Wedstimate: Matching couples with high-quality wedding vendors suited to their taste

As beautiful as they are, weddings can be quite taxing to plan and execute. The amount of time and effort it takes to plan a wedding is nearly impossible to do without help. With a vast variety of vendors and planners to choose from, the decision can often get tougher. Unfortunately, many wedding vendors and businesses can get overshadowed or go unnoticed due to a lack of marketing and visibility.

With the help of innovation, couples intending to plan their weddings and vendors waiting for opportunities can benefit from a company like Wedstimate. The company was founded to not only help couples looking for the right vendors but also for vendors to maintain a reliable and sustainable stream of leads. The vendors use the site to showcase their abilities and are matched with couples who have corresponding styles and budgets.

Wedstimate brings wedding planning and innovation together by offering the best experiences for both parties. They prioritize each couple's preferences, understand their needs and wedding expectations, and deliver on their promise of finding them their perfect vendors.

CIO Bulletin had the opportunity to talk to Trevor Blake, the Founder and CEO

of Wedstimate, about the innovative ways the company has transformed wedding planning.

Q. What brought about the idea to start a wedding vendor directory? What is the story behind its inception?

The idea of starting a wedding vendor directory came to me when I started my DJ business. As a wedding vendor just starting out, I couldn’t afford to advertise in the big directories. The monthly fee was more than my car payment. I wanted an easy way to advertise my company that wouldn’t bankrupt me before I even started my business. Simultaneously, I wanted a way to advertise that would guarantee me a reasonable return on my investment.

Just starting out as a DJ, I tried to advertise my business in places that were affordable, and it felt like throwing money into a void. That is what sparked the idea for Wedstimate.com. This directory gives wedding vendors a place to advertise and guarantees them leads without being prohibitively expensive. The benefit of a directory like Wedstimate is that even if vendors don’t convert all the leads they receive, they know that every month they will get at least five more opportunities to convert leads. The better their profile, the more leads they can generate. Vendors get all of this for a reasonable fee without a binding contract.

Q. What are the different kinds of services you provide? What are some of the innovative ways in which you maintain visibility in an extremely competitive market?

What makes Wedstimate.com more innovative than its competitors is that we match our vendors with appropriate couples. Using some simple data compiled when couples join, we can infer what their needs are and then match them with vendors that fit the criteria. This gives our vendors a better chance of converting those leads into sales. This makes us vastly different from our competitors and keeps us at the top of our game with vendors.

Q. How has innovation played a role in the success of your company?

Nowadays, leveraging technology to streamline processes, enhance user experiences, and offer new services is the only way to attract users. Therefore, innovation plays a huge role in how we operate. Using up-to-date technology helps achieve our main goal, which is to streamline how wedding vendors meet couples that are best suited to their styles and price points.

Q. How does Wedstimate manage to match couples with vendors best suited to their tastes?

I can’t give away trade secrets. However, we can ascertain, based on the information that we collect when couples sign up, things like their wedding date and location, along with some other key data points that help us understand and determine what they would prefer. We use that info to match those couples with vendors when they sign up.

Q. Can you elaborate on what finding better value for vendors means? How does Wedstimate manage to do so?

Finding a better value for vendors is simple. First, the big directories can charge whatever they want because there aren’t many options for vendors. Just by offering wedding vendors an alternative that is less expensive, we create value for the vendor. Secondly, by guaranteeing vendors five leads per month, we promise that our vendors will get their names and profiles onto the screens of newly engaged couples.

Q. What are some of the challenges you have faced in building Wedstimate? Can you share some of the innovative solutions that have helped face these challenges?

Some of the challenges, to name a few, are competition, vendor verification, and user experience. I think these will always be challenges, but some of the ways we can minimize their effect on the business are through AI personalization. We can get more specific with algorithms that analyze user behaviors along with predictive analytics to identify user trends and industry trends.

Q. What are some of Wedstimate.com's future plans? Would you like us to highlight some of them?

The future of Wedstimate is bright; we will continue matching couples with their preferred wedding vendors. Our goal, however, is to offer the most seamless mobile and web experience that users can have in a wedding directory. We want to become the most well-known brand in this space.

A brief biography of the CEO and Founder

Trevor Blake is the creative and talented founder and CEO of Wedstimate. He has a background in advertising and user experience design. He believes in elevating brands through a targeted and thoughtful strategy. He is great at understanding what a brand is trying to achieve by looking at the collected data and subsequently shaping those metrics into a creative solution; this is popularly known as his formula for executing successful projects. Under his leadership, Wedstimate has been recognized by LuxLife Magazine as the ‘Wedding App of the Year 2023’, solidifying the business’s position as a leading and innovative company to watch out for.