Interview with Sean Muller, CEO of Wedding Tracker

Wedding Tracker is a subscription based service, which provides a sophisticated and very easy to build wedding website. It also includes web based wedding management tools for events, guests, RSVPs, and everything else involved with weddings. The software and the site interact much more comprehensively than the competitive products available. It retrieves information from the database and allows recipients to RSVP to events they are invited to, but not other events, nor are they able to invite others that weren’t invited by the Bride and Groom.

We target the 2.5 million people that get married in the US each year. The primary focus is on first time-married couples. We also support international marriages, and have a large international customer base. We are primarily focused on the US market.

My wife and I were getting married about a year and a half ago and that was my first introduction into this market. I hadn’t realized that this market existed. Historically, Grooms have few responsibilities at weddings, but one of mine included tracking all of the guests and building a website. I knew how to build website, but unfortunately I didn’t have to time to put one together. I was really surprised at the offerings that were available.

That is correct. Those companies allow you to build web pages within their sites, but they are very primitive at best. My wife and I set out a plan to not only create a website, a tracking mechanism, but also to offer it as a product to others.

First of all, customers are building their own stand-alone website, which has their own domain name. We register the domain in real time when the site is published. Another compelling reason to use our software is the online RSVP system. We have had a real success with this service, because people no longer have to manually handle either email or standard mail responses. The guests can RSVP online, and the married couple can manage in a very systematic and professional way in which many people attend the event. One of the key differentiators is our 12-step wizard, which allows our customers to set up the site quickly and effectively.

That is the key to our success. We have taken a sophisticated product and made it user friendly.

We have done a fairly large-scale direct marketing campaign to couples that are getting married. We contact them primarily through email. We send a highly customized and targeted email, which also includes available domain names that matches with prospective customers. We were very surprised by the excellent response that we received. This marketing campaign was critical for us to establish ourselves as a viable company.

We are finding that the viral aspect of our business model is really kicking in. The hosted solution provides information about our services as well as links back to learn more. When customers send out notices to their friends and family about the upcoming wedding, they are in effect marketing our service to these recipients. We do make sure that all said marketing and communications are done in a discreet and professional manner. Our goal and success has been driven by the fact that we focus on ensuring that our customers and their guests have a wonderful experience using our service.

We have spent a lot of time on this issue. With our approaches our renewal rate is currently at 40%. Our customers love to keep their websites after the wedding. Many of them want to keep those special memories available for long after the wedding. Some of our customers like to turn their site into a general family and baby website. This is the first time many of our customers have ever built a website and it has been such a positive experience that they continue with the service.

Fortunately the economy doesn’t stop people from getting married. Having a wedding website is a very small but rapidly growing niche of the wedding market. Although the wedding market itself is growing at 2-3%, we see this area exploding. Our goal is to get the point where having a website for a wedding is a given. People spend an average of $20,000 on a wedding, and having a tool that helps coordinate this highly complex event is very important. We have priced our products very aggressively to ensure that we capture the maximum amount of the market possible.

Venture Funding usually requires that you target customers through conventional marketing mechanisms. You often put a lot of money into large-scale print advertising campaigns or even TV ads. We don’t believe that those are ways to grow companies in this market. We have done a lot of our traditional campaigns, and the response was nothing like what we saw from our non-conventional campaigns. Also, taking Venture Funding this early in the game requires that the founders give up a lot of ownership, which lessons your control. The bottom line is that the business generates enough cash to support our marketing campaigns.