Joy – Wedding App & Website - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

Yes! Our founders, Michael Bach, Vishal Joshi, and Kaiwalya Kehr, are all engineers of some stripe. Michael is an incredibly gifted visual and UX design engineer, Vishal was a Group Manager at Microsoft, leading projects like Azure, and Kaiwalya, our CTO, is the principal architect and brains behind how Joy is built, both on web and the app. Each founder brings a great depth of knowledge to Joy and they've created a really great foundation on which to scale our dev team.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

I think Joy is unique in that we're both a website and an app. One of the hard things to navigate is how to manage user expectations around the differences between the two. It's not likely that we'll have complete feature parity, as the nature of the web and apps are different (as I'm sure your readers know!). So there will always be a challenge in how to communicate to users that Joy's wedding website and app are complimentary rather than identical.

_{Cali Pitchel}

Cali Pitchel is the Director of Marketing at Joy, a San Francisco-based startup that brings everything about your wedding into one place. At Joy, Cali leads all online and offline marketing efforts, writes and produces content for their online wedding planning magazine, Engaged, and cultivates strategic partnerships to build brand awareness and drive user acquisition. Cali and her fiancé, Chris, are getting married in just over a month (and yes, they're using Joy to plan their wedding)!

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

I really love photo apps like Instagram and VSCO, and we get a lot of inspiration for our Moments feature from their intuitive design and rich, yet simple features. A few other team favorites include Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and Slack. We're in constant communication as a team, and Slack allows us to move forward on the go.

How long have you been working on this app?

We've been working on the app for just over three years, and my has it come a long way!

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

It's about keeping everything about their wedding in one place.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

Every new feature we add to the Joy app delivers on our promise to bring "everything about your wedding in one place" for our users. We compete with a lot of other apps in part, but not in whole. Two of our main differentiators from other wedding apps would be our Moments section and our push notifications. Moments is a way for guests to upload photos before, during, and after the wedding right in the Joy app—this way our couples can remember their special day from 100s of points of view. The push notifications are really handy, especially in the case of last-minute communication to guests. Say, for example, the weather isn't cooperating. The couple (or someone they designate like their wedding planner or the Maid of Honor) can send a notification to guests reminding them to bring along an umbrella. We also have a great feature called Unplugged Ceremony. If a couple opts into Unplugged Ceremony, Joy sends a push notification 15 minutes prior to the ceremony asking guests to power down and focus on what matters most during the vows.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

It's been really interesting to watch the way people want to use Joy versus the way we thought they'd use Joy. We're constantly learning from our users, and they really do guide our feature releases and updates. What we've found is that couples want more editing power and on-the-go planning resources, and we're going to continue to build toward a truly useful wedding planning tool.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

If you're engaged (or about to get engaged), we'd love for you to take a look at our website, withjoy.com. That's where you'll find more information about our wedding website and app, and the ways you can use Joy to ensure your wedding goes off without a hitch. If that's not your stage of life, we'd love for you to tell your friends and family about Joy. It's beautiful, it's useful, and best of all, it's free.