Wedfuly, with Caroline Creidenberg

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Transcript:

Joshua Ross:
My name is Joshua Ross, and welcome to the Entrepreneurship at DU Podcast. The wedding industry generates $70 billion in annual revenue, and the United States is 25% of the entire wedding industry. Caroline Creidenberg, a University of Denver alum, took a class project and turned it into a thriving wedding business.

Caroline Creidenberg:
If the average wedding budget is $30,000, they’re not spending 10,000 of that on a wedding planner. So how are they doing this?

Joshua Ross:
Wedfuly found early success as a bootstrap company generating $10,000 a month in revenue coordinating weddings.

Caroline Creidenberg:
We collected all of our full payment upfront from couples. So as a bootstrap company, we had used that money a long time ago

Joshua Ross:
As a business was hitting its stride and growing covid hit. We talk about how Caroline pivoted her business to find success. During Covid, she pitched on Shark Tank and she eventually sold wetly. Here’s the interview with Caroline Creidenberg. Caroline Creidenberg, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Thank you. I’m good. Excited.

Joshua Ross:
Awesome. Well, let’s jump right into it. So you graduated from the University of Denver in 2017 and in less than seven years, you are an accomplished founder with a successful sale. So can you share with our audience how a graduate from an engineering school with a computer science degree decides to start a wedding business?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, I haven’t really heard it in that timeline because when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t feel as accomplished as maybe it looks. So I, yep, studied computer science here at University of Denver, and I studied abroad the whole year, junior year. So I was gone for the full year, came back, and back then we had a club, dynamize was the OG Entrepreneurship Club, and a bunch of my computer science friends had joined the club. And so it was kind of mostly a lot of business kids at the time, but they were like, Hey, you should come to this meeting. There’s free pizza. College kids love free food. So I showed up and at the time they were talking about a pitch competition that was going to happen, and it was a quarter long competition. So at the beginning of the quarter, you pitched what your idea was, and at the end you presented on how much progress you had made.

A little backstory on why I had even said yes to the entrepreneurship club was that in my, between sophomore and junior year, I had worked at a tech startup in Kansas City where I’m from. It was the founder, was a family friend of ours, and he requires everyone to take a personality test, I guess, of sorts. And based on the percentage match you are to the job, they’ll hire you or not. So I was applying for a QA engineering role. I got a 3% match to the role, and he sat me down for lunch and was like, here are my results, here are your results. You’re probably going to start a company one day. You’re just never going to be satisfied just doing this kind of day-to-day job. And so that kind of planted the seed in my head like, oh, well, I do love new, exciting things.

I love change. I love trying to tackle a problem. So maybe one day I am thinking 40, 50 years old, I’ll start a company. But this pitch competition was kind of intriguing. And so at the time I was applying to full-time roles and I was really looking at female dominated industries. I had just come off of an internship at a big financial corporation as a software engineer. It was not a culture fit at all. A lot of my friends was kind of like our first time having a real job, and a lot of my friends would go to happy hour with their coworkers at these cute cocktail bars, and I was playing Super Mario Smash Bros and drinking canned beer. Nothing against that. That’s just not my ideal scenario for culture and where I find joy in life. So I was like, I feel like I need a bit more female influence, but I still want to be a software engineer.

You still want to code. So I started looking at wedding industry, interior design, any industry that was very female dominated and trying to get a software engineering role within that industry. And so weddings were on the top of my mind because I was looking in that industry. There was not a lot of tech in it at the time. You had the knot wedding wire, Zola was kind of starting up, but it was pretty early on, and I kind of was like, well, I’ll explore this space. So for that pitch competition, I was like, my idea is something in the wedding space. And then 10 weeks later I had gone to a bunch of wedding showcases and interviewed a bunch of vendors and couples and kind of landed on the first iteration of wedfuly, which at the time was called Bash and Spree, which sounds like Fashion Spree, so it was a garbage name. But that I won second place at that pitch competition and then rolled that into a capstone to actually for computer science to actually build the app itself. And that was kind of how it all started, the very first iteration.

Joshua Ross:
So you’re still in school, you have this app, you’ve done this capstone, and the app does what?

Caroline Creidenberg:
So the original app was, I think we called it your Wedding Planner in Your Pocket or something. And it was four wedding planners actually. So it was essentially they had papers and binders and everything was written down and nothing was really on their phone or iPad. So the idea was to get all of that onto a device, I kind of assembled a team. We did dollar two idea or idea to class, and then that’s where we kind of started to build it out. But it was really just a very simple storage app essentially.

Joshua Ross:
And that was from Idea to First Dollar Sale with Professor Hague?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, that was the class. I kind of convinced my computer science program to let me do that as a capstone. And so part of it was while we had to do the business side, I had to actually develop the app during it as well.

Joshua Ross:
Okay. Now walk us through from that app to We Philly, what was that transition? What was that pivot that you made?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, so as I was building the Wedding planner app, I kind of was just really, to be completely honest, offput by the industry. It was very trying to get all the vendors that I was meeting with and the wedding planners I was working with. Their main goal was to get to the high end wedding market, which makes sense. I mean, if you’re doing lower end weddings, you have to do more of them. And these people, all they have is a Saturday usually. So it makes more sense to try and go for a higher dollar wedding, higher package and do less weddings. But for me, I was like, but there’s this huge gap in the market of what are all these people doing who can’t pay a wedding planner can cost anywhere from day of coordination, can be a thousand to $2,000 all the way to a full service wedding planner can be $10,000 on the low end, some charge as much as 25, 30, 40, $50,000.

This is when you’re planning million dollar weddings. You’re seeing them on Vogue, that kind of world. And at the time I was like, first of all, who’s having a wedding? Who has that kind of money? I’m just trying to get by in college and who is servicing all these other weddings? If the average wedding budget is $30,000, they’re not spending 10,000 of that on a wedding planner, so how are they doing this? And so that’s where we fully, we call it we fully 1.0 on my team. That’s where the original Wedfuly 1.0 idea came from was like, let’s find a way to make the wedding planner more accessible to all couples at a lower cost by bringing it online. So it was a virtual wedding planner.

Joshua Ross:
So this idea was you saw this underserved market, you saw kind of this low hanging fruit, maybe a little lower margin than the higher end a hundred percent, but you saw that nobody was addressing it, and so you went after it. So you started web fully 1.0 and then what happens?

Caroline Creidenberg:

Yeah, so started that, graduated, worked on that full-time was probably hitting, I’ll try to give revenue numbers because I think that’s helpful when you’re early stage trying to figure out if you’re succeeding or not. We were probably doing about $10,000 in revenue a month. So at the time I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve hit 10,000. That’s amazing. But obviously bootstrapped no outside money. So it was still a grind. All of that money was going straight back into the business. I was still working freelancing development and also working odd jobs and covid hit and we collected all of our full payment upfront from couples. So as a bootstrap company, we had used that money a long time ago. These couples were planning their wedding a year plus out, and they were paying us a year plus out. So all of that money was spent gone, and people started knocking on our door being like, we canceled our wedding, can I get a refund?

And that was just a very sticky situation for lots of businesses, specifically in the wedding industry. There had been services rendered, but the wedding hadn’t happened yet. So who was in the right there? And we frankly did not have money to refund with. So I was kind of staring down the option of do I shut it down, which was probably the leading option at the time just because I was feeling pretty burnt out. We just couldn’t really get past, sometimes we would hit $20,000 a month, but it was not reoccurring revenue. So very hard to always figure that out. And so I was kind of ready to throw the towel in. I was up in the mountains, this was March. I actually got stuck in the mountains during Covid. It was like March 14th. I remember I went for a hike and I was like, what if we did one wedding Zoom wedding?

What if we just reached out to Zoom, did a press release and it’ll get us through this two weeks of Covid, whatever, two months that we thought it was going to be. And I was like, that’s kind of a good idea. So I went home, emailed Zoom, like a random email messaged like 50 plus couples on this Facebook, Colorado Weddings Facebook group I’m in was like, Hey, who wants me to live stream their wedding for free? And then wrote a press release and someone, someone was like, yeah, will you do my wedding? So on March 18th, I think 28th, 18th, not great with numbers, we did our first wedding and Zoom agreed to collaborate with us. And so I took that and ran with it, wrote a pretty good press release, and it was just like perfect time, perfect place, perfect story. And it caught on wildfire. And so it got picked up in the New York Times, Vogue, Denver post, lots of podcasts, all these random blogs, and people were pounding down our door. We had thousands of inquiries of people being like, can you live stream my wedding? And I was like, sure, we’ll figure it out. So that’s kind of how wed fully 2.0 began was just me trying to get a press hit to keep our business alive during Covid, and then it totally pivoted the business.

Joshua Ross:
That’s a great story. And it just shows using that entrepreneurial mindset, looking at adversity and trying to figure out ways to solve the problem and not giving up. And I think you also hit Zoom at the right time, hundred percent right before the wave crashed over them. It’d be curious in June if that email would’ve been answered by

Caroline Creidenberg:
Them. Definitely not. I think we were, like I said, right place, right time. I say that part was lucky, but then taking the look and running with it is where it kind of all came together. But no, would they have answered their marketing@zoom.com email? Probably not. But they saw it as a marketing opportunity. And at the time they were in every headline, they were like, zoom this, zoom that. And so I was like, that’s the obvious partner here, because sure, there’s plenty of other video platforms, but let’s ride the wave that zoom’s on right now.

Joshua Ross:
Okay, so all of a sudden you have thousands of people contacting you. What do you do next? How do you scale this up? This is a new frontier. I mean, you understand weddings, but these are Zoom weddings and how do you curate this experience?

Caroline Creidenberg:
So that was probably in all the journey of Wedfuly, my favorite part was learning how to scale. So I kind of just grabbed the closest people to me. Another, I guess lucky thing was that a lot of people were getting laid off at the time from their jobs. So I had a lot of my network and people I’d worked with in the past were like, sure, why not? I’ll start working with you. I’ll start trying to zoom a wedding with you. And it was really honestly twofold of taking, I was probably on, sometimes I’ll pull up my old calendar just for fun to humble me, but I would be on calls from 7:00 AM Mountain time until 9:00 PM Mountain time with prospective couples, like 30 minute calls with maybe a five minute break in between. And I was just soaking it all in, trying to hear, well, what do they want to do?

And a lot of them had these phenomenal ideas. So a lot of our future product offerings within the live stream were just people being like, can we do this? And me being like, sure, we’ll try it. We’ll work together to figure out how we can do it. And so that was a huge part of it was just listening to what they wanted and the ideas they had. Because people who are planning their weddings, they’re very creative, they’re having a lot of ideas, and if it works well, then we’ll take it, put it as an offering and start charging for it. So one of the examples was like this gal was like, Hey, I use Zoom for work and we use the breakout rooms. Could we use those to do reception tables? And then I could go into each table and have a conversation with each of them, and I was like, I don’t know how we’ll do that, but sure, yeah, let’s figure it out.

You put together a list of who, and we’ll figure out on the backend how to make that work. That then became reception tables as our offering. So a big part of it was listening to them. And then on top of that, I just had an amazing, amazing team of people who were yes people. So I was a yes person and think I modeled that to them and they were like, we’ll just try whatever and see if it works. And I think we were granted a lot of, if you remember back then, people were given a lot of leniency around how these calls went or how these things happened because it was all new territory. So now the expectations of how it runs is 10 folds more higher than back then it was like anything would impress. So we could try something, maybe stumble a little bit with it, but the end result was still gave people a way to interact and they were beyond themselves sitting alone in their house and they’re like, wow, I just got to talk to people for two hours that I haven’t seen in forever and family and friends and catch up and celebrate this couple and have emotion and have happiness.

And so that gave us a great runway to really just go experiment and have fun with it. But I would say honestly, my team was rock stars. I mean, we all were clocking like 80 to a hundred hours a week of work and we were having fun with it. So it didn’t matter, not sustainable, but at the time we were just like, let’s figure out how to make this work.

Joshua Ross:
That’s awesome. And also, you know what? They couldn’t leave their homes anyway, so what else?

Caroline Creidenberg:
That was the other perk too. I had a lot of young college grads who I’m like, if this were now, they would not want to sit on Zoom on Saturday and run a bunch of weddings, but what else did we have to do?

Joshua Ross:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. So you talked a little bit about, all right, we will see how we can make this work on the back end. And that is something that a technical person says, you understood the business and the front end and the business side. How did your technical skills help you with this business?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, I think kind of twofold. One, externally, it gave me a lot of respect. People, sadly, we still live in a world where if I walk into a room and I’m young and I’m blonde and female, I might not garner the amount of respect, especially in a tech world that other people may. But being able to kind of say, yeah, I studied computer science. I worked at NASDAQ as a software engineer, immediately I get points that I don’t have walking into a room. So that’s one fold. And then internally, and personally, I think it gave me a lot of confidence to just go do and figure out, I don’t want to be a software engineer anymore, not my dream job. It never really was, but I saw that skillset as a means to an end. And I think having the confidence to have the understanding behind the scenes, even if I don’t, I’m not the best developer in the world. I’m not going to spin up an app in a day. I still am. I have the tools to go figure it out, so I might as well try. So I think both of those made my journey a lot easier by having that background.

Joshua Ross:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I have a tech background as well, and I can’t program anymore. I don’t think I can configure a router anymore, but I can still architect it and I understand how to take that business problem and address it using technology,

Caroline Creidenberg:
And you can be in the room at least participating in the conversation. And I think just from a confidence standpoint, that’s huge. I have friends who are non-technical founders and they could go figure it out. They’re smart enough. But I think the barrier to entry of it’s just so foreign is really hard to overcome. And so not having that is really nice.

Joshua Ross:
And being a technical founder, the proper expectations to set and when engineers are telling you how long it’s going to take, if that’s correct or not,

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, it just gives you a way more 360 view of the business instead of having that blind spot.

Joshua Ross:
Yeah, that’s actually a perfect way to say this. Say that. So as you’re building this service-based business, what are some of the challenges that you had building a service-based business as opposed to a product-based? And you have a little bit of a product in there, but it’s usually basically using a third party product?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, big, I mean, dealing with an emotional purchaser is very hard. It can reap really great benefits and it can also really hurt you. So honestly, one of the hardest parts of the business throughout it being a service-based business was managing expectations and also handling any disappointment on the backend. That really hurts. I’m a very big, I think I realized through this whole journey my superpower was building a team culture. All of that stuff is really where I thrived. And when you’re having your team get beat up by these very emotional purchasers, it really gets to them and it hurts. They burn out quicker, their will to go and figure things out, dampers a little just because they’re getting berated by people. We’re just trying to figure it out. But the expectations are pretty high. It is society tells us one of the most important days of their lives.
So that still is and always will be something that’s really difficult with being in the wedding industry. I think on top of that, I actually think we had less problems because it wasn’t an internal product. Think about how many engineers Zoom has on their team. They have a really great open API, we can manipulate kind of things as we need lightly, but I didn’t have to take on the financial burden of having a bunch of in-house engineers. And then it just allowed us to build product and if other areas to help improve the business. I always told people we were never going to be a video conferencing platform or a livestream platform. If that was what we were going to be, then we would be in a different realm of business. There was never a need to build a live streaming platform specifically for weddings, in my opinion.
So I actually think it made our lives a lot easier to not have that stress of having to also build that product in house just because when you are a service-based business, there’s enough stress with all the other things that you have to do. So that was kind of nice. I think we did get a lot of flack and still do for using Zoom to this day. People will be like, oh, you just used Zoom? And it’s like, yeah, but we figured it out and we made it really smooth. And a lot of times people had no clue we were. So I think at first I was like, oh, I’m a technical founder. Should I be building something? Should I be embarrassed that we’re using an external platform? But as time went on, I’m like, no, this is a way better setup for us, especially the type of business I know we’re building. I wasn’t going to build a billion dollar live streaming platform at the time. I knew what we had, I knew the niche we had, and I knew it was amazing. And so that just didn’t really affect me too much by the end,

Joshua Ross:
I think it was brilliant. You were using available products out on the market to develop a business and scale your business. Could you imagine if you were thinking about building a video platform with all of the equipment that was required, the bandwidth, the hosting, the co-location, the engineers, the customer support, it would take your eye off the focus of what the problem you were trying to solve,

Caroline Creidenberg:
And we just wouldn’t be able to continue to explore and iterate the way we did. I mean, we would’ve missed that wave. We wouldn’t have had a business at all because if we had to build what we used with Zoom, it would’ve taken way too long. We would’ve missed the wave that we caught early on. So I think that’s great. And I think our team was really good. And the magic sauce we had was there’s so much technology that exists, hardware, software right now that you can tap into and customize and make it really work. So we took so many different existing pieces of software and hardware and the way we stitched it all together to make the operation work was what we were really good at.

Joshua Ross:
I tell my students all the time, I call it Frankensteining, especially with your MVP going, Frankenstein something, don’t go out and build a much of stuff.

Caroline Creidenberg:
I mean, once you hit a scale, then go build it. We hit a scale where we had to go, then build internal software that we’ll talk about in a little. But up until then, it was working great and we were making a lot of money on it, and we were proofing the concept and really solidifying what we needed to build.

Joshua Ross:
So I want to pull on that thread for our audience. When you’ve taken off, you’re in Covid coming out of covid, how many weddings were you doing a month in the peak season? Obviously it’s a seasonality business as

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, peak season we were doing about 80 to a hundred a month, so we were cranking through them at the time.

Joshua Ross:
So how many is that a day? You’re not doing them maybe seven days a week, but I’m guessing Saturday is still the most popular day. So with that, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about this event that happened on November 21st. You appeared on Shark Tank, sorry, November, 2021, Caroline Creidenberg went on Shark Tank with Wedfuly. And I know there’s certain things you can’t reveal about Shark Tanks, but I’m going to ask a number of questions and hopefully you can answer them to the best of your ability without legal getting involved. So first of all, will you walk us through the application and acceptance process for a Shark Tank? And then also how long is the gap between you when you actually film your picture actually in the Shark Tank and when it actually aired in November?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, so the timeline’s a little fuzzy because we were so busy. I never applied for Shark Tank. I think someone on my team did, but none of them remember applying. So that part is a little fuzzy, but we got an email from casting in February of 2021, very vague just being, at first I thought it was spam. It was like, Hey, we’d love to get on a call with you for this season of Shark Tank. And I was like, okay, sure, that sounds hilarious. Let’s do it. At that point, it was just so unrealistic seeming. And also I feel like everyone wants to be on Shark Tank who has a business or thinks it’s going to be the end all be all changed to their business. So I was like, this has to be a joke. Sure, I’ll get on a call with casting. And so casting pushed us along, pushed Wedfuly along after that call to the application process, which is pretty rigorous.

It’s multiple, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 pages of just stories about your business, how you built it, everything throughout your journey. So kind of slowly filled that out as I had time because it wasn’t going to drop the opportunity, but I also was still in my head, I’m not going to pour a lot of time and energy into this. It’s just not realistic that we’re going to get on. And then that turned into, you get to this stage of the application process where they ask for a video and it’s essentially a 10 video that they want explaining your business. And I had gotten advice from someone I knew who had been on Shark Tank in the past that just be goofy, have fun with it, really don’t take it too seriously because they’re not looking for business viability, they’re looking for TV people. And so luckily we have videographers on our team because we’re a live streaming company.

And so I was able to film one day. I was like, all right, leadership team, clear your calendars, everyone. We’re working on this Google Doc up until that day, just fill in what you think the script should be and then we’re all going to meet at this one gal’s house and we’re going to film and I’m going to bring a wedding dress and I’m going to wear skis and we’re going to ski down a mountain in a wedding dress, and then we’re going to talk about the business. Let’s just be goofy. So the video started with me entering on skis in a wedding dress with the music playing. And then just the whole time we were just all having so much fun and they were feeding me lines to say, and it was the weirdest video ever. And then our videographer put in all these weird noises and animations and the video is just a hysterical 10 minute long video of us talking, not us, but me talking about the business.

And so we sent that in. At this point I’m still kind of like, let’s just have fun with this. And then I got the call and it was like, Hey, you’ve been picked to go on Shark Tank, but it was still four after the video. You start meeting with a producer every other week. You have your own producer for the whole time, and they wither the group down. So I don’t know, they probably start with 300 entrepreneurs and then by filming date they have a hundred. So each week I’d go into the meeting and they’d be like, you’ve made it to the next round or you haven’t. And then I started crafting my pitch early on. So this was probably May, and then we got film date was July. I think I only got it a month before, but you’re pretty prepared because you’ve been working with the producer the whole time.

They kind of line you up with 10 entrepreneurs throughout the day. I got really lucky and Drew the first filming spot because otherwise you have to sit around as an anxious ball of nerves for the whole day waiting to get called. So 4:00 AM wake up call, got hair and makeup done there. They treated you like a celebrity for maybe three hours. I was actually in the tank filming for an hour and a half, which a lot of people don’t know. It gets cut down to seven minutes and then they literally are like, all right, see you later. You’re chopped liver. We’ll tell you whether or not you’re going to air. So the process was kind of insane and the whole time I was just like, there’s just no chance that this is happening. This doesn’t happen. So I really just treated it as this fun event and I feel like that made it so much better for me.

You came out of the tank securing a $200,000 investment from Robert Herve, so I believe that was it, 10% equity. Yes. So that valued your company at $2 million. So can you tell us about that investment and what eventually transpired? Are you allowed to talk about that?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Not a ton in depth, but I can tell you that how it works is you do a handshake deal on TV to make it actually authentic. They don’t give the sharks any information about you or your business ahead of time. So even though I wasn’t there for an hour and a half, think about a regular investment deal, they still spend hours scrutinizing your data room and looking at everything. So to be fair to the Sharks, then after you’ve pitched, they then set you up with their representative and you have to do essentially a whole data room for them and then they’ll review the data. During our negotiation process behind the scenes, we both just kind of amicably was like, this isn’t the best setup for either of us and kind of walked away in very good spirits with each other. But so I actually did not end up going through with the deal after I filmed.

Joshua Ross:
How did it help we fully in terms of from a marketing perspective?

Caroline Creidenberg:
I mean there’s really nothing that you can get like that without paying a bunch of money. So the amount of eyeballs that we got from the show was just insane. And for us, it was a really good high funnel option just because a lot of people, we obviously had a difficult product. People who I have a gal I know who sells deodorant, everyone uses deodorant and it’s an under $20 purchase. So that’s a prime product where you’re going to just, right as the episode airs, you’re going to see all this money flow in and all these purchases because it’s such a low purchasing and everyone uses it. Whereas ours was very specific of you have to be getting married or engaged planning a wedding, and our packages are like 800 to $1,800. So it’s not like a small investment. So it’s not like they’re going to hit purchase as the show’s airing, although some people did, which is still crazy to me.

But our funnel filled up so much. I mean, just the amount of people that were reaching out was insane. And then the thing that you don’t really realize while you’re going through it is this show airs. My episode airs probably once a quarter and I’ll just get all this bombardment of people reaching out. So it’s, I always say the gift that keeps on giving, but it’s no other thing out there when we were getting ready to pitch, you meet with, they’re trying to hype you up. And the guy put it in a very good way. He was like, this is the Super Bowl of entrepreneurship. And I was like, okay, that’s a fair point. I don’t love that you’re telling me that as I’m walking down the aisle to go present. But it’s true, right? I mean, the opportunity is insane to just have that many people getting eyeballs on your offering.

Joshua Ross:
It might’ve worked out better that you didn’t give up 10% of your company because in August, 2023 you sold Wedfuly to Wedgewood wedding and events. And I’m guessing, and I’m just assuming you were the sole shareholder of the company when you made the sale, walk us through the acquisition, how it came about because you guys were the leading in wedding streaming, and Wedgewood is the nation’s largest wedding venue provider. So on paper, logically it makes sense, but why did it make sense to you?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, so reaping the benefits of Shark Tank. This couple had seen us on Shark Tank and booked a wedding. At the time we were offering this in-person package where we go in person with a professional videographer and it’s a little bit souped up package from our old one. It was a package we were testing and this couple was getting married in Denver at a Wedgewood weddings venue location. And so I had kind of heard about Wedgwood weddings in the past. We had done a bunch of weddings there, but I had not connected the dots that they were all one conglomerate. And so I went to try and kind of talked to them. I went and worked the wedding as the videographer to try and talk to them about a partnership. So that’s kind of how it all started was I just wanted a more steady stream of business because having a consumer facing business can be hard.

And so having a venue partnership would maybe guarantee us a certain amount of weddings each month and we could have stronger predictions, financial predictions and stuff around that. So that was kind of the goal going in. And as we kind of started negotiating with them, we struck a deal to do a partnership in the Colorado region, and we were working a bunch of weddings there. I was kind of talking to the regional manager a bunch, and it kind of struck me that a lot of the struggles that they were running into, we had already experienced specifically going back to kind of early live streaming days. We had just used people, which I think a lot of startups do to fuel the growth. So I would hire coordinators and be like, you’re working this wedding. If we had 35 weddings in one day, they can each do three weddings.
We needed sheer amounts of people and I wanted to have them be W2 to be fair to them. So we were bleeding cash during off season, and so I had to do layoffs and restructure the whole business. And a big part of that was building this internal technology that allowed us to scale with a part-time team without bleeding cash in the off season. And they were kind of running into a lot of issues there as well. And they were looking to build this essentially a digital portal for their couples, and it was very similar to what I had built for our couples. And so then the conversation kind of took a turn away from the livestream partnership, which was still functioning and went towards this need for this software we had built.

And at the time, I was pretty burnt out. It had been a long three years with a lot of really fun wins, but I had also been working an insane amount of time. I was kind of ready to have a little bit of a life back, and the conversations kind of kept progressing. And for me, I was kind of like, so I had raised about $300,000 between 2020 and the sale. So while I was the sole board member and decision maker, I still did have investors that I wanted to make whole, but because I hadn’t taken on a lot of money, I didn’t need to sell for multiple hundreds of millions of dollars I could sell for something, set myself up for a really good success and also keep good relationships with my investors, make them whole, all of that. So it kind of just based on my stage of life and being able to listen to what I needed and what my team was kind of needing, it just made the most sense to pursue that opportunity.

Joshua Ross:
So what did you learn through this acquisition process? I mean, it takes some time. There’s the due diligence. It is kind of consummate in a marriage, right?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Yeah, I learned a lot. That was a very humbling experience. And also I kind of had a lot of fun with it. It was like I had scaled the company, done a lot of stuff that were new to me. And so it was fun to kind of, here was another new thing I could go explore. And so I thought it would take maybe a couple months. I was so naive. I remember in May of 2022, we started having the conversations and I was like, oh, by fall I’ll be like, this will be done, wrapped up, completed. But I just learned a lot throughout that experience of it’s going to go through, it’s not, I better just turn back and keep working on the business. Oh wait, it’s back on the table now. It’s off the table. A lot of that happens. I think the rule that someone told me while I was going through it was, three strikes are allowed before the deal will completely fall apart.

So it was just a good lesson in also making sure that, I always used as a phrase when I was meeting with the CEO of Wedgwood weddings a lot. You don’t want organ failure. It’s kind of a gruesome analogy, but you want to make sure too, that even though I am burn out and it is an exciting opportunity, it needs to be the right fit for me and my team and for the product and everything. So a lot of those conversations were also hard to have with myself around, am I blinded because it’s such a fun idea to sell your company? Or is it actually the best next step for the company? So it was definitely also a very transformative time for me personally, of it was something I could force into action. A lot of other things, I can take the reins and fully control them, but this was not like that. So I had to really learn to sit in the shit and just not get too ahead of myself with it.

Joshua Ross:
Well, first congratulations on a successful sale. That is very impressive. Alright, so what’s next for you?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Right now? I’m trying to just learn to slow down and embrace this stage for what it is. I have surprisingly adapted pretty well to it. I am really good at being a nine to fiver now, and the challenge that’s in front of me is really exciting. So I try not to plan my future too much, but I think I want to sit here and see what this is all about. It’s only been, I don’t know, like five months, six months maybe. I know though. I’ll go do something again just because I miss and will always miss. We always used to say as a team, we captured lightning in a bottle and having that feeling, I don’t think that’s something that you can never get in what I’m doing right now. So I think I’ll probably eventually start something again. I never want to force it into being, so I’m kind of just staying open and trying to slow down and sit in the current and enjoy it.

Joshua Ross:
So my last question for you, what advice do you give your 18-year-old self?

Caroline Creidenberg:
Oh gosh, definitely study computer science. I would just say learn to slow down a little bit personally and not force things into being go after them as soon as you see the opportunity. But I think younger Caroline was a lot more easily heightened by things and just embracing life as it happens is really important. And the biggest lesson I’ve learned through all of this is just like it’s okay to sit in the shit and not always be moving forward. Be super happy. It’s okay to embrace the negative, the change, the unknown, the ambiguity of life, and that will make you a better person, a better entrepreneur, all around, just life easier for you.

Joshua Ross:
That is wonderful advice. Caroline, thank you for being on the podcast.

Caroline Creidenberg:
Thank you for having me.

Joshua Ross:
The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in Margery Reed Hall on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on Twitter, X DU entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered, edited, and produced by Sophia Holt. Entrepreneurship at DU is part of the Daniels College of Business, which has its own podcast. Check out Voices of Experience wherever you get your podcast.