How to grow your side project
The story of easywedding.gr
Hi, Dimos here.
Welcome to the 16 new subscribers this week! 🥳
This is the second part of our conversation with Savvas Vezyridis (LI: @savvas-vezyridis). We’ll explore his side project, easywedding.gr, and try to understand how they got to where they are today.
PS: Those who read last week’s interview know Savvas already, so no introduction is required. We talked about building side projects with real-world potential, so make sure to check it out if you haven’t!
Read time: 4 minutes
Savvas Vezyridis
Athens, Greece
Co-founded easywedding.gr, a platform that connects wedding professionals with couples
In 2023 Easy Wedding helped organize more than 2000 weddings, has 700 wedding professionals (vendors) listed, and one full-time employee
Before we start… here’s what Savvas had to say on their journey:
It's not that we followed a clear plan. It all came from trial and error—essentially, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
So, if you’re building a project of your own, keep experimenting!
So Savvas, how did you attract vendors in the first place?
We started making phone calls. But it became clear pretty quickly that this method wasn't working for us—people were simply hanging up when we called. I think in Greece everyone is wired to instinctively hang up when seeing an unknown number because we are constantly bombarded with sales calls.
Eventually, we shifted our focus to using social media, and this worked much better for us.
How did you use social media?
We simply found vendors on Instagram and cold messaged them. Once you follow one account, Instagram automatically suggests other similar accounts, and for us, every suggested account was potentially another vendor to reach out to. The Instagram algorithm acts as a discovery tool.
We simply told them: “I’ll get you clients if you sign up for our platform”, and they did.
Does having more followers on Instagram help?
We now have more than 28,000 followers, but interestingly, this hasn’t increased our response rates a lot. At least not as much as we believed it would.
It helps since we now have more vendors reaching out directly for partnerships, but that’s about it.
How are you attracting couples?
We have a blog. That’s our main source of traffic. Especially early on, the blog was the only way we could get organic links since the directory keywords are congested and have many sponsored ads, making it difficult to get on the first page.
How do you figure out what to write?
We look for trends mostly from popular wedding blogs outside of Greece. It helps us understand which topics are gaining traction and are likely to pick up with readers.
We also look at what drives traffic for our competitors. We understand which keywords work for them, and then write content that targets these keywords. You can use SEO tools like Semrush to do that.
How do you know an article is working?
We use Google Analytics and the Search Console to track the source and keywords that drove that traffic. We sometimes also do sponsored ads for our blog on Facebook or Instagram to see how much we pay per click.
A successful article can get you a click for less than a cent in Greece, while a less popular one might cost five or six cents per click.
If Easy Wedding grew 10x overnight, would you quit your software dev job?
I want to continue working as a software engineer, so I would say no. I learned a tremendous amount over the last two years working in the industry, and this would never have happened if I kept working alone on Easy Wedding.
Never say never, but I'm a builder at heart and still have a lot to learn, so I want to keep doing what I am doing.
All done! If you enjoyed this, I’d love to know!
Until next Tuesday,
Dimos
🚀 Shoutouts & Recommendations
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💼 Jobs from my network
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