How Emantran in changing the scene of Invitee Management in Indian weddings!
The Indian wedding industry is huge. India celebrates around 10M weddings in a year. And it is not just a simple wedding. There is music, food, people and everything. Precisely the reason why it is called as the big fat Indian wedding. The total market size of the industry is $50B. Yes, Covid has ruined the industry and had brought it to its knees. But this is how it is. The event industry is changing very rapidly, but once the CoVid situation is over (even if after 2 years), everything will be back to normal.
Imagine an Indian wedding. Now imagine every minute that leads up to a wedding. Food, photography, decor everything is a treat to the eye and the soul! Now imagine the thing that starts the day after a wedding date is taken, which perhaps is the most difficult and tedious task of them all. Yes, you guessed it right. Inviting guests!
Inviting guests starts the very next day a wedding date is taken. Let’s say someone’s cousin is getting married after 6 months. Let me take you through a journey on the whole process of inviting guests in India.
The brother (to be groom) lived in a different place, the groom’s sister in a different place, and their parents in their hometown. 2–3 days after the wedding each of them had their own list of people to be invited. The list was neatly written on a piece of paper, divided according to regions. The four of them got together on a call and after 3 hours of heated discussion, came to the conclusion that so many guests could not be invited as it would overshoot their budget. Trimming down the list was an epic story in itself. I leave that to your imagination.
After the dust settled, the realization dawned on them that many of the names were listed multiple times. There was that! Then each time, the guest list changed dramatically when guests’ names were added or removed. We believe if the entire family was sitting together, this fiasco would have been 20% less. After that they started inviting, some they invited personally, some they invited by phone. Many people were not in the list because they forgot to list them, and many were not there as my brother and his parents forgot the names of the people whom they had to invite. Think about it! We meet someone on the road and tell them we would invite them to a party, save their number in our Phonebook but later forget the name that the number was saved against. Unfortunately, this happens to the best of us!
In some cases, calls were made but were not picked at the first instance. Then that name was never called again. It ended up hurting so many people’s emotion. People feel the need to be invited somewhere, doesn’t matter if they are going or not. Something that did not happen to the people in this story, but might happen with anyone is — what if the list or diary was lost, ripped off or deleted (in case of an excel). That would spell devastation to the entire guest invitation process.
The ‘someone’ whose cousin got married is the founder of Emantran — Anshuman. He and his co-founders have built Emantran, India’s first Invitee Management App for weddings and events. They came up with a simple app called Emantran that would help families help manage their invitees in a better way. The app would help them curate the list of invitees, call them from within the app, set reminders on when to call and update the invitation status. We meet someone but do not want to clutter our Phonebook, just list the person’s name in the app. No clutter, pure management.
The team started with the plans from February onwards, and released the app in April. Yeah! CoVid times. They were selected by a popular incubator in April itself for incubation, but could not join because of CoVid. Moreover, virtual incubation did not make much sense to them then. But they went ahead with launching the app anyways. Till date, the app has been downloaded over 200 times with 50+ reviews and 4.9 rating.
The founding team says that they realize that they are not an app which would bring in millions of downloads, but they hope that it would bring a smile to anyone who is thinking of getting married. Afterall, they are saving them countless hours of nervous wreckage during the whole invitation process.
As I write, the team in working on changing some basic functionalities of the app and they have said that they would make it even better by January 2021, making it more versatile to serve big-ticket weddings and events.
