does a Wedding Cost on Average by Wedy is the first step in that direction, giving decision-power to couples to understand the costs of every vendor potentially present on the wedding day. It will be connected with that Wedy Marketplace release, sending actionable insights on couples hiring process.

Wedy Actionable Insights

It is not just on the consumer viewpoint that issues are found in the wedding market. Despite the built-in virality on wedding events and its huge market size — $72 billion a year in the US, R$20 billion in Brazil, and $300 billion globally, the Wedtech is facing so many challenges to disrupt the wedding industry. Beyond the average one year between someone getting engaged and their wedding event — a long-journey with rarely repeated actions, the couples move on with their lives abandoning the digital weddings platforms.

As a lesson learned, Wedy understood this market is not just about unit economics; a core purpose is mandatory. Credibility, transparency & diversity are the Wedy core values to deliver great solutions in this context. Planning on a mobile app, searching for vendors, sharing RSVPs & digital gift registries is all possible at Wedy, where couples still rely on the power of a social network for wedding discovering and emotional support.

The Wedy Shop 🛍

In our busy world, why waste time waiting for vendors quotes? Real-time pricing and availability could be accessible in the easiest way. Moreover, why not book an entire wedding online? Wedy is turning the wedding planning an easy and affordable journey by connecting couples with the best wedding vendors around. And, of course, experienced couples selling used items or even category specific business partners with the best product inventories.

Wedy Shop (pt-BR)

These are the highlight features of "The Wedy Shop":

🏢 Vendor services transactions : Our market network makes it significantly easier for vendors to operate their businesses and helps customers get better service with the free-market competition. Options as vendor rating, availability and pricing transparency are one of the main sub-features here;

: Our market network makes it significantly easier for vendors to operate their businesses and helps customers get better service with the free-market competition. Options as vendor rating, availability and pricing transparency are one of the main sub-features here; 👰 Peer-to-peer : Organically, just-married couples are already publishing used items from their wedding as dresses, accessories and general wedding stuff on Wedy timeline. We’re just easing the conversation and the deal of each item sold on the platform from couple to couples;

: Organically, just-married couples are already publishing used items from their wedding as dresses, accessories and general wedding stuff on Wedy timeline. We’re just easing the conversation and the deal of each item sold on the platform from couple to couples; 👗 Business partners: Big product catalogs from partners as Enjoei. Where Wedy community could boost sales on their specific wedding categories.

Big product catalogs from partners as Enjoei. Where Wedy community could boost sales on their specific wedding categories. 💌 Wedding Stationery: Wedy loves wedding stationery. It is our big opportunity to express our taste closer to the couple’s styles. A high-tech solution offered in partnership with the startup Trakto will create thousands of full-customize stationery options to weddings as greeting cards, save the dates, invites and others beautiful items created by our designers and the community;

Wedy loves wedding stationery. It is our big opportunity to express our taste closer to the couple’s styles. A high-tech solution offered in partnership with the startup Trakto will create thousands of full-customize stationery options to weddings as greeting cards, save the dates, invites and others beautiful items created by our designers and the community; 💜 Brand products : Mugs, funny t-shirts, bridesmaid or best man gifts. The item itself does not matter, the main message here is: Wedy branded products will be released on the marketplace, prioritized by the customer’s requests;

: Mugs, funny t-shirts, bridesmaid or best man gifts. The item itself does not matter, the main message here is: Wedy branded products will be released on the marketplace, prioritized by the customer’s requests; 👍 Social network built-in: All those transactions will be empowered by a complete feature-set already launched on the previous versions of Wedy: profiles, likes, comments, claps, inspirations, related products and, planning tools.

Pure transactional marketplaces generally need to grow both demand and offer carefully together to solve the inherent chicken and egg problem. Wedy is following the strategy of SaaS-enabled Marketplace. It means providing a kick-ass tool for one side and then grow the other side. That is, the Wedy SaaS-enabled marketplace is a business which combines the characteristics of both models:

A marketplace component that connects two or more parties of weddings to conclude a transaction and thus can generate and benefit from real network effects;

A SaaS component that offers software features to one of the parties, able to be used as standalone software.

However, we realized that a transaction fee model is hard to pull off when transactions are made online, but the service is delivered offline. That makes charging by transaction fees tricky. So stay tunned, the Wedy team will share their hypothesis validations on that topic in the next chapters.

Every day is a new beginning