Shan-Lyn Ma co-founded Zola in 2013 and changed the wedding registry experience for couples. Here’s the story of her journey, from her early career to founding Zola.
Being A First Generation Immigrant
Born in Singapore and raised in Australia, Shan-Lyn Ma moved to the United States to attend college. Being a first generation immigrant, she learned the value of hard work and persistence from her dad. Since childhood, she has had a passion for entrepreneurship. She remembers that while other kids had posters of pop stars or athletes on their walls, she had a poster of her hero Yahoo co founder Jerry Yang.
She earned her degree from Stanford University, where she studied both computer science and psychology. After Stanford, Ma entered the tech world, working for Yahoo as a product manager. After working at a big organization like Yahoo, she wanted to work at a startup before she could start something of her own.
She was able to find a perfect job at Gilt Groupe, a luxury e-commerce site, where she headed up a new business unit—the food and wine division—and built the team’s operations from scratch.
At Gilt Groupe, she met her eventual Zola co-founder, Nobu Nakaguchi.
Her work at Gilt gave her hands-on experience in building and scaling digital platforms. This experience proved instrumental when she later decided to build her own platform.
Turning A Bad Experience Into A Business
While attending numerous weddings and also during her marriage, she realized that wedding registries are so bad as they come with so many limitations. That was when the light bulb went off. Ma noticed a major gap in the market and decided to act on it.
Seeing an opportunity to innovate, Ma co-founded Zola in 2013 with the mission of creating an all-in-one wedding planning and registry platform.
Before starting Zola Ma took a lot of customer feedback. While talking to couples, she found that receiving gifts was the worst part of their wedding experience, which was surprising as who wouldn’t like getting gifts?
Couples would often receive packages and have no idea what was coming or when. Sometimes, gifts would be delivered while couples were on their honeymoon, and they’d be concerned it’d get stolen from their doorstep.
Ma took all the feedback and applied that to create Zola.
Zola allowed couples to register for items across multiple brands and add non-traditional gifts like honeymoon funds or experiences. It also featured a seamless user interface, integrating gift tracking, thank-you notes, and other wedding-planning tools.
Zola quickly became popular among millennials.
Growth And Her First Million
Zola initially launched as a wedding registry platform, and within its first year, it had attracted thousands of users, allowing the company to hit its first million in revenue early on.
Zola’s emphasis on couples needs earned it substantial venture capital, raising over $140 million by 2018, which enabled rapid growth and further development of its platform.
Zola Today
Zola has since expanded into a full-service wedding planning tool, covering everything from invitations to venues. Shan-Lyn Ma’s vision and dedication have made Zola one of the leading wedding platforms, valued at over $600 million.
If you liked this story, you will like our other story of First Million here ➱
Image Attribute: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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