María Carmona and Myrtha Hernández created a marketplace with an innovative business model to search and buy everything that is needed for a wedding.
Mixing every-day life events with the business
You just got married, you said yes and you get married in the next few months. And now, what’s next? Plan the wedding, but you will have to dedicate many hours of your time or even weeks to find everything you need for that big day, and it will surely be complicated to have a tight schedule. For many couples, far from enjoying the preparations can become a headache.
It was precisely this problem that motivated the Venezuelan María Carmona and the Mexican Myrtha Hernández to found Liizt, a platform that helps plan weddings, set up gift tables and schedule the honeymoon, all in one place and with a click . It works as a marketplace where you can choose more than four thousand products for the gift table, suppliers for parties such as banquets, musicians or DJ, and travel options.
A huge innovation
This tool also offers the possibility of creating personalized digital invitations, web pages, making reservations, creating a gift table with products and experiences such as massages or throwing up the parachute, receiving funds or life insurance. Unlike its indirect competitors such as Liverpool or Palacio de Hierro, in Liizt the user does not pay a single peso for using the platform or requesting services.
How do they generate income?
María explains that for each article, experience, service or trip that the future spouses buy for themselves or through their guests, the startup retains a commission of the cost directly to the brands that are a Liizt partner. Everything sold in this marketplace costs the same as in the store.
They have three types of clients: those who are about to get married, the guests who are the ones who pay for the gifts and the brands that offer their products and services through this platform. They serve mainly the millennial generation, although many of them prefer to travel or be independent than to marry. Two thirds of this generation are single, 14% are married and 16% live in free union, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
The entrepreneurial marriage
The idea arose two years ago when Myrtha received an invitation for a wedding in which she said that if they wanted to give them a trip and an elephant ride, they would deposit a certain amount of money into a bank account. The entrepreneurs realized that there was no flexibility to decide what to give and what to do with the gifts. Then, they decided to add talents and work as a team to come up with a solution.
María studied economics in Venezuela and had already set up three e-commerce companies, while Myrtha worked in an architecture firm and had experience in design and product development. They invested $ 5,000 of their own to create the platform and started working at Myrtha’s house with 15 programmers. While developing the page, they set up a contemporary art investment fund that is still valid to fund Liizt.
The key to success
One of the keys to success was that before launching the page in December 2017, they validated their model with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP, for its acronym in English), ie a version of the platform that they tested with 30 couples that They planned to get married to know if their proposal really served them, if they were willing to buy it and collect information that would help them improve it.
“Many times you are designing according to what you suppose, but you do not know if it is really what the users need”, says María. Hence the importance of validating before going on the market.
To date they have maintained a growth in the company of 18% per week and have managed to make strategic alliances with brands such as Cuisinart, Smeg, Dyson or Nespresso who expanded their sales channels by joining this tool. Maria mentions that they do not intend to steal from the wedding planners or the business of the wedding industry, but rather, far from being a threat, Liizt is an opportunity to sell and professionalize their services even more.
Catching investors
But that is not all. Entrepreneurs arrowed Silicon Valley, as they received the highest recognition of Y Combinator with 10 thousand dollars, the largest business accelerator in the world where large companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Rappi have been created. In addition, his first investor was a famous businessman from Silicon Valley, in San Francisco.
They confess that they never thought about applying, much less being recognized by Y Combinator with a company for future spouses, but decided to do so when they saw that their business was becoming more attractive in investment issues, as the wedding industry generates more than 20,000 millions of dollars in sales in Mexico. When they applied to this accelerator, they were interviewed by the founder of Gmail, Paul Buchheit.
Technology, a main matter
One of the biggest challenges was to form your team at the beginning to build the technology, and convince the big brands to be partners without having a robust user base. They learned that it is important to start with the resources that you have around you and get the most out of them to grow, just as they did by starting to operate in their own home, offering products from one brand, then another and so on.
They consider that their business has the potential to continue growing, especially because the wedding industry is still typical and can reinvent itself with the innovation of entrepreneurs. In addition, 600,000 weddings are held in Mexico each year, which makes this market attractive.
For now, Liizt only operates in Mexico, but María and Myrtha have plans to expand in Latin American countries. The goal, says Myrtha, is to be the go to place of weddings. “We want our brand to be positioned in the minds of the public, that when they are getting married, it is the first thing they think about to resolve the wedding.”
Also published on Medium.