WeddingPlz: An Online Marketplace For Wedding Vendors
Started in January 2014 by Manas Wadhwa, WeddingPlz is a wedding vendor search portal that helps people find every wedding product and service such as catering, flower decoration, wedding jewellery, music services, parlour services and so on, all in one place.
BWDisrupt Team Member Interact With Manas Wadhwa, WeddingPlz’s Founder and Spoke to Him
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?
I have always been an entrepreneur at heart. To me entrepreneurship is about having the freedom to solve a problem my way. To be able to walk through a business and start thinking of how can it be made better and scalable. Ever since I remember my only passion since my early working days was to start something of my own. Coming from a modest family with limited financial means and support, I started working at the age of 19 and eventually started my first business at the age of 22.
What were the challenges before you while setting up this startup?
Market Fit: The biggest challenge was to make the product a market fit. It involved huge investment of time with our target audience and figuring out what's their mind set and need and how its going to work. providing them with an easy to use and clean user interface so that they get what they are looking for without much digression and waiting
Single Point Consolidation: Weddings encompass the maximum range of age groups and emotions involved. There are more than a hundred areas to take care of, all pertaining to different vendors. The key challenge was to bring all of this to a single point focus, a single point where all the users (the prospective bride and groom and their families organizing a wedding) and vendors can all come together and get in touch with each other directly and precisely, so that the wedding preparation can be done smoothly and easily and with just a one click process.
Data Reliability: Another key challenge came in the form of providing the most authentic, reliable and exhaustive vendor information to users so that once they log on to weddingplz.com, they don’t have to see or ask anybody else for more vendor details. So collecting, curating and updating the latest and most comprehensive data is an ongoing challenge for us.
What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?
While there are umpteen number of challenges that startup face while setting up shop, yet there are few which I feel are the most crucial:
1) Need Gap Fixing, which basically means delivering a product or service that meets the critical need better than any other that’s already existing in market. Being a startup you always need to be on your toes ensuring that your idea is smarter and with the times.
2)Attracting and hiring the right talent is yet another challenge that involves finding the right team which shares as much passion as you do keeping in mind the capital constraint that you have. This often gets very tough as startups often lack the capital necessary to attract top talent which is the key to faster progress.
3)The third biggest challenge is attracting traction, building an audience and retaining it. It requires constant and undeterred focus to get users to use your product or service and then to retain them gets even more challenging.
Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?
Anybody who is about to get married (to be wed couples) & everybody involved in their wedding planning ( family, friends and relatives ) & the vendors whose business is listed on WeddingPlz are our customers.
Expansion of WeddingPlz, both in terms of Geographic expansion and Product expansion is foremost on our agenda and we are aggressively pursuing it. Currently present in 5 cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Bangalore, we have a network of 46000+ verified and farmed wedding vendors, the largest across any other portal currently present in India and we plan to launch in 5 more cities by by the end of this year. Our aim and vision is to make Weddingplz the single largest Wedding Resource that to-be-weds, friends and family to search, plan and organize a wedding
The best and worst memories while setting up …
The best memory was the eve of launch of weddingplz.com. We were there in the office till past midnight working on the nuances of it, before we hit the GO button finally… the atmosphere was electric… passion laughter happiness anxiety… can never forget it…
The worst is … well there is no worst… everything about starting weddingplz has its own special place in my heart!
