Devil's in the (Distribution) Details
February 20, 2024
As I get closer to 30, I'm entering the phase of life where all my travel is being allocated to weddings. It feels like all my vacation days and weekends even 9+ months out are booked up for people's weddings.
With the onslaught on weddings, we also all go through the dance of information collection, as is tradition. You get a text asking for your email, then you get an email asking for your address, and then you finally get the invite mailed to your door, and then the dance starts anew with the next friend coming out of the dugout approaching the altar.
It's here that I fell into a trap: "It'd be so much easier if there was just an app for this! You could check everyone's email and address right there". But the devil is in the details.
I think a lot of idealistic thinkers like myself get sucked into solutions like this because in a perfect world, this would be great! If everyone had this app, you could check where they lived, when they last updated it, nudge them to update it if it's been a while, or with AI you could try to automatically pull emails / documents and parse them to update the app with the latest (like google calendar does with flights). There'd be no dance. There'd be no filling out of 10 forms a year with the same information. It'd be seamless.
But there's a huge gulf between perfection and reality. If you imagine the actual mechanics of how this would work, the ideal world starts to break down. It's a mess of onboarding, reminders, distribution, stale data, and human assumptions.
One person starts using the app (say my next friend getting married). They still need to do the same song and dance here of collecting emails via text messages, uploading them to this new app / Zola (and then syncing data), and then each person on the list still needs to fill out their information just like would before on a google sheet. So far nothing has changed. Actually, things have gotten worse because we added one more app in the mix which causes extra friction.
Okay, but then things will get better from here, right? Another person in the same friend group is getting married 6 months later, and so they decide to use the same app. Just like they wanted, they see that a lot of friends they were inviting have their addresses entered on the app!
But then we run into two more problems:
1. Even in this scenario where the users are in the same friend group, there's not perfect overlap of invitees to the wedding since there's bound to be differences in family, family friends, coworkers, etc. So there's still a lot of people who need to go through the same song and dance as before where you collect email, then address etc. (potentially a large % of invitees as well)
2. Unless you're gathering information like a week after someone entered the data, you probably want to re-confirm their address in case they moved. You don't want to send an invite to the wrong place, and you want to make sure you get everyone you want at your wedding there. This means that despite data being there, you'll probably want to check in and get a refresh on the information anyways! You'll need to have the app ping the invitee to either confirm / update their address (which defeats most of the purpose of this new service).
These two unfortunate facts tell us that when trying to get this app off the ground, you'll hit a wall where the service devolves back into essentially the same workflow of sending a text to get an email, sending an email to get an address, etc.
Unless you're able to connect this with gmail / gcal / apple contacts and have AI automatically update contact information without a human in the loop, it becomes impossible to cross the chasm from software to useful software.
Hopefully this is one of the things that AI agents can help solve in the long run! I'd love to have an agent that updates my address book with my latest info + my friends / contact's info. I know there's a trope on twitter about personal CRM and how it's not something most people need + it's data intensive to enter all the information you need to properly run it. But maybe a properly integrated AI can be a solution here!