The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2018

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Carley Roney and David Liu got married, they had a seat-of-the-pants celebration on a sweltering Washington rooftop. They never planned to go into the wedding business, but soon saw an opportunity in the market for a fresh approach to wedding planning. In 1996, they founded The Knot, a website with an irreverent attitude about "the big day." The Knot weathered the dot.com bust, a stock market meltdown, and eventually grew into the lifestyle brand XO Group, valued at $500 million. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," how Michael Dixon's business, Mobile Vinyl Recorders, uses portable record lathes to cut vinyl at parties, weddings, and music festivals. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	We put together this deck, we practice this presentation, we go through this whole dog impotty, talk about what we're planning and doing and what we're going to build, and he looks up, and he says,
0:42.0	this has got to be the worst business plan I've ever seen. And the air just got sucked out of the room.
0:49.0	Prime NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:04.0	I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, how one couple's disastrous wedding inspired their business, the not the number one wedding planning site in the US.
1:18.0	Right now, I've got three wedding invitations hanging on my fridge.
1:27.0	And I sometimes wonder about the people behind those cards, the six people who are probably freaking out right now.
1:34.0	The caterers, the flowers, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, the venue, the hotel discounts, for guests, the hair, the makeup, the photographer, the...
1:44.0	I'm going to stop here because I'm starting to get stressed out and I'm already married.
1:49.0	By the way, fun fact, the average wedding, the average wedding in the US, now costs $35,000, and the planning for it takes between nine months and a year.
2:01.0	So my advice... hello.
2:04.0	And if that's not an option, you will probably, at some point, make your way to the not.com.
2:10.0	It's a multimedia platform that helps you plan your wedding.
2:14.0	And it's a big business, the not is the center of a media group, now valued at more than half a billion dollars.
2:22.0	Which is all the more remarkable because at one point during the dot-compost, the not stock price fell to 26 cents.
2:29.0	But we'll get to that a little later.
2:32.0	When founders Carly Brony and David Lew started the not in the late 1990s, it was more like a chat room.
	...

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