Essential Invite - A Premium Digital Wedding Invitation Platform

Starting with the problem, not the product

Before writing a line of code I ran a structured discovery phase to validate whether this was a problem worth solving — and for whom.

I conducted competitor analysis across the main UK and US invitation platforms, mapping their feature sets, pricing approaches, and the gaps that kept appearing in reviews. I then recruited engaged and recently married couples for user interviews, using a branching survey to screen and segment participants.

The interviews surfaced a consistent set of frustrations: platforms that required email addresses for every individual guest rather than households, no ability for guests to update an RSVP once submitted, templates that felt dated or heavily branded, and RSVP forms so limited they couldn't capture dietary requirements or transport interest in a single flow.

The opportunity was clear: a platform that treated the invitation as a genuine product — not a form with a photo on top.

Designing for two very different users

Essential Invite has two distinct users with almost opposite needs: couples who want control, clarity, and a beautiful result with minimal effort; and guests who need a frictionless experience that works for people of all ages and technical confidence.

The couple-facing product needed to feel premium but approachable — an editor that guided rather than overwhelmed. The guest-facing experience needed to feel like a beautifully designed wedding website, not a form. Those two design briefs pulled in different directions at times, and keeping both coherent was one of the more interesting design challenges of the project.

As a solo founder building a full-stack product, I made a deliberate choice to use Claude and Claude Code as core parts of my development workflow — not to replace engineering judgement, but to compress the time between idea and tested implementation.

It would have been tempting to start building straight away. Instead, I spent several weeks on research first - gathering insights with both Claude and Gemini, and writing more than ten iterations of a product requirements document as new questions and ideas surfaced along the way. Only once that felt genuinely ready did I open Claude Code and start building.

I'd used Claude Code before, on smaller projects and experiments, but this was the first time I used it to build something meant to actually ship — a different bar than a prototype, and one that made the discovery work before it feel worth the time it took.

Essential Invite is fully built and working today. The next phase — and the one I'm most looking forward to — is onboarding a first group of real couples to use it for their actual wedding, see how it holds up under genuine use, and let that feedback shape what comes next. Building the product was the more predictable half of this; validating it with real people is where the real learning happens.