How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Shan-Lyn Ma of Zola

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

With the wedding industry dramatically impacted by the pandemic, co-founder and CEO of Zola, Shan-Lyn Ma decided to pivot. Instead of just wedding planning, Zola would expand to include livestreaming virtual weddings as well as an e-commerce marketplace for home goods. Shan-Lyn talks with Guy about her forecast for the wedding industry this year and how to get more girls interested in entrepreneurship. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.c.com. Hey, it's Guy here with a very special and timely announcement. On March 11th at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, how I built this live is coming back. And this time, we're going virtual with best-selling author and former monk Jay Shetty. If you're searching for purpose, peace, and clarity in your life or your struggling to find meaning and motivation at work, then you'll definitely want to join this conversation. Tickets are still available. For more information, head to nprpresents.org, and I hope to see you there. Hey, everyone, and welcome to how I built this resilience edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Each week, on Thursdays, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show live to talk about how they've been building resilience into their businesses this year. And today, my conversation with

Shanlon Ma, CEO and co-founder of Zola. Zola is a one-stop shop for couples planning a wedding, from creating a wedding website, finding local vendors, making a registry, to even creating a photo album of the big day. With the wedding industry completely hammered by the pandemic last year, Zola focused on releasing new products and features for couples, like a home goods marketplace and even hosting virtual weddings on its platform. We aim to serve couples. We aim to serve couples. from that first day they get engaged through their entire wedding planning journey and into their first years of newly wed life with the tools and technology that we build to help them plan, dream, and then bring to life their fantasy wedding.

So basically, you go on the website and you can do everything, like from finding the person to do your flowers to a venue, to the caterer, to the registry, to the invitations, everything. Yes, your wedding website, you'll save the dates, and then your album of your beautiful photos with the photographer that you found on Zola. Yeah, I was checking out the website earlier today. It's super cool. How did it start? You started 2013, and I think at the time you were working at G-G-I-L-T, which is the guilt group, G-I-L-T, not G-U-I-L-T. Tell me how this idea came about. Well, I had always dreamed about starting my own company one day, but I had never felt ready until really working for many years in product management, which was really working alongside designers and engineers to build digital websites and mobile apps. And so had gotten that experience. And in 2013, that just happened to be the year all my friends got married at exactly the same time. I think everyone has that year where you're going to a wedding every weekend, spending a lot of money.

I was buying gifts from my friend's wedding registries and found that the experience that I was going through their registry was just one of the worst shopping experiences I had ever seen. I was talking to Nobu, who is my co-founder at Zola, about how painful it was. And he's married. And he was complaining about it. From the couple's perspective, it's just as terrible. And we looked at each other and we said, you know, we've been working together to build great products. Why don't we attack this ourselves? We think we can do a much better job.

And that was how Zola was born. I'm wondering, you know, I mean, this is 2013. So this is still, you know, the ancient early days of Web 2.0, which is unbelievable. Did you have initially when you went to people? I know because a little bit of your backstory, you grew up in Australia. and then you came to the U.S. for business school, and you had a bunch of jobs in sort of adjacent kind of industries, right? You worked at guilt and another, and you also worked at another.

At Yahoo. You're actually growing up in Australia, it's a very remote country and that is literally on the other side of the world. And I had always kind of read about what is happening in the world and what is happening in the tech revolution. that we're all living through right now. And I felt very removed from the action. So I moved to the US to really be a part of this tech revolution underway.

And my dream was always to be like an entrepreneur like Jerry Yang, who founded Yahoo. I had a picture of him on my wall, my bedroom wall. Because I'd never known really anyone else who had worked in tech apart from the people that I read about in magazines. So my dream actually came true and then I moved to the U.S. After business school, I was able to get a job at Yahoo, which Jerry founded. And I think one of the best days there was when I walked past him in the hallway. Wow. But as a result of working there, I got to learn from great product leaders who were some of the best in Silicon Valley who really taught me,

how do you think about creating a product that customers love and that they want to share with all their friends. When you came up with the idea for what is Nazola and you started to talk to people about it, I have to imagine that some people said, oh, this industry is saturated. There's already, there's, you know, the knot. There's a bunch of other sites that, you know, there's a bunch of other people doing this. You don't want to get into that business. That is exactly right. I think there was a lot of opposition from many places and from many investors who said, like what you said, you know, it's not possible to build a big business in wedding. because there hasn't been one yet.

Or do people really spend that much on weddings? Or it's highly fragmented as an industry. And so there must be a reason for that. And that sounded crazy to me because I knew how much my friends were spending in terms of time and money. I think weddings is one of the only times in your life where you spend, on average, in this country, $30,000 on one day. Wow.

Because you want to create a special memory and experience for yourself. and your friends. And so I knew there was a lot of business opportunity. There was an underserved need. There was a passionate customer base. And just because investors didn't feel personally connected to the pain point, didn't mean it didn't exist. And look at you now. I mean, you're now a huge player in this industry. Tell me a little bit about the business model. How do you guys make money? So we started with one particular business model, which I'm proud of in that I think it's very innovative. It is truly a good. combination of an e-commerce business and a marketplace business. And what I mean by that is that

when we first launched our wedding registry, we wanted to offer products and experiences and the ability for couples to register for whatever they wanted. But we also knew we had to find a way to make money to stay in business. And so what we ended up doing was creating this marketplace of products and brands that couples wanted, where we could sell them, the product through Zola as similar to the way retailers do it, but in a way where we could drop ship the product so we didn't have to buy all the inventory. And if we did have to buy all the inventory for the registry because it's required such a broad assortment, I think it would have been very hard to make the business model work.

But because we could move towards a blend of an e-commerce and a marketplace business based on the technology that we built to allow that to work, we were able to then not just serve a lot of couples, but have a business that was then able to fund our investment into new products that were free, like the free wedding website that we offer or the guest list manager. And from that could then innovate into more products that helped us expand our business into new business models, such as paper invitations,

where that is more similar to what I would call a direct-to-consumer or D to C, business model. And you're super, we'll talk about this in a moment because you're super diversified now, but going back to when you were launching this, I mean, this is a capital intensive business because you've got product, you've got website, you've got human beings, lots of people who you have to hire. How are you able to raise money? Because I know, from what I understand, like you didn't have money to fund this yourself. No, absolutely not. So the the first round of funding, we were fortunate in that from our many years of working at Guild Group, which was the startup, Nobu and I had worked with previously, Kevin Ryan, who was the founder

and chairman of guilt and also a serial entrepreneur who was started many other businesses. He knew us. He liked the weddings industry. And so he came on as both our co-founder and our seed investor. And when I tell people that story, many other founders say to me, wow, you were so lucky. It's like you clicked your fingers and all of a sudden you had funding. And what I say to them is that is actually not true. It's the opposite.

It is that Nobu and I worked our guts out 24-7 for four years to prove to Cameron that we were worth investing in. And that's the only reason he was able to make a decision so quickly. Wow. And so that was what helped. just get started when we had no product and no revenue. And then from that initial seed funding, we were able to build and launch our first product and get people using it show, you know, it was a real business and the funding was able to come in easier after that based on the numbers that we were showing. Wow. That's so cool. Shandlin, I know that you guys were growing and a lot,

like a lot of businesses, I think 2019 was a really just banner year for you. You come into 2020. You're probably expecting it to be the most incredible year from a revenue perspective. And then the pandemic hits in March of 2020 and weddings start to get canceled or at best rescheduled. Were you worried? Were you worried about what was going to happen to your business? It was a scary moment. And I think like every other person running a business, you just have never run a business through a pandemic before so no one knows what's going to happen. One of the things that has always been beneficial to us, however, is we have great visibility into what our business is going to do each year in terms of revenue, how it will perform,

because we can see wedding dates, we can forecast the business very accurately based on that. So at the start of 2020, we could forecast 2020 is going to be a great year because we have so many more people married with Zola than the previous year. And as we all know, the pandemic had different plans for us all, particularly in the wedding industry and in the world. So in March, when COVID first hit, when the lockdown started, and we saw the majority of people start to move their wedding dates from March, April, May into later dates, later in the year, this year, next year. And we saw two things. We saw first, obviously, risk to our financial plan. And then we also saw a lot of couples reaching out to us for support on how do they navigate, rescheduling their

wedding in a pandemic. And we ended up receiving a tidal wave of calls and emails of couples asking us to help them navigate through this time. How did you deal with all those calls and emails? Because you have like 200 employees. Yeah. So we very quickly, started to put out within our product messages that would help couples based on what we were hearing from them through these calls. So we put on our wedding website product messages that couples could post to all their guests to communicate what was happening with their wedding as a result of COVID-19. We launched, change the date cards so that couples could very easily customize and send, change the date cards to all of their guests to get the word out. And then we did invest a lot more in our customer

support team. And I've always been proud of the fact we have best in class customer support for our industry. And we wanted to maintain that. And well, it definitely wasn't easy. And I know that our customer support team just worked 24-7 to serve our couples. I am proud of the level of service that we helped our couples have through this time. In a moment, more from Shenlin Ma about how Zola and the entire wedding industry had to pivot due to the pandemic. And her predictions for the future of weddings, stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this Resilience Edition from NPR.

Today, my guest is Shanlin Ma, co-founder and CEO of the Wedding Planning Site, Zola. And when you think of industries that were disrupted by the pandemic, it's safe to say the wedding industry is pretty high on that list. But Chanlin says her team actually used that disruption as an opportunity. As you started to see that year, as you started to see the pandemic year unfold, you had to start making decisions, big decisions about pivoting about what things you could do. And I know you guys introduced a bunch of stuff last year of a wedding vendor search platform. Zola Home, where you're selling furniture and home goods.

I think you introduced wedding cards, maybe photo albums, all last year. Was that all like fast-tracked and maybe even introduced because of the pandemic? Because you were forced to do it quickly? Yes, exactly. I think there were two categories that these things fall into. One category is things that we always wanted to do and we knew were long-term priorities for us, like the wedding vendor search platform. And we had been building that platform. But 2020, we thought things are going to accelerate in that people want to plan their weddings increasingly

online because they can't offline. And so it's important for us to have as robust an offering of as many venues, florists, caterers as possible, because that is what people want to look for right now. And it's also important for all our vendor partners who are small businesses to be getting leads and getting customers during this time when obviously they are hurting as well. So we invested many more people, time, attention into building out that vendor searched offering than before, and that accelerated. Then the second category is really things that we didn't think we were going to do in 2020, but we kind of pulled up on the roadmap because we saw the need was there. So the home store is a great offering, an example of that, where we didn't think

the home store was the number one priority initially when we set up in 2020 because there's so much to doing weddings. But of course, when people are all at home and then looking online increasingly for ovens, bread trays, mattresses, and we have all of that. We saw in our data people very quickly turning to Zola to buy things for their home, even though it was very hard to do. So we thought, what if we make it easy and we actually let people not set up a registry if they are just looking for a pizza oven. And so that was the launch of Zola home. And since we've launched that, we've just seen incredible demand for both current couples, past married couples, as well as anyone coming to Zola to buy for their homes. I mean, it's like a second business.

It's like an entirely separate company that you launched, right? because the wedding platform, you know, that's like I'm thinking, that seems kind of manageable. You've got the registry and then you've got the cards and the albums and the platform. I mean, it's a lot. But then there's a whole separate business selling like home goods and furniture and flatware and all kinds of things like that. Yeah. And it was always a part of the dream because the reason why any normal retailer has a wedding registry is because they hope to then continue to serve that person with things as they move into their newly

wed home and as they can grow as a couple in their home. So that is a very classic strategy. But for us, I think the differentiator is that we are able to personalize what people see within our home store depending on what their style preferences are or what their brand preferences are. So I think over time our home store just gets smarter and smarter in showing people things they're most interested in. Shenlin, did you, I mean, you know, you say that you didn't plan on introducing this, the home goods store in 2020. It sounds like the pandemic was actually an opportunity to fast track it, right, in a sense that you didn't go through the normal motions of a big rollout campaign and a big strategic plan and endless meetings. that it sounds like you just kind of pushed it out there because you had to. Yes, yes.

I think in product development, there's almost two kind of product launches. One is where you push your product out and then you iterate based on feedback. And then the home store example is more of an example where it's pulled out of your hands by the users. They are demanding it and they are voting with their shopping dollars. And so it was almost like, it would be stupid not to work on this in 2020. Super cool. I mean, we've done interviews with lots of entrepreneurs who also similarly introduced these huge ideas that in previous times would have taken 18 months or, you know, two years to roll out. But under the circumstances to grow or to thrive or to even stay alive, it sounds like you guys just pulled the trigger.

We did. We did. And I think we were lucky in the sense of the way that we had built Zola from the very beginning, the technology platform. We built it in a way that was flexible because we had this idea in mind from the beginning. And I think if we had not built it in a way that allowed us to grow into this strategy, it would have taken a lot longer than it actually took. One of the coolest things about weddings last year were Zoom weddings. And we had one on our team, James DeLhousie. one of our incredible producers, all of our producers are incredible. James had out of Zoom wedding. We all came. It was so beautiful. People were just crying. It was so nice.

It was James and his wife and just like two or three people in person there who were all tested and they did in Washington, D.C. And we were all over the country, all over the U.S. I'm in the Bay Area. It was so nice. It was just beautiful. And it felt very special. And you guys basically started, created a platform to enable Zoom. And I read that you hosted like 5,000 wedding events last year.

Were those mostly virtual? Exactly. Yes. So we did see, again, people starting to ask us and beg us, could we help them facilitate a Zoom wedding through our wedding website product? And so we very quickly built this because we knew this was something to help couples through this tough time. We launched it. And really day one, we saw.

hundreds and then ultimately thousands of people use this primarily for their ceremonies, like what you described, where people really wanted to still have that ceremony, even though in many cases people wanted to still have a bigger celebration or party later on. They wanted the ceremony. They wanted it to be meaningful. They wanted their friends and family to be there. And they wanted it to be easy to access. And that's where we came in.

We said, okay, what if people are already on your wedding website? the ceremony was right there and then. So if you have access to someone's wedding website, you could see and stream the ceremony. And that was just an example of something that we don't make money from, but we know it was a huge need. And we were so happy to be a part of that because it helped people in some of their toughest times.

Shalen, I'm going to go to a couple of questions where we've received from our viewers. This is from Carlos. Carlos asks, Do you think couples will start asking for proof of vaccination at weddings once more of us are vaccinated? We're actually just debating this on our team and whether we thought this would happen. I don't think we've seen overwhelming evidence yet that this is happening. But I think, you know, in certain instances where there are higher risk attendees, you know, it may be more likely to happen.

But I think in many ways, it's still too early to tell whether that will be common behavior. All right. It's probably likely that as more and more of us are vaccinated, that weddings, you know, that were kind of put off will start towards the end of this year and really begin next year. Are weddings going to come back with a force in 2022? Is it going to be this overwhelming deluge of weddings? And, you know, I always can rely on the wisdom of crowds to tell me the answer to this question. And luckily, what we are seeing in the numbers is absolutely yes. We see at least, you know, a couple's planning their wedding on Zola that their wedding dates are really growing in a huge way starting this fall. So I think if you were to kind of do a survey of when, based on that, when do people think that they'll be able to have a large wedding ceremony with people in person? it's really starting this fall.

And we are lucky that we're in industry where it's not a matter of if weddings, large weddings are going to happen again. It's a matter of when are they going to start happening again. And what I overwhelmingly hear from couples again and again is people really want to have that large party with their family and friends. They miss that.

And so I don't know if that is ever going to change. In fact, we are hearing instances of many venues and vendors booking out very quickly now because the floodgates are open on people feeling more comfortable and planning their ways. Yeah, I mean, I know that the past year has been tough for venues and others who, you know, who do in-person events. But I can imagine that right now might be a good time to start building that structure, that barn on your farm to host weddings for people. Absolutely. And if you do that, you should share it on Zola. And we'll help you get some couples in there. Shanlin, this is a question that it's come through Facebook, actually through YouTube from Emerald Wolf Girls.

And I love this question. And I'm going to kind of paraphrase it. I know that I've read you talk about Katrina Lake as somebody who's inspired you. Katrina's been on how I built this. She's amazing. She's been to our summits before. And it runs an incredible business stitch fix. I mean, I think, like, you would, like, listen in on her quarterly calls, like, earnings calls that she'd have with reporters because you just admired her so much.

The question is, how do, I know you grew up in a family where entrepreneurship was encouraged and discussed and talked about, and you had this idea. I mean, you had Jerry Yang on your wall, right, as a kid. I mean, you were kind of, kind of that, you were that kid. How do you, the question from YouTube is, how do you get, what's your suggestion for? for encouraging girls to be interested in starting their own businesses one day. What a great question. And in fact, just hearing Katrina Lake's name gives me goosebumps because I admire her so greatly and what she's done.

I think, well, first and foremost, it goes back to the old adage of you can't be what you don't see. And so I think the more that we can show girls examples of people like Katrina or so many great women who have really broken barriers, broken ceilings, and felt like it was just doable for younger girls. I think that is a huge step forward. And I know even just like you mentioned, a very embarrassing fact, I do listen to Katrina's earnings calls because there's so few female CEO leaders who do them that to hear her do it in a way that is both strong, but uniquely different to the way many men do it is a learning opportunity for me.

So that's one. I think the second is encouraging them to push their ideas in all kinds of discipline. So it's not just about business ideas. It could be ideas in the garden or in art or in whenever you go out to any kind of in-person experience. there's always things you can improve, you can change, you can do differently. And so I think even having the conversation of how could this be better? How could we make it better is, I think it gets the creative juices flowing on what is the kind of change that you want to bring to the world? And then hopefully, how can you do it in a way that is sustainable and scalable so it doesn't just happen once.

It happens continuously. Awesome, awesome answer. Shannon, co-founder of Zola, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much for having me. What an honor. That's an excerpt for my live conversation with Shanlin Ma, co-founder of Zola. You can join us each Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 Eastern on the How I Built This Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages, or on NPR's YouTube page, to hear the live conversation and maybe even ask a question. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to NPRPresents.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Falkner with help from Liz Metzker, Farah Safari, J.C. Howard, Will Mitchell, El Manian, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers.

Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and I'll see you back here in a few days. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.