The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu (2018)

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2019

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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 in our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Tyson Walters who got so tired of his St. Bernard shedding everywhere that he created a zip-up body suit for dogs: the Shed Defender. 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 years 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.
0:27.0	Hey, so back when Carly Roni and David Liu decided to launch a wedding magazine online, the internet was so basic that it barely had ads.
0:37.0	But as the internet got bigger and bigger, so did the knot.
0:41.0	And today it's grown into an international brand that helps people celebrate all kinds of milestones, weddings, babies, new homes, bar mitzvahs.
0:49.0	This episode, first ran in March of last year, and I think you're going to love this one because it's also extremely funny with a really great wedding scene.
0:58.0	So here it is.
1:02.0	We put together this deck, we practiced this presentation.
1:06.0	We go through this whole dog and pony, talk about what we're planning and doing and what we're going to build.
1:11.0	And he looks up and he says, this has got to be the worst business plan I've ever seen.
1:18.0	And the air just got sucked out of the room.
1:27.0	From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:36.0	I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, how one couple's disastrous wedding inspired their business, the knot, the number one wedding planning site in the US.
1:54.0	Right now, I've got three wedding invitations hanging on my fridge.
1:58.0	And I sometimes wonder about the people behind those cards, the six people who are probably freaking out right now.
2:05.0	The caterers, the flowers, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, the venue, the hotel discounts, for guests, the hair, the makeup, the photographer, the...
2:15.0	I'm going to stop here because I'm starting to get stressed out and I'm already married.
2:20.0	By the way, fun fact, the average wedding, the average wedding in the US, now costs $35,000.
	...

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