Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma reflects on the initial skepticism she faced from venture investors who did not personally experience the pain points of planning a wedding.
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“And just because investors didn't feel personally connected to the pain point, did it mean it didn't exist.”
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Insight
Ma: Flash sale business models are rarely sustainable or profitable
“I think the, ultimately, the business model of flash sales was one that was very hard to turn into a sustainable, profitable business.”
Ma: Wedding registries had not meaningfully changed since the 1960s
“The problem was that it hadn't changed in decades since the 19 sixties when they were first invented. It was like someone had taken a registry from the 19 sixties and just put it on the internet and hadn't touched it since.”
Ma: Holding warehouse inventory is structurally unprofitable for wedding registries
“And it's even more impractical in a wedding registry setting because By nature of a registry, you want to offer a very broad assortment, so you want as many brands and products as possible, but you need very little inventory depth, and so that kind of model is…”
Ma: Series B is hardest because selling dreams is no longer enough
“You know, at the teenage years where you have enough of a track record where you're making money so you can't just sell the dream of what's going to happen, but you're also not yet at maturity where you can show this is going to, this is already a huge company…”
Shan-Lyn Ma: Product launches are either pushed out or demand-pulled
“I think, you know, in product development, there's almost two kinds of product launches. One is where you push a product out, and then you iterate based on feedback, and then the home store example is more of a example where it's pulled out of your hands by th…”
Shan-Lyn MaMar 11, 2021▶ 18:05How I Built Resilience: Shan-Lyn Ma of Zola
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