The company has seen its website grow organically over the last five years to help couples plan hundreds of thousands of weddings without spending a dime on marketing.
When Vishal Joshi moved from India to the U.S. to work as a software engineer he didn’t expect that path would eventually march him down the aisle to the wedding industry. He was leading teams at Microsoft when his colleague and future cofounder Michael Bach inspired the proposal. Bach’s sister Amy was planning her wedding and increasingly frustrated with the lack of connection between wedding planning apps and websites.
They created what they thought was a simple integrated workflow software and it took off — fast. Soon after Amy’s wedding, the trio was coming into work to find their desks littered with sticky notes from other colleagues asking if they could also get a custom wedding website. When their servers started to crash, they knew they had something big. They left their jobs in 2016 to focus full time on the budding business, Joy. “First [Microsoft] tried to convince us not to leave,” Joshi tells.
Joy stands out in the increasingly crowded wedding sector because the platform is hyper-focused on the details, Joshi says. He has personally spoken with hundreds of couples for direct feedback on what they would like to see and many of the suggestions have become features, like an integration with Uber and Lyft or the ability to make customized schedules for each guest based on wedding events they are and aren’t invited to.
Joy is completely free to use for couples and has been able to expand thus far exclusively through word-of-mouth advertising. This has allowed the team to focus entirely on making the tech beautiful, Joshi says, which has helped attract investors like Jon Shulkin, a partner at Valor Siren Ventures. “The idea that they’ve attracted a user base with no marketing, that to us at Valor shows they are building something special,” Shulkin tells.
The company does make money though. In the spring, the startup launched a new service that helps couples create a single registry across different retailers ranging from big-box stores like Crate & Barrel and Target down to their favorite local businesses. As people buy gifts off the registry, the company receives kickback from the retailers.
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