How Bridebook Solved The Cold Start Problem By Building Wedding Planning Tools

8 Jan 2023 · 2 min

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2:16

Bridebook's co-founder explains how they solved the cold start problem by building planning tools first. After reaching 3,000 users, they paused marketing to focus on workflow features that worked without suppliers, then used that traction to recruit venues and vendors. They followed Houzz's playbook: build something useful, prove demand, add the marketplace later.

Questions this video answers

They paused marketing, built robust workflow tools that gave couples value without a marketplace, and then used that user base as leverage to approach suppliers, following a market‑network model.

Houzz’s evolution from an inspiration platform to a vendor marketplace and the pre‑ad phases of Pinterest/Instagram are cited as analogous cases.

Chapters

Yes. So you did mention, you know, those first kind of like 3,000 people that signed up, right? So how did you kind of go from, you know, initially kind of like attracting, you know, those first kind of 3,000 people? And then did you say, hey, okay, we have the demand, now we're gonna go, you know, get the suppliers and the venues and all the different providers? Or how did you kind of, I would say, like kind of, you know, solve for the, you know, chicken and the egg or the cold start problem there?
Exactly. So The exact scenario was like, brilliant, it worked. You know, I was right, or I had a moment of that. It was like, shit, now we've gotta go away and build it properly. And basically we left, or, you know, we didn't carry on marketing or whatever. The whole thing really was sort of, you know, close to a trapdoor test and then went away and actually built it out really properly over, over that. over a year actually before he came back. The key bit we've done, so we're a market network. So this concept NFX I've written about quite a bit, which is where we have these workflow tools and then the marketplace. And what's maybe, you know, advanced about our model is couples still get a lot of value from just the workflow tools without any marketplace. which means we can solve the chicken and egg problem because we can get all the chickens and then go and talk to the suppliers and already say we've got them to then get the eggs on or whatever the right analogy is. Another company that I've seen do this is Houzz, the interiors platform, where it's like they have a great inspiration product where you can go have a lot of fun on it. They did brilliantly on that long before you went into them, you know, long before they started plugging in an e-commerce marketplace now and a vendor marketplace. And they plugged that all in. They also had that just sort of huge organic demand, a little bit like a sort of a Pinterest or a social media platform before you added ads. So we all had fun on Instagram and then we're all annoyed when they added ads one day. It's almost a sort of marketplace version of that.