Shan-Lyn Ma built Zola into a leader in the $100 billion dollar wedding industry and a company worth hundreds of millions in the process.

What started as a better online wedding registry has blossomed into a one-stop destination for all things weddings.

The most fascinating part?

How she’s done it all.

She’s leveraged a differentiated approach, unique business model, and ongoing customer feedback, and Zola has been able to stand out in an industry ripe for disruption.

There’s a lot to her story.

Let’s get to it.

Shan-Lyn Ma was born in Singapore and moved to Sydney, Australia when she was four years old.

That move, combined with her upbringing, influenced her desire to one day start a company:

Shan-Lyn also had an unlikely idol growing up.

It wasn’t a sports star, actress, or celebrity.

It was Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo:

Why Jerry?

Because he was the epitome of Shan-Lyn’s romanticized dream:

Shan-Lyn would end up in Silicon Valley soon enough.

After graduating from college in Australia, she moved to the U.S. to get her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Guess where she interned the summer after her first year?

Yahoo.

In 2006, after graduating from GSB, Shan-Lyn joined Yahoo full-time as a product marketing manager, spending two years working for the company.

Shan-Lyn’s time at Yahoo was a tremendous learning experience for her and she finally saw her inspiration:

After leaving Yahoo in 2008, Shan-Lyn joined Gilt Groupe, a company co-founded by Kevin Ryan in 2007.

Gilt was an early leader of the flash sale model and Shan-Lyn was drawn to their product, which in the early days you needed an invite to join:

Gilt offered Shan-Lyn the opportunity to work at a smaller company, an experience she craved after two years at Yahoo and one that would set her on the path to becoming a founder.

Furthermore, through that 4-year experience, she met her future co-founder, Nobu Nakaguchi, and her first investor, Kevin Ryan.

She was also able to figure out how well Nobu and her worked together:

After four years at Gilt, Shan-Lyn would spend one year as the Chief Product Officer at chloe + isabel before deciding to finally start her own company.

It’s 2013 and all of Shan-Lyn’s friends are getting married.

She’s going to weddings what seems like every weekend, but she’s frustrated with the registry process:

Shan-Lyn, just like we saw with Laura Behrens Wu a couple of weeks ago, had a personal problem she thought she could turn into a business.

And, with around 2 million weddings taking place every year in the U.S. alone, a number that hasn’t really changed much over the years, she had a massive market to go after.

Because of her experience at Gilt, Shan-Lyn also knew how she wanted to run her own company:

But let’s take a step back.

Shan-Lyn and Nobu knew the wedding registry process was broken.

So what’d they do first?

Drawing on their backgrounds in product management, Shan-Lyn and Nobu went through a very traditional product development process before fully committing to work on building their future company.

They started talking to hundreds of couples and thinking about how they could differentiate themselves in a massive market.

Shan-Lyn and Nobu were constantly looking for pain points, trying to fully understand the experience couples had with their wedding registry so they could design something better.

Three things came up repeatedly with couples:

With that feedback, Shan-Lyn and Nobu got to work prototyping:

It’s a few months after the initial “aha” moment of this opportunity to improve the wedding registry.

Shan-Lyn and Nobu have talked to hundreds of customers, prototyped a solution, and it’s become clear that this a problem worth solving.

So what did they need next?

Funding.

Fortunately for Shan-Lyn, she’d find it from her former Gilt Groupe boss, Kevin Ryan, after 4 years of hard work at the company:

Zola launched in October 2013.

Their business model presented another opportunity for Shan-Lyn to innovate, as she’d later talk about in 2021:

Armed with plenty of customer insights, a product that addressed many of their pain points, and a sustainable business model, Zola was ready to take off.

In the early days of Zola, virality was a key component of their growth:

With this growth, in November of 2013, they raised a $3.25 million Series A led by Josh Kushner at Thrive Capital, who then joined Zola’s board of directors.

Zola has 1,000 different items available to couples for their registry at this time.

Not long after, in April 2014, they launched their iPhone app to make it even easier for couples to create and manage their Zola registries.

By this time, they had 3,000 products and experiences available for couples and their growth was already starting to take off.

In the timeframe from their October 2013 launch until April 2014, Zola had 10,000 couples create a registry on their platform.

Growth was also accelerating every month.

Zola would end up doing more than $8 million in revenue in 2014 and by April 2015 the team was already nearly 40 people.

That set them on the path to raising a $10 million Series B round of funding in November 2015 led by Canvas Ventures.

Building on the 10,000 couples that had used their platform in the first 6 months after launch, two years in that number was 100,000 and Zola would do $40 million in revenue.

Shan-Lyn’s company was the fastest-growing online wedding registry by 2016 and a fundraising round that year would value Zola at more than $200 million just three years after launching the company.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led a $25 million Series C for Zola in November 2016.

Of the Series C rounds closed in 2016, Shan-Lyn Ma was one of only 4% of woman founder CEOs to close a Series C that year.

It was a round of funding preempted by VCs, as Zola didn’t need to fundraise, still having most of their capital from the previous round due to how fast they were growing.

In just three years, Zola had hit a $120 million GMV run rate, by this time Shan-Lyn was leading a team of 52, and couples using Zola could choose from more than 40,000 products for their registry, of which Zola gets a 40% cut if sold through their platform.

They were doing this while remaining very capital-efficient:

After this round of funding, Shan-Lyn would spend more significantly on paid marketing, not only buying ads in bridal publications but also in New York City subways, something they’d do for years to come, especially around engagement season.

Around this time Shan-Lyn talked about the customer surveys they use to improve Zola and how impactful these had been:

The growth team that leads these surveys at Zola shares this data with the entire company.

For Shan-Lyn, it’s all about accountability:

In April 2017, Shan-Lyn launched Zola Weddings, expanding beyond registry, something she talked about in July 2017:

Zola Weddings, a free resource for couples’ wedding-planning needs, includes, as written about by Alex Taussig at LVP, a custom website, registry, dynamic checklist, and automated guest-list management.

By 2017, 300,000 couples had used Zola’s platform with 500+ brands and more than 50,000 products and experiences available.

A May 2018 Series D round of $100 million led by Comcast Ventures valued Zola at $600 million, surpassing The Knot, another leading wedding company.

The selection of VCs in this round was strategic:

And what allowed Zola to capture so much market share by this point?

Shan-Lyn talked about that in a 2019 interview:

By 2019, Zola had 80,000 products on their site, but virtually no inventory, and they capture wholesale retail margins because they are the retailer.

Shan-Lyn is leading a team of 200 by this point and, while they’ve had a great deal of success, they’re not without competitors.

Amazon, of course, is one of them.

Whenever Zola launches an update, Amazon tends to copy it, but Shan-Lyn isn’t too bothered:

She’s a force and I love it.

And how does she think about building products?

One. Stop. Shop.

Coming off the Comcast-led investment, Zola started experimenting more with TV ads, with surprising results:

That same year, reflecting on the wedding market, Shan-Lyn was still surprised by its lack of disruption:

Then, when the pandemic hit the following year, Shan-Lyn and the Zola team were forced to adapt quickly.

What do you do when a global pandemic completely decimates your industry?

You adapt your product to continue serving your customers:

From there, Shan-Lyn and her team accelerated the launch of their wedding vendor search platform and also launched Zola Home, pulling it ahead on their roadmap:

Shan-Lyn and her team also hosted 5,000 virtual weddings through their wedding website product during the pandemic.

It’s a testament to their willingness to adapt and do whatever is in the best interest of their customers.

That willingness to adapt was also showcased by Shan-Lyn herself when she brought on a co-CEO, Rachel Jarrett, in June 2022.

Today, Zola continues to expand.

In September 2023, the team launched Zola Baby, a baby registry for expecting parents.

It was a product their customers continually asked for and one that seemed inevitable.

What’s next?

Time will tell.

In each edition of the Just Go Grind newsletter, I like to include a few more quotes at the end from my research into the founder who is featured, sharing their wisdom.

Advice for other founders:

On finding the right cadence for customer feedback:

On the realities of becoming a mother while running a company: