The room already knows the stories.
Which is the entire difficulty. Forty of the people listening were there for at least one of the things you are about to describe, and they will notice if the version you give has been improved.
Why a wedding speech is the worst possible use of a writing tool, and the best.
Ask any general-purpose writing tool for a best man speech and it will give you one immediately. It will be fluent, it will be about the right length, and it will contain a story about the stag do, a joke about the groom's cooking, and a line about how everyone knew from the first time they saw them together. None of that happened. It is the average of every wedding speech ever published, which is precisely why it sounds like one.
That failure is not a small one. A listing that overstates costs you a buyer. A speech that invents a detail costs you in the room, live, in front of the person it is about — because the groom's mother knows he never worked at that pub, and the bride knows they did not meet at a bus stop. The one audience in the world that can fact-check you instantly is the one you are standing in front of.
So this job works the other way round. It will not supply the material. It will not fill a gap with something plausible. Everything in the speech traces back to something you typed, and where the speech needs a detail you did not give — a year, a place, the name of the friend in the story — it stops and asks for it in the draft rather than deciding for itself. What you are buying is not invention. It is order, cutting, and a shape you can say out loud.
What it does with what you give it.
Six or seven answers go in: your role on the day, who the couple are to you, how you know them, two or three real moments, the tone you want, how long it should run, and anything that must not be mentioned. A speech, a shorter version of the same speech, cue cards and delivery notes come back.
Here is the part that matters — what happens to a memory that is nearly a story.
We met at uni and he was the only person who came to help when my car broke down on the way to my sister's wedding, drove two hours, didn't say a word about it after.
I have known [ADD FACT: groom's name] since [ADD FACT: which university, and what year you both started]. And the thing I want to tell you about him is not from university at all.
Three years ago my car died on the way to my sister's wedding. I rang him. He drove two hours to get me there — [ADD FACT: where he drove from, and what he had to leave to do it] — and then never mentioned it again. Not once. Not at the time, not since, not even when it would have been useful to him.
That is the whole man, in one story. He turns up, and he doesn't tell you he turned up.
Notice what did not happen. It did not invent the university, or the year, or where he set off from, and it did not quietly drop the story because a detail was missing. It kept the shape and marked the holes, because you can fill those in thirty seconds and nobody else can. It also did not add a joke about your driving. You did not give it one.
The three-year figure is the one thing there worth checking before you read it out. That is what the checks list at the end of the draft is for: anything the speech asserts on your behalf that only you can confirm.
How it works.
- You answer the questions. The long one is the memories box, and it is the only one that really matters. Two or three moments with the who, the where and the why, written badly, beats a page of "he's a great guy" written well. There is a minimum length on that box for exactly this reason.
- You pay once — £7 — and the job runs. That buys 7,000 points. A speech has a ceiling of 3,500 points and spends only what the finished draft actually costs, so the rest stays in your balance for another job. Three revisions are included: you can tell it the tone is off, or that a story has to go, and it rewrites.
- You get five things back. The speech, a version cut to roughly half the length in case the day runs late, cue cards in running order, notes on where to pause and where to look up, and a list of what to confirm before the day.
A job that fails to generate spends nothing at all.
Who this suits.
Worth your £7 if
- You have the stories and cannot get them into an order that goes anywhere.
- You write fine in an email and freeze the moment it has to be said aloud to two hundred people.
- You are the father of the bride, the maid of honour, or a second best man, and every example you have found online is a best man doing jokes.
- You know exactly which subject must not come up and want it handled without a drama.
- You have a draft that runs eleven minutes and needs to run five.
Not worth it if
- You genuinely do not know the couple well. Nothing here can manufacture closeness, and a warm speech from a near-stranger is the one thing a room can always hear.
- You want the jokes written for you. It will not write material about exes, weight, money or anyone's past relationships, and it will not punch down for a laugh.
- You are looking for a speech to read cold off a phone. It is written to be said, but it still needs you to have read it twice.
- You want it to sound like a professional speechwriter. It is trying to sound like you, which is a different and lower ceiling on the polish.
Ready to write it?
The questions take about ten minutes to answer honestly, and that ten minutes is where the whole speech comes from. Have your two or three moments in mind before you start.
One payment, no subscription. 7,000 points; this job's ceiling is 3,500 and it spends only what it uses. Three revisions included.