Notes on MarryBirds

Written by Minami

A month has passed since the new year. How have you been? Did you have a great start?

Last month, I worked on the finishing touch of MarryBirds, our wedding business directory.

We started working on MarryBirds last summer. Fredd and I married in the summer of 2023 and had a small civil wedding. But even for this, organising it took so much time and energy. It was not easy! Also, we often hear our friends say that wedding planning is a hassle - so we thought, "How can we make wedding planning easy for couples?"

The idea came from Fredd's sister, who helped us organise our wedding and also had a wedding last September. We decided to create a wedding business directory to help couples quickly and easily find a great match with a wedding venue and services for their wedding. I started building a website with Next.js, but the first challenge was when Fredd tried to add data on wedding businesses manually. It was simply impossible.

We did not give up because we liked the name "MarryBirds." We started to do research and found out about web scraping. We started learning how to scrape, and finally, we could extract enough data to start MarryBirds.

Meanwhile, we also conducted extensive market research and heard from wedding business owners about the difficulties of promoting their businesses, so we thought we could also help them. We learned a lot about SEO to help wedding businesses with marketing.

Finally, we created a platform where couples can quickly and easily find a great match with wedding businesses for their wedding, and the business can promote itself. I hope MarryBirds will help them both!

We're planning to launch MarryBirds this month. Also, personal news: We're moving to a new place soon. We've been looking for a flat to move to for a long time, but it was challenging as these things are pretty competitive where we live. But we found a place near our favourite cafe—and this was a person (previous renter) we met at a wedding. So, it seems weddings are the thing!

Fredd and I feel like launching MarryBirds and moving to a new place this month will open up a new world. We're so excited to see what will unfold!