vishalkgupta

7 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by vishalkgupta 9y ago

   MoneyLion ( http://MoneyLion.com/ ) | New York, NY or San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Onsite MoneyLion is a technology-enabled lending institution focused on helping all consumers gain access to credit. At MoneyLion we feel p
2. 2.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   1 year at Cisco Systems hardware engineering internship, 1 year at a mobile startup before mobile was really a thing, 8 years at Goldman Sachs in their electronic trading business- business side, 1 year own startup, 3 years electronic tradi
3. 3.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   Vishal from WedWell here. Really appreciated the input from everyone who commented, and the votes. We're charging forward. Hopefully you'll see us in the next YC round ;) Overall liked having an open forum for people to give feedb
4. 4.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   True-- Efficiency may not be the best term for marketing this thing (to anyone beyond the YC community). I'm all ears for sure. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me at info@wedwell.co Thanks again, we're still ear
5. 5.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   I second the idea that a facesmash like approach could really be a much better idea of how to handle this. It's easier to view one startup vs another instead of looking at voting on 20. There are some stand outs that may just run over
6. 6.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   Thank you! Very helpful for our message
7. 7.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   We're still iterating, but right now we reach out to vendors proactively. So ideally it's little/no work for the vendors to have to search for events, we post them on events that they should be able to handle. The work that t
8. 8.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   Thanks for the comment. We really do think its less about finding the cheapest vendor and helping streamline the process. Elsewhere here it was coined as "vendor dating", which is something I really like. On top of the fact that v
9. 9.▲
   by vishalkgupta 10y ago

   Vishal from WedWell here. This competition was a bit unstructured in general. So not surprised that many teams didn't talk too much about their teams, and spoke more about their ideas. We're a small team lead by myself. I am techn
10. 10.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    RE WedWell: Thanks for the comment. Funny enough we're moving slightly from "WedWell: Vendors bid for your wedding" more towards "WedWell: A more efficient way to plan your wedding". (Dang- Depending on how long the
11. 11.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    RE WedWell: I think it's less about unique insight, and more about timing/positioning. Couples expect to communicate with vendors over the phone/text, they don't want to write paper checks, they want vendors to find them
12. 12.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Vishal from WedWell here. Lol.. Zenefits was boring.. so thank you?
13. 13.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    RE:WedWell - no good vendor would put themselves through his - they’d be too busy making money. >Not what we're seeing. Were initially focused on the NYC area. There are a huge amount of great vendors who are constantly battling for
14. 14.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks gills. Love to pick your brain a bit about this. Happy to move to email at some point. What was your solution called? We think that this is a process problem vs a technology problem at first. We're trying to distill the client&#
15. 15.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks again for being a client! We're really lucky to have clients like you and your fiancé. Your feedback is helping us make a better product.
16. 16.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks! There's a lot of old tech in the wedding space, but the act of planning a wedding has largely stayed the same. We're hoping to evolve that. Our goal is to make it easier to iterate with more vendors. With scale, prices may
17. 17.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks malyk! It's a huge space. Some more data that we find really attractive in this space: Average cost of US Wedding(1): $32,641 Average cost of Wedding in NYC(1): $82,299 (We are located in NYC and are focused here for phase 1) Mo
18. 18.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Vishal from WedWell here. Thanks for the breakdown of the shortlisted startups. It's really thorough and I largely agree with your assessments. Your breakdown reminded me of a PG essay ( http://paulgraham.com/startupidea
19. 19.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks for the vote! Planning a wedding is super broken. Besides the fact that vendors largely up charge specifically for weddings, the amount of time it takes to iterate with vendors (often face to face) is way too long. We're hoping
20. 20.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    My gut feeling is that YC wouldn't want to some how alienate those with low karma points, but they could do something like only allow those to vote who have commented on Apply HN posts (or something along those lines).
21. 21.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Hey HN! I'm Vishal. One of the team members behind WedWell( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441020 ). We're somewhere in the top group of entries with 43 points. I wanted to say that regardless of whether or
22. 22.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks for the question! One idea was to incentivize couples who've already had weddings to share their details of their weddings/vendors with us. We in turn we would build and host a wedding web page that the couple can always re
23. 23.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    One of our initial marketplace platform inspirations was 99designs. I was really drawn to the idea of building a brief that was a text/link based representation of what I wanted our design to be. As I began my own time/money plann
24. 24.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    I think your question is about how to manage possible friction between the vendors and the couples. Currently for weddings that have planners (about %20 of them do), people can use the planner to broker discussions. I think we see a world w
25. 25.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Client acquisition is one of the biggest concerns we have with this idea. If we're creating a solution for couples, we will have low/no user retention. We have considered creating a vendor focused service, but there are a couple o
26. 26.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Absolutely, there could be many aspects of planning that could be made easier if they are tracking everything on one system.
27. 27.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Thanks for this. We've started experimenting with a brief that's a bit more visual, allowing for a client to select weddings that look inline with what they are looking to do. Thanks, actually the team isn't a couple working
28. 28.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    Agreed. Weddings are tough. You can't just win on price, it needs to be a win on expirience. Client acquisition in the couple space is also not easy. Once you acquire the customer, the value has to come with that one wedding. We'v
29. 29.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    I think you're on target. The hardest thing here is getting this the incentives aligned here. Our incentives for the couple need to be need to be more focused on ease of use/process, less on being cheaper. We may steer that way in
30. 30.▲
    by vishalkgupta 10y ago

    First, congrats on getting married! Some thoughts on your comments: 1. I don't necessarily think that our solution is for everyone. We're looking to find our little niche in the market where a couple is ok with forgo-ing some of t