How was first client acquired

Email Chain for the first client. The client has not authorized us to disclose his name, so we will mask his name till he gives such permission.
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Hi Rohit,

Following are my tentative requirements. Do let me know if you have any other ideas apart from the below ones:

1> There should different sections for various activities like Home Page, Event Listing, Discussion Forums, Invitation and acceptance tracker, Our Story, Photos/Videos, Guest List and Guest comments
2> Once the website is through, we should be able to post the URL to all the guest addresses (email ids) and they should be able to accept invitations online.
3> There should be an easy to download/track mechanism to keep a tab on the number of attendees (its desirable if they can additionally mention their probability of attending each of the event like Definite/Probably/Not Sure/Not attending etc)
4> Its desirable to have a seperate page which should be an online invitation card
5> In totality, there should be a theme for the whole of this activity which will make it bit more interesting, rather than just filling up pages with pictures and text. The Google theme by Nikhil was good. If you can provide options of themes which you can suggest, it will be great
6> All the pages should be easy to access (without heavily loaded) and catchy
7> There should be background music being played while the guests browse through the site. I should be able to select the preferred background song .
8> Its prefereble to have a gift registry kind of page where we can list down items which can be brought in a gifts or the guests to choose items from the list on gift.
9> Option to send invitation to friends from various social sites like orkut, facebook etc
10> Mechanism to track how many guests have actually accessed the website (URL)
11> Mechanism to send second reminded for guests to re-confirm their attendance for the event
12> Page for guests to show them the events with items on the food menu

I have already registered in one of the sites available on net which is pretty good. I shall be sending you list of other requirements soon...

Thanks,
XYZ

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Dear XYZ,

This looks good, and achievable. If you are OK, can I put the contents on the blog. Also, would you like your name to appear there (emails and contact don't appear to protect privacy).

Some observations:

1, I think the area where creativity would be needed is the theme universe?
2. Do you have any internet link for marriage traditions and ethnic subtleties for your community
3. A lot of features including Items 1,4, 12 are standard HTML components and should not be difficult
4. Invitation/Confirmation/Reconfirmation and downloads can be managed through Google Documents, and we have worked the mechanism
5. Background music is also not a big deal. Mashup is a powerful technology, and we will use it to find a good range of background music.
6. I am assuming Gifts are the ones that the Guest will receive from your side if they select rather than guests giving to you(I guess that would be impolite if put on your marriage site)
7. Facebook provides Facebook Connect, and Orkut provided Friends Connect so that users can directly login into your website without registering separately. A similar facility is available with LinkedIn as well. I think sending a common and I guess customised message to friends should also be possible.

Some features I think you should put up:
1. Marriage Vendor List for quick reference, and contact information
2. Marriage Financial Accounting (Expenses incurred since start)
3. A page to show Google Maps to exact venue of various events
4. A twitter interface for your marriage so that both of marrying partners can tweet amongst themselves though cellphones, and tweeted messages appear on the website.
5. Interactive Capabilities: Your friends and family should be able to suggest honeymoon locations.
6. Weather Gadget at the location where marriage is supposed to happen
7. Accomodation Management: If you have some kind of accomodation allocation done, you guests should know before they come down.

I will also think more, and get back with more ideas...

Thanks for your mail,

Rohit Tripathy

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Thanks for the inputs Rohit, all your additional comments were really helpful. Typically how much time and cost will it incur to get these things done ?

Regards,
XYZ

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Pricing is uniform: Rs 5000/- About Rs 2000 in that is marketing distribution share(details of all shares is present in http://iammarrying.blogspot.com. Sumeet has suggested to pass it back to you as you have come directly which we will pass to you as a gift or some kind which can ease your marriage preparation.

Standard features should be available in no time. We are a believer of mashup (linking with those internet sites that provide features like accounting/music etc). If a internet site is available, it should be available in no time. If it is not available, then we will have to build it.

Our idea is to use this as a case to build a beater product :) So we are interested in all valuable features that we can put..

Rohit Tripathy

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Sounds good to me ! When are we starting...
XYZ

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Right away. I will start building these. I think you should tell us some theme suggestions in a day. Now that you are first customer on board, everything stops, and building your site becomes the only priority.

Nikhil is coming out of his marriage on 8th, and he will get a shock to see work straight away :)

I think we should spend some more time on more features as well. We are still not there.

Rohit Tripathy

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