How to double your users amid a pandemic
Delivery services, gaming, online groceries. These are all industries that have experienced accelerated user growth during COVID-19. But when you think about weddings, it’s hard to find any company that doubled its users at a time when no events were taking place.
The key to Liizt’s success? Understanding the magnitude of the problem and offering a holistic, online solution, completely adapted to our user needs.
Couples go through a very painful, expensive and time consuming process from the engagement until their first years of marriage. As if that wasn’t enough, the pandemic forced them to find substitutes to the traditional offline wedding planning and registry solutions. We were there for them.
A $50 B underserved market
A couple of years ago my co founder and I spotted a huge problem hidden in a massive industry that no one was paying attention to.
$50 billion are spent every year in the LATAM wedding market, and it is fragmented. There are hundreds of thousands of wedding vendors, mainly small and informal businesses, with no clear industry leader. Even leading department stores in the region have tried to solve parts of the process, but their generalistic approach prevents them from dominating the industry.
Think about it. It’s the most special day in anyone’s life so far. Since it’s a one time event, all players come with everything they’ve got:
- You only get married once, so you’ll hire the best vendors you can for it.
- Your best friend will only get married once, so you’ll buy them the most special gift you find.
- You’re being hired for someones’ most important day, you’ll do your best in delivering a great service.
That’s the reason why so much money is infused into the wedding space every year. And even with all this expenditure, the process is painful and extremely expensive.
Before Liizt, couples still had to go to brick and mortar department stores and scan item by item with a pistol, kept their guest list in Excel and created index cards to write thank you notes. Besides solving what was obvious and streamlining the whole process for free, we gave our couples a place to start their new life on the right foot.
Here comes the pandemic
Months after our launch the unexpected came and 96% of our weddings were postponed. 1% were cancelled. The common sense would have been to double down on our team and customer acquisition expenditure, but we knew we had an opportunity. We decided to stay true to our mission, and prove our customers that we’d be there for them even during the most difficult times.
- Adapted to our market. Leveraging existing platforms such as WhatsApp, the leading chat app in the region, enabled us to create an accurate distribution channel and reach many more users.
- Fueled our tech nature. People went digital and we were ready for it, placing us in a much better position than our competitors’.
- Became a youtility. We stayed relevant through initiatives like launching COVID guides, to help couples navigate through it. This increased our SEO presence significantly, since we were one of the few responding for our user’s searches.
- Built trust. No wedding companies were advising against throwing big parties. Even if it could backfire, we encouraged our couples to stay safe and celebrate with their loved ones in the future. This emphasized our mission to build lasting and strong relationships with our users.
- Responded fast. We launched several features such as online celebrations and wedding loans, as a result of listening to our users who became part of our product development process.
These strategies were the driving force behind our 2X user growth.
Our circle of life
Most companies come alive when users make a purchase. The wheel of Liizt, on the contrary, starts when a couple registers for free. They see a clear value proposition, at no cost at all, and they invite their guests to become part of this ecosystem. This triggers our circle of life, because through social proof wedding guests will make a purchase that is much more simple than in regular e-commerce. When guests add a gift to their shopping cart, they complete the process 89% of the time.
Despite the adversity COVID-19 created for weddings, our flywheel took off. Our cashflow certainly got deferred, but the certainty of completion in our industry is very high.
If we compare this to the travel industry, for example, we can clearly see a difference. Those who used to go on vacation twice a year simply didn’t travel this year. The probability they’ll travel 4 times next year is very low. The travel industry, as many others, lost that revenue.
After our deferred revenue hits, we’ll exceed the pace as online remains the norm, witnessing even extremely traditional households transition into our new model.
Not competitors, just behavioral barriers
The behavioral barriers that prevented people from riding into a complete stranger’s car before Uber, staying at a random person’s place before Airbnb or simply working full time remotely before Zoom and Slack, disappeared when the context changed.
These past months certainly disrupted the environment for weddings, tearing down all barriers consumers used to have and making it impossible for them to physically go to department stores to register for gifts, to send paper invitations and even to celebrate a wedding as we were used to.
When we started Liizt, we thought these drastic changes would take time. Seeing the shift in adoption proves the pandemic pushed us into the future.
And what’s even more, it made us realize that we are not competing against anyone. We are creating value in the intersection of e-commerce, event planning, travel and finance. In a key moment in every person’s life, when they had nowhere to go.
The very near future
Liizt is where couples start their new lives together. Our data centric approach allows us to understand our customers much better, and therefore serve them in a more catered way. Today, after 6 months of zero weddings and 17 months from our launch, we have reached 700,000 people through our ecosystem and we’ll continue to serve them in every possible way.