AI Wedding Planner Bot — Concept & Features

Overview

During a routine check-in, Karly proposed building an AI-powered wedding planning bot as a potential product. The core insight: professional wedding coordinators charge $5,000–$7,000 per event, and the majority of their work — timeline generation, vendor discovery, reminders, and checklists — is automatable. The bot would guide couples through the entire planning process without replacing the human decisions, just the coordination overhead.

Mark and Karly agreed on a path forward: Karly sketches the full feature set and workflow, Mark builds a working draft.

"Coordinators cost, I mean, people are paying like five, six, seven thousand dollars a piece for one, and I was thinking about it, I'm like, that's something you could just create AI." — Karly

Core Feature Set

1. Reverse Timeline Planning

The bot asks for the wedding date and works backward to generate a full planning schedule. This is modeled on military "reverse planning" — anchor to D-Day, then assign every task a relative offset (e.g., venue booked at −12 months, invitations sent at −3 months, final headcount at −3 weeks).

• Input: wedding date
• Output: dated task list auto-adjusted to the couple's timeline
• Behavior: if the date changes, all deadlines recalculate automatically

2. Vendor Discovery by Zip Code

The bot finds local vendors in key categories (florists, caterers, venues, photographers, etc.) based on the couple's location.

• Input: zip code + vendor category
• Output: list of relevant local vendors, ideally filtered to those who specialize in weddings
• Stretch goal: pull Google reviews or ratings to surface quality signals
• Complexity note: national coverage adds complexity; a regional MVP is more tractable initially

3. Reminders & Automated Alerts

Time-sensitive nudges tied to the reverse timeline. Examples:
- "Your wedding is 6 months out — you should have a venue booked by now."
- "It's time to send save-the-dates."
- "Final headcount is due to your caterer in 2 weeks."

4. Checklists

Structured task lists covering the full wedding planning lifecycle, including less-obvious items like:
- Liability insurance (some venues require couples to provide their own)
- Marriage license timing
- Vendor contract review milestones

Monetization Angle

The bot would be positioned as a low-cost alternative to a human coordinator. Pricing model not yet defined, but the value proposition is clear: replace a $5,000–$7,000 coordinator fee with a subscription or one-time product purchase.

Open Questions

• What's the right delivery mechanism? (Web app, chatbot interface, SMS-based reminders?)
• How do we source and maintain vendor data at scale?
• Is there a B2B angle — licensing to wedding venues or bridal shops?
• What's the MVP scope that gets to something demonstrable quickly?

Next Steps

Related

• ^[1] — meeting where this concept was proposed
• ^[2] — separate AI/automation work context
• ^[3] — other AI tooling concepts and experiments