Why every family gets its own link: building wedding invitations for Indian weddings

I am Khushi, and I build ShaadiMode, a web app for Indian weddings. This post is about one design decision that shaped the whole product: every family gets its own invitation link.

The problem with one card for everyone

An Indian wedding is not one event. There is often a haldi, a mehendi, a sangeet, the wedding and a reception, spread over two or three days. Not every guest is invited to every function. Close family comes to everything; colleagues may only come to the reception.

Most couples still make one PDF or video card and forward it to everyone on WhatsApp. That card has to list every function, so guests see events they are not invited to, and the couple then spends weeks on the phone collecting RSVPs and answering "which day should we come?".

One link per family

In ShaadiMode the couple adds families to a guest list and ticks which functions each family is invited to. Each family then gets its own link. When they open it:

• the invitation greets them by name,
• it shows only the functions they are invited to,
• it opens in the language the couple picked for them (we support 28),
• and the RSVP form asks only about those functions, plus things like meal choice, rooms and pickups.

Because the reply is tied to the family's link, the couple sees one clean list per function instead of a pile of WhatsApp messages.

Why a link and not an app

Wedding guests range from teenagers to grandparents. Asking every guest to install an app does not work, so everything is a normal web page that opens from WhatsApp. The same idea carries over to photos: after the wedding, the photographer uploads the photos and each guest finds the ones they are in with one selfie, again without installing anything.

Stack

• Next.js on Vercel for the site and the invitation pages
• Supabase (Postgres) in Mumbai, close to our users
• WhatsApp Cloud API for sending and for a helper that answers guest questions
• A small face-matching service for the photo side

What I learned

The hard part was not the video or the design. It was the guest list: families, who is invited to what, and keeping replies attached to the right family. Once that model was right, the invitation, the RSVPs and even the photo sharing all hang off the same family link.

If you are building for weddings or events in India, I would love to compare notes. You can try ShaadiMode free at shaadimode.com.