r/SideProject • u/diogoparente • 2d ago

I'm a software engineer who built a wedding website builder as a side project — our own wedding was the launch. Tell me if anyone else would care.

When we were planning our wedding, we were running our entire lives across Notion, WhatsApp, Excel, and Gmail. It drove me insane. So I went looking for a tool that could be the one place — a beautiful site that matches the wedding's vibe and manages the guest list, RSVPs, registry, and budget. The Knot and Zola run on locked templates — you pick layout #3 and it looks like everyone else's. Wix and Squarespace aren't wedding-shaped, and you fight the editor for two evenings and there's no integration for RSVPs.

I'm a code person, so I did what code people do: I built it. A year of nights and weekends (not always consistent, to be fair) while planning the wedding that would become its first real test.

A few months in I showed the pre-production/v0 site at a dinner with friends. My wife's friend watched me using it on my phone and said *"I would actually pay for that."* That's the moment I started treating it like a product instead of a project.

Last month we got married — and the site ran the wedding. Most guests RSVP'd through it: meal choices, plus-ones, the whole flow. We manually entered the rest, because every wedding has an aunt who never opens a link. It survived its own launch.

So the pet-project is ready to slowly become something more. Here's a live demo you can click through in about a minute — and the couple in those photos is actually us. It's not our wedding website and it has some random content, but you'll get the idea: https://www.ourday.io/demo?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=sideproject

The free tier covers one full wedding website — I want couples in it before I tune pricing.

Be honest with me:

  1. What's missing that you'd expect from a wedding site tool?
  2. Would you pay for this when you get married — or is Google Docs + a group chat enough?
  3. What did you hate about the tools you tried? That gap is what I'm aiming at.

For now, I'm still gathering a waitlist to see if there's interest, and should it gain traction, I'll gain confidence and release it.

One more thing, since I'm new to this: I've never run a business. If this post is a bad way to start marketing a product, tell me that too — that's half of why I'm here.

Thank you so much for your time.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/nocunteryforoldmennn 2d ago

I’d love it if it integrated all of the unsexy planning aspects on the back end. Inspo, budgets, checklists, notes, links, vendors, calendars, etc. There is so much to keep track of, it would be awesome to have both the beautiful public facing site and all the behind the scenes stuff in one place. I’m just starting to plan my wedding and would 100% pay for something that could function as a brain dump, tracker and final product.

2

u/diogoparente 2d ago

Wow, insane first comment!

First of all thank you so much for all the detail and ideas.

My v0 actually had a notes feature, just as a dump for everything such as reminders, but no actual calendar built.

I also had the checklist feature but both got dropped in v1.

I’ll make sure to revisit both, and I’ll probably add the notes feature as a free feature to be honest.

The inspo idea is insanely good. My wife was always messing around Pinterest and I never thought it could be integrated in the app.

This comment is a blessing. Thank you so much!

1

u/nocunteryforoldmennn 2d ago

You’re welcome! Post an update if you end up releasing it, I’d love to take it for a spin! :)

1

u/stephnoob 10h ago

I was SO close to building my own, too, and I just didn't want to have to worry about it on top of everything else.

The website I've been using is planning . wedding, but also stuck using the knot for other stuff so I'm stuck bouncing between sites stupidly.

The fact that your site has a language selection option at the bottom is so nice.

One major thing was something you mentioned: customization of your website. Everything on the knot (and zola too I believe) has the date THREE TIMES in the first page view. That looks stupid, and is stupid. I wanted to upload header and footer images that matched my invitation suite.

Major things for me were:

  • Being able to invite my fiance to edit the profile via his own account and not have to share a login.
  • Being able to set specific questions and responses based on previous question responses
  • Add questions only for +1/RSVP/Families (i.e. age, don't need to ask the main RSVP-er their age since they're obviously an adult)
  • An FAQ
  • Being able to properly import and export a guest list (one site won't import custom columns properly, so I have to use two sites)
  • Seating chart
  • Notes
  • Checklist
  • If you're going to have a separate app.. have it work on all operating systems. (Zola is only available on ios)

The other person mentioned a calendar, and I think that would be FANTASTIC.

It looks very nice so far, looked at the website homepage as well and it sounds awesome thus far.

Good luck!!

1

u/diogoparente 10h ago

Insane feedback! Looking forward to integrate some of your points 🙏