Give the PDF for ~10 guests away for free. This demonstrates that your solution will work, but nobody worth worrying has their invitation need filled by 10 invites.
Charge appropriate to value for PDFing the full guest list. Charge extraordinarily dearly for completely taking one annoying task off the overworked bride's plate and sending the invites yourself.
The free PR you get from offering the free PDFs will drive sales of the printed versions and providing some free PDFs to low value customers will be much cheaper than Google ad-words and wedding magazine adverts. If you think about it magazines / blogs are going to point to the place you get good invitations for free, ultimately a lot of the people going there will pay for them to be printed and sent out.
Let them. Your pathological customers have to go somewhere -- send them to that sucker. If they cut their prices, you raise yours. I promise you you will come out ahead on that exchange. (It even works for bingo cards, which the customer has not spent an entire lifetime envisioning as the ultimate in socially acceptable public demonstrations of lavish consumption.)
He mentions around the 3 min mark that lead generation generates more revenue than direct payments (and then goes on that topic for a bit).
Mark Pincus talks about it here - http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2009/11/my-take-on-...
Peanut Labs backs it up with independent research - http://peanutlabsmedia.net/2009/11/02/survey-finds-arrington...
i agree with this - her wedding is a special event that she will spend as much as she can - she already has a mental budget calculated by a complex process known only to her - some variables include -the cost of the wedding of her best friend -average cost of wedding in her social graph -how much she can afford to spend - then she will spend double of her budget so that she can complain about how guilty she feels for spending soo much for a wedding --but in no way-- her wedding will cost less than -and her planning process will last less than- the wedding of her best friend - she will get the most expensive of everything including invitations - she may buy groceries with coupons to look chic but this is -her- event - she will not look cheap - consider that even when she wants to -look- cheap she does not buy jeans and rip them at home herself -no- she buys -branded- jeans already ripped with style for her -also- it is a mistake to think that she is buying a -product- when she orders invitations - she is buying a -story- presented to her as -marketing- that she can share with her friends - for her to buy cheap invitations that she will spend time to create manually herself - there better be a -cool- story she can share with her frieds why she made this decision to go cheap - this story the founder must supply to her through marketing convincing her that buying cheap invitations does not make her look cheap - this is more difficult than building the site -also- maybe more important - she is -outsourcing- her wedding event - by definition she is the queen and the center of the universe and she will not do anything herself -except- giving orders - there is a lot of pride and competition involved in planning a wedding - she will not condescend to do manual work for her own invitations to save money - i think tracy in this case is thinking like the groom not the bride - but the decision to spend is made by the bride - so i believe this not to be a sound business model
It is a mistake to think that she is buying a product when she orders invitations. She is buying a story presented to her as marketing that she can share with her friends. For her to buy cheap invitations that she will spend time to create manually herself, there better be a cool story she can share with her friends why she made this decision to go cheap.
In the context of Limedaring's business. How do you make something like this happen? Unique typesetting? Outsource and arbitrage? Printing on a plotter machine?
Maybe my example is not very practical... but the question is: what in your product makes each guest feel special?
Also, talk to Andy Brice from Perfect Table Plan and pump him for information on who the ultimate customers of his software are.
P.S. The fact that a particular woman is marrying a particular man on a particular day is, in itself, worth more than $25. It can also be sold to multiple people. Just throwing that out there -- lead generation often isn't held in particularly high esteem, but it is big money.