Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz The Knot: Carley Roney & David Liu About this episode 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 for our postscript "How You Built That," how Michael Dixon's business, Mobile Vinyl Recorders, uses portable record lathes to cut vinyl at parties, weddings, and music festivals.
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0:03 Speaker 00 We put together this deck. We practiced this presentation. We go through this whole dog and pony and talk about what we're planning and doing and what we're going to build. And he looks up and he says, "This has got to be the worst business plan I've ever seen." And the air just got sucked out of the room.
0:28 Guy Raz? From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
0:39 Guy Raz? I'm Guy Raz, 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.
0:55 Guy Raz? Right now, I've got three wedding invitations hanging on my fridge. And I sometimes wonder about the people behind those cards, the six people who are probably freaking out right now. The caterers, the flowers, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, the venue, the hotel discounts for guests, the hair, the makeup, the photographer, the-- I'm going to stop here because I'm starting to get stressed out, and I'm already married. By the way, fun fact, the average wedding-- the average wedding in the US now costs $35,000. And the planning for it takes between nine months and a year. So my advice? Elope.
1:37 Guy Raz? And if that's not an option, you will probably, at some point, make your way to thenot.com. It's a multimedia platform that helps you plan your wedding. And it's a big business. The Knot is the center of a media group now valued at more than half a billion dollars, which is all the more remarkable because at one point during the dot-com bust, the Knot's stock price fell to 26 cents. But we'll get to that a little later. When founders Carly Roney and David Lu started The Knot in the late 1990s, it was more like a chatroom. It was a place people could pop into and type in all caps, "IS ANYONE ELSE FREAKING OUT ABOUT THEIR WEDDING PLANNING?"
2:18 Guy Raz? Well, today, the knot says it's used by 80% of all couples planning a wedding, which is also remarkable because David and Carly's wedding was kind of a disaster. They actually met briefly when they were both undergrads at NYU in the 1980s. They were both in the same film program, but it wasn't exactly love at first sight.
2:40 Speaker 02 Well, David was a senior and I was a freshman, and we didn't really talk during it because I thought-
2:49 Speaker 00 We made it exchange two sentences in the entire year.
2:51 Guy Raz? Wow, in the entire year.
2:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:53 Speaker 02 Because he looked like kind of a super senior snob to me.
2:56 Guy Raz? Did you, but David, did you notice Carly at that time?
2:59 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. I had a crush on her.
3:01 Guy Raz? You did already at that point?
3:02 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
3:03 Guy Raz? But nothing ever came of it. So after college, Carly and David went their separate ways. David got a job working at a startup in Philadelphia where he made video yearbooks for high schools, and Carly was a script reader for a movie director in New York. But a few years later, in the early 90s, they both happened to be invited to a Christmas party by a former NYU professor.
3:25 Speaker 02 And I remember like looking across at this group of people and thinking like, who's that guy with the ponytail? Why does he look so familiar?
3:34 Guy Raz? You had a ponytail?
3:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:36 Guy Raz? Wow. So you're like, I don't know, you're late 20s, David, at this point. Kind of just, you're like, I'll show up at this party and-
3:44 Speaker 00 Well, actually, I remember the doorbell ringing and hearing Carly's voice, and I immediately remembered her.
3:51 Guy Raz? Wow.
3:52 Speaker 00 And she walked in and made a beeline for the vodka.
3:55 Guy Raz? And went up to you and said, "Hey, handsome."
3:57 Speaker 02 Well, what's funny is we ended up probably a little bit of interest-
4:01 Speaker 00 We pretended that there was a project to work on together.
4:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. We were like, we should talk about this more. Maybe we could do, work on something together. And so we both left the party with the premise of being back in touch.
4:13 Guy Raz? But clearly, there was, there was interest beyond, I mean, right? Or was it just super earnest? Like, you thought, yeah, let's, let's collaborate?
4:21 Speaker 02 No, it was totally a ruse.
4:22 Guy Raz? Okay, it was a ruse. Okay, I got you.
4:24 Speaker 00 We had our first date in February. We moved in together in June. We were married in July.
4:28 Guy Raz? Oh, my gosh. You jumped through this story so fast. You've gone from ponytail at the party to being married like seven months later? Yeah.
4:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, was the irony, that one of the starting ironies of the story is that, you know, I have divorced parents. I never thought I was getting married. I didn't believe in marriage. I thought people just, sort of like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, it would be better to just be in love with someone maybe, but have your own home, just in case. And then I met this guy and I'm like, this is kind of amazing. He's so amazing. He lived in Philadelphia at the time and I actually then moved right to DC at that time to work on a project at the Smithsonian. And so we started this like long distance romance between Philadelphia and DC. And I don't know if it was like something in the air, or it was just like mad true love. But one time we were sitting there and we
5:26 Speaker 02 were talking about taking a trip to Hong Kong. And I said, oh, you want to get married in Hong Kong?
5:34 Guy Raz? Uh huh.
5:35 Speaker 02 Just like out of the blue. I don't even know what I was thinking.
5:37 Guy Raz? Sure.
5:38 Speaker 02 He said, sure. And I was like, okay, then. Let's get married.
5:41 Guy Raz? Wow. So you go to your parents, Carly, and you say, you know that guy David I've been telling you about? Yeah, we're getting married.
5:47 Speaker 02 Well, what's funnier is like, I haven't told you about this guy David.
5:51 Guy Raz? Oh, okay.
5:52 Speaker 02 But by the way, we're getting married. You might want to meet him prior to the wedding.
5:56 Guy Raz? And did they say, Carly, this is crazy. This is not going to work. This is not how marriages last. That's exactly what they said.
6:03 Speaker 02 That is exactly what they said. And in fact, turns out, and I never knew this, they had sort of had a whirlwind romance and gotten married very quickly and ended up divorced. So this was just like their biggest fears playing out in front of them. And, you know, because you're, you know, like young and spitting, you're like, you just don't understand, Mom and Dad.
6:23 Guy Raz? So you, you guys get married and how's the wedding? What's the wedding like?
6:30 Speaker 02 So we were trying to look back at why it was that we picked a date of July.
6:38 Speaker 00 In DC.
6:39 Guy Raz? In Washington DC, but which where I am, and it is a horrendously oppressive time of the year. July in Washington DC is a time when people leave.
6:50 Speaker 00 On a rooftop outside.
6:51 Guy Raz? On a rooftop outside in July in Washington DC. This is going to be your wedding day.
6:56 Speaker 02 And really, how hard can it be? You're literally throwing a party for 80 people. Like, what do we need? We need like a location. We really didn't have a place in mind. We figured we could find once we sent out the invitations and just said.
7:10 Speaker 00 The invitations were postcards from the National Zoo that had pictures of pandas on them.
7:15 Speaker 02 You're really making us sound crazy.
7:17 Guy Raz? And it said, what, just show up in Washington DC on this date? We'll give you details when you arrive.
7:22 Speaker 00 Exactly. It's a July 10th. Location TBD.
7:25 Guy Raz? Okay, gotcha.
7:27 Speaker 02 But it was all, you know, kind of in the spirit of like, we're just going to throw this fun party. And, you know, our actually community around us pulled together, and that was the fun part about it. My aunts who live nearby were like, we're going to go get flowers at the farmer's market. Another aunt of mine was like, I have a friend who has a, there's a rooftop on the top of her building, which is a block away from your home. And then there was this Peruvian restaurant near us that we knew kind of served fun tapas and paella. So we went and asked them. And we really just figured it out and over the course of three weeks. And it sounded, at this point, I'm kind of loving it. Like, it's like the
8:06 Speaker 02 first original DIY rooftop, you know, edgy wedding, alternate wedding. And the only problem was that, you know, you still watched the news those days to find the weather. And we sort of turned on the news on the Wednesday before and saw the weather chart, which included...
8:23 Speaker 00 108, 109, 112. It was climbing.
8:28 Speaker 02 It was going to be 111 degrees on our wedding day.
8:31 Guy Raz? What? 111 degrees?
8:34 Speaker 02 The story just gets worse from there. It's boiling hot. Our guests look like they're dying. We had booked this venue, the venues. Air conditioning had broken from trying to get the place cool.
8:47 Guy Raz? Oh, wow.
8:48 Speaker 02 And as we said, it was like a beautiful Peruvian place. And because we have a flair for the dramatic, I thought that the most incredible thing would be if instead of serving the paella that we were serving behind the scenes, if they would bring out the paella and walk it through the room.
9:04 Guy Raz? The giant plate of paella, right?
9:06 Speaker 02 Steaming.
9:07 Guy Raz? That's a great idea.
9:08 Speaker 02 Clams and mussels.
9:09 Guy Raz? And?
9:10 Speaker 02 So my only horrifying part of my wedding day was turning, looking up and seeing my grandmother's face as they walked this steaming plate of paella by her. I mean, she was just horrified. Everyone's already drenched in sweat. Drenched in sweat and this steaming fishy. I mean, it was like, oh, my God, this is such a colossal disaster. Everyone is so completely uncomfortable. There's no air conditioning.
9:41 Guy Raz? And really, everybody just wants snow cones.
9:43 Speaker 02 Everyone wants the hell out of there is what they want. And we walked away from that evening being like, oh, my God. I never want to do anything related to weddings ever again. What a crazy industry. Why isn't it easier? Why isn't there a place to find this information? I just like, yeah, it was exactly all the things we thought would be horrible about planning a wedding were. And so we slammed the door and never wanted to think about it again.
10:11 Guy Raz? So 1993, you are married, you move in, you're living together in Washington DC. What are you guys doing at that point in your lives? You're still at Smithsonian, Carly? Yes.
10:22 Speaker 02 We finished the project. We all moved back to New York.
10:25 Guy Raz? To New York, OK. Start grad school. Start grad school, right. So you start working on your... Ideas and projects and...
10:32 Speaker 00 So in the very first semester, I'm taking this class on interactive media and this new technology that was going to transform the world was CD-ROMs.
10:42 Guy Raz? Yes. Yes, they were going to transform the world.
10:46 Speaker 00 Exactly.
10:46 Guy Raz? They were, yeah.
10:47 Speaker 00 And we started noodling on this idea that this project that Carly had been working on all summer was going to be the largest, single largest collection of Smithsonian objects collected from all the different museums and was being brought to Japan and was going to talk about American history. And we said, that's such a shame that the American audience will never get to see this. Why don't we see if the Smithsonian will hire us to produce the sort of epic American history disc? It has the dizzy Gillespie's trumpet and the ruby slippers and the Apollo space capsule and all the work is already done. We can just scan it and put it in and some animations, music, and we have a CD-ROM.
11:27 Guy Raz? Yeah.
11:28 Speaker 00 We pitched the Smithsonian and they thought it was an awesome idea. We thought they had a budget and they said, great, you guys, if you can find someone who will pay for it, you can do it.
11:39 Speaker 02 Which is already far-fetched, that the Smithsonian would agree to have two people who know nothing about anything.
11:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, right. And we walked into the Egghead Software Store and started pulling CD-ROMs off the shelf and writing down the names of the publishers and started faxing proposals to people.
11:57 Guy Raz? Wow.
11:57 Speaker 00 And we had this one group out in Portland, Oregon, called us up immediately, said, we're doing edutainment discs. This is right in the center of our bull's eye, an American history disc with the Smithsonian brand. They flew out, took us to Smith and Wilensky for a big steak dinner. And at the dinner, the guy writes on a cocktail napkin, one gold master, American history CD-ROM, Smithsonian content, $100,000 budget, six-month delivery date, sign here.
12:29 Guy Raz? What? Wait, you guys have no experience. You just pitched this half-baked idea to the Smithsonian. You then fax this half-baked idea blindly to a bunch of publishers. And this one company bites.
12:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, and we actually said, can we go to the bar area to discuss this for a second? And we go in, and we're like, is this binding? Is this a real contract? What happens? And we just said, you know, whatever, let's just go, let's just sign it. And we went in, we signed it, and the guy turns to us and says, you know what? You know this is not a binding contract. We said, we assume so. And he said, but this was a test. This was his test to see if you guys had the chutzpah to actually sign this napkin. And he said, let's do it.
13:10 Guy Raz? Wow. So you get this money, and you start working on this project right away?
13:15 Speaker 00 Yes.
13:15 Speaker 02 I mean, that was it. We basically founded a business. We used all of our film school experience, actually. We were suddenly like, oh, good.
13:22 Speaker 00 Producers, yeah. And we literally hired all my classmates.
13:25 Guy Raz? Everybody.
13:26 Speaker 00 Everyone said, we're on board. I mean, we're all in school for this. And then suddenly to be able to create a commercial product with the Smithsonian brand was exciting.
13:34 Guy Raz? So you deliver this to the Smithsonian, and then they make this CD-ROM available in their shops and stuff?
13:40 Speaker 00 Well, so the publisher was actually very aggressive about getting the discount. And, you know, no one was really making any money on CD-ROMs. And pretty quickly, we realized that this was not going to be the medium that was going to change everything. But this publisher managed to get the CD-ROM OEM bundled with every one of the early IMAX. So if you bought one of those IMAX, you got our disc. And as a result, you know, we got maybe, I think it was like a dollar per disc that was actually distributed. So it became a windfall for us.
14:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, so millions of these discs. It's sort of one of the top grossing discs of all time because it got bundled. It was such an easy win. And that was the, yeah, that turned out to be the sort of launch of our company.
14:24 Guy Raz? So you walked out of that project with like... Some cash to play with.
14:29 Speaker 02 Enough cash to keep the people that we had hired around, at least, I think, the like.
14:35 Speaker 00 I dropped out of grad school because suddenly I realized, well, we have this company now and we're going to work on the next project. And we were a little digital media studio.
14:44 Speaker 02 But in the middle of this, working on this project together, one of the four of us, our two friends, Michael and Rob, they sort of said, hey, guys, don't you think we should be thinking about, you know, we work well together. Do you think we should be thinking about something, doing something that isn't work for hire for somebody else?
15:02 Guy Raz? Like, something that was yours, you guys would own.
15:05 Speaker 00 Right. We started brainstorming. What can we build? Because our vision was now to create this multi-branded, multi-platform content studio. And we started looking at the different categories. And we said, you know, sports, news, entertainment.
15:18 Guy Raz? Like, what were you doing? You were brainstorming?
15:21 Speaker 02 Right. And that's what's funny. Like, the later story makes it sound like it was all like, and then, after her horrible experience planning her wedding, the idea was birthed. And in reality, what happened is that Michael actually was like, hey, this guy friend of mine, he wants to do like this online shopping thing and something related to like registry. And maybe we should do something in weddings. And I think David and I look like we'd like seen a ghost, like, oh, my god.
15:50 Guy Raz? No way.
15:51 Speaker 02 Jesus, do you know anything about the wedding? Well, they suck. Like, completely disaggregated. Like, the industry is old fashioned. And then, of course, you have that moment, you're like, right, it's a disaster. And it would completely and fundamentally change if you introduced technology to it.
16:12 Speaker 00 You know, there was not an MBA between the four of us. You're talking about four film grads. So our research was going to the magazine store and pulling different categories, like bridal, travel, ecpecurian. And we looked at these wedding magazines like, wow, they're huge. Look, there are 400 pages.
16:28 Guy Raz? Just to sort of understand, like, you decide that you want to do something in content, and weddings was probably the way to go. But what would it be? Like, I mean, this is like 96, 97. I mean, a website, a message board?
16:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is 95. There was no websites.
16:47 Guy Raz? So what was it going to be? Like, a way for people to just list their services?
16:53 Speaker 02 So we were content people. So we thought the best place to start would be putting incredible, like, fresh content on the internet.
17:01 Guy Raz? Like, here's a cool idea for your wedding.
17:03 Speaker 02 Yes.
17:04 Speaker 00 Yep.
17:05 Speaker 02 And so the only way I would agree to do this, the one who was suddenly, I was looked at immediately like, you're the woman. You're gonna be interested in weddings. I was like, the only way I am touching this is if we do something really, really different. Like, the reason we didn't access any of the information that was out there when we were planning our wedding is because it was written for people who were completely, had a different worldview than me. I did not dream about my wedding every day from when I was born. I did not, I wasn't marrying in a traditional way. I mean, I have like an intercultural marriage with divorced parents. I mean, every problem there could be in a wedding was in my wedding. And those magazines made you feel like crap.
17:47 Guy Raz? Yeah.
17:47 Speaker 02 They wanted you to quit your job, sit with your mommy having bonbons, and dream up your big day.
17:53 Guy Raz? Yeah.
17:53 Speaker 02 And calling it your big day. That just wasn't my thing.
17:56 Guy Raz? Your big day.
17:56 Speaker 02 And none of my friends either were that way. Like, all the women I know were like, it was, you know, it was the, at this point, it's like the 90s. You're hip, you're forward-looking, you care about fashion, and there's like a whole, like, it's just, it's such a different movement among young people. And that wasn't reflected at all. It was like the industry that had been left behind. Our whole overall attitude, and the reason why we called it The Knot, was that we wanted our brand to be very, like, alternative and differentiated and not be, you know, the kind of traditional cookie cutter, these are the rules way to plan a wedding. We wanted it to be, like, dare to do it differently.
18:36 Speaker 00 And, you know, if you looked at the landscape, you know, Brides magazine had been around for 50 years, Modern Bride for 35 years, Martha Stewart was like a hot thing, been around for 10 years. And we didn't know which way to attack that. And we suddenly realized, based on, you know, also Carly's, you know, belief in the differentiation of our brand, that we would become weddings for the real world. And we defined that as interracial couples, interdenominational couples, same-sex couples.
19:05 Speaker 02 Hipster couples, right.
19:06 Speaker 00 Right. You're pregnant, you already have babies, you're divorced, you know, second marriages, all the stuff that we knew that the traditional media companies couldn't touch. You know, these are the marginal areas, and we're gonna, we're gonna declare ownership of those.
19:18 Speaker 02 We also had a really big sense of humor. We wanted to be irreverent because we thought that that was sort of attitudinally. If you wanted to talk to brides and grooms, not their mothers, you needed a new voice.
19:30 Guy Raz? Yeah. So I'm trying to understand, if you were to describe this to your grandmother, who was appalled at the paella at your wedding, would you have said, so Grandma, we're making basically a magazine, but it's going to be in the computer, in the internet. Is that a fair description of how you were thinking about it?
19:47 Speaker 02 There were, yeah, two components. One, it was like the world's coolest wedding magazine, mixed with a community.
19:55 Speaker 00 Right. Remember, this was on AOL. So we launched on AOL.
19:58 Guy Raz? AOL had like these message boards and these chat rooms. And like sites. So it was, you partnered with AOL to start this up?
20:07 Speaker 00 Well, they provided the seed financing.
20:09 Guy Raz? How did you even get to AOL?
20:12 Speaker 00 So.
20:13 Speaker 02 Friend of a friend of a friend.
20:14 Speaker 00 Exactly. So Michael, our Rainmaker co-founder, had an in and managed to get us an audience with Ted Leonsis.
20:22 Guy Raz? Wow.
20:22 Speaker 00 Who was running the greenhouse and was making investments.
20:25 Guy Raz? Yes.
20:25 Speaker 00 And I remember, we put together this deck, we practiced this presentation. Carly, Michael and Rob were like the marketing and presentation geniuses. And we rented our little car, drove down to Vienna, Virginia, and we had this audience with Ted. And we go through this whole dog and pony, talk about what we're planning on doing and what we're going to build. And he looks up and he says, "This has got to be the worst business plan I've ever seen."
20:52 Guy Raz? Wow.
20:53 Speaker 00 And the air just got sucked out of the room.
20:57 Guy Raz? Yeah. By the way, how did you propose to make money off of this, in that plan?
21:01 Speaker 00 Well, we hadn't gotten to that point yet.
21:03 Guy Raz? Okay.
21:04 Speaker 00 And so, but he basically said, he was like, "Look, wait a minute. What's the lifetime val-- I mean, how long is an average engagement?" And we said, "You know, nine to 13 months." And he said, "So your average lifetime value of your customers is nine to 13 months. How do you ever plan on recouping any of your marketing costs in nine months? This is impossible."
21:21 Speaker 02 Right. If your audience churns 100% every year, you never, if you do your job right and they find the right person, you will never have them as a customer again.
21:29 Speaker 00 Right. To this day, I credit our co-founder, Rob, who stood up and said, "You know, we're going to sell advertising." And Ted looks at us and says, "There's no advertising on AOL."
21:40 Speaker 02 There's no advertising on the internet.
21:41 Speaker 00 And we said, "Well, we plan on selling it." But if there was no advertising, no advertising was allowed on AOL? Partners?
21:49 Speaker 02 No one had done it.
21:50 Speaker 00 No one had done it? Yeah. There was no IAB, there were no banners. It was all basically a subscription business. And Ted looks at us kind of funny. And then he picks up the Brides magazine we brought as sort of like the
22:02 Speaker 02 Show and Tell.
22:04 Speaker 00 And I still remember, he picks it up, brings it to his nose and flips through the pages and goes, "I don't know anything about this industry, but I smell money." He goes, "Let's fund them."
22:13 Guy Raz? Wow.
22:14 Speaker 00 So in 90 seconds, we went from the worst business idea he'd ever heard to, you know what? Let's give these guys a chance.
22:21 Guy Raz? When we come back, how David and Carly launched The Knot, watched its value skyrocket with the dot com boom, and then fall to rock bottom with the crash. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.
22:43 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So in 1996, when Carly Roney and David Lu pitched their idea for The Knot, the bigwigs at AOL wound up giving them a pretty hefty amount of cash.
22:59 Speaker 00 We got our seed financing by 1.6 million. I think it was their largest investment at that time, too, in any content partners.
23:05 Speaker 02 Ironically, though, like, it isn't really that much money if you have to buy computers for $7,000 each desktop.
23:13 Speaker 00 Right. And there was no such thing as open source software. So we were paying software licenses. There was no WeWork, so we had to find an office to rent.
23:22 Guy Raz? In New York?
23:23 Speaker 00 In New York.
23:24 Guy Raz? What were you doing to build the site?
23:26 Speaker 00 We wanted to make sure that the audience came to our site, would see something fresh and new every day. So we treated this like a daily publication, like a newspaper. We had 10 content channels. There had to be fresh content, distributed every single day.
23:39 Guy Raz? What do you mean 10 content channels? You'd go to the site and there's like 10 tabs?
23:43 Speaker 02 Right. There's like planning and fashion and bridesmaids.
23:48 Speaker 00 The Great Escape was the honeymoon.
23:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, honeymoon channel. So a lot of it was just producing and publishing content constantly.
23:55 Guy Raz? And who did you get to write that content?
23:58 Speaker 02 I had this connection to a group of fun, really fun, young writers. They were the people who wrote for Sassy magazine, so really strong attitude. We had men and women.
24:12 Speaker 00 All had great senses of humor.
24:14 Speaker 02 Really good senses of humor. And we had that, they, you know, my, my litmus test is if they would never, ever, ever write for a wedding magazine, then they could write for me. The other key piece of it, though, was really understanding, and this we didn't, we didn't know going into it, but really realizing how important the community was. And managing the community and building out the kind of platform of the different message boards and how to create connections between people. And that is where the sort of explosive, what, you know, sort of the early concept of like a social network, right? How you could crowdsource amazing information.
24:51 Speaker 00 And that's where AOL was the perfect training ground for that. Because the key sort of, the gravitational center of all this stuff were in their chatrooms.
25:00 Guy Raz? Right.
25:01 Speaker 00 And, you know, these chatrooms, you had to try to turn into these thriving, continuous conversations. And we all had to man the chatrooms. We, we had aliases, like mine was Anya. And I would sit in this chatroom, waiting for people to show up. And most people tend to just lurk. They wanted to hear and read other people's conversations. And you had to try to figure out a way to get people engaged and get them to participate. And so I always had this one thing that I would write, and to get people started, I would say, "My fiance forced me to buy a dress two sizes too small and said if I can't fit in the dress on the day of the wedding, to not show up."
25:41 Guy Raz? But you would just make this up?
25:42 Speaker 00 I would make this up.
25:43 Speaker 02 David was the only one. I want to say that this was unsanctioned.
25:48 Guy Raz? But you had to like get this spur conversation.
25:50 Speaker 00 And boy, was that the fire started. The room would explode. Everyone who was lurking would jump in.
25:55 Guy Raz? You were a troll. You were an early internet troll.
25:57 Speaker 00 Well, and I could slowly then back away. And that room would just keep going for hours and hours and hours.
26:03 Speaker 02 You know, you drop mother-in-law. Mother word, mother-in-law always gets a chat room going. And or, you know, misbehaving bridesmaids. It's just all about like putting the theme in play.
26:13 Speaker 00 But what it did was it taught us to listen to our audience.
26:17 Guy Raz? Yeah. Was the site making money pretty fast through, you know, those AOL subscription dollars?
26:27 Speaker 00 Uh, no.
26:27 Guy Raz? Okay, right.
26:29 Speaker 02 Well, if you think about the internet at the time, which was, I mean, mostly men.
26:34 Guy Raz? Yeah.
26:34 Speaker 02 Even AOL was probably the most women of any place on the internet. And still that was mostly men.
26:40 Guy Raz? Yeah.
26:40 Speaker 02 And then people getting married, since there are only 2 million of them in America at any given point in time, you're starting to like get down to a very small set of people who could even potentially be our customers. But I think in those first week, I remember our like monthly visitor count.
26:57 Speaker 00 Like 15,000.
26:58 Speaker 02 Oh, I think it was 7,000. And we were like 7,000 out of 2 million Americans. Like, we've got a long way to go.
27:04 Guy Raz? Yeah.
27:05 Speaker 02 What we really had to do was go out. Our first hire was a salesperson.
27:08 Guy Raz? Yeah, you needed advertising.
27:10 Speaker 02 We needed advertising.
27:11 Speaker 00 In fact, one of our first advertisers, in fact, I think she may have been our first advertiser, was Nicole Miller. And she had this bridesmaids dress line that was cute. And she wanted to market it as something that you could wear again. And Nicole came to our office. And I remember we were showing her the little pieces of art that we had created that were essentially the first banners. You know, there were little buttons that would sit on the site. And, you know, Rob would explain to her, hey, you know, people can click on this. And she said, well, what will my buttons do? And we realized that she didn't have a website to link to. And he said very quickly, "Well, they'll link to a catalog of dresses that we'll build for you." And she was like, "Oh, my God, that's amazing."
27:53 Speaker 00 And, you know, we were basically selling links and buttons and clicks that were leading to other places that we had to sign the creed for the advertisers.
28:01 Guy Raz? Which, I mean, for the advertisers was this new shiny thing that they didn't understand. And they were like, "Well, these guys understand it." But I have to assume that the ad rates at that time weren't that high, right? They weren't paying that much money at that time, or were they?
28:15 Speaker 00 They weren't. I think our first year total revenues were maybe $70,000.
28:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, $70,000. Remember, like $71,000.
28:23 Guy Raz? You could not, I mean, the 1.6 million was, that money was burning quickly.
28:27 Speaker 00 It was, it was almost gone. We were, we were rapidly running out of money. And what saved us was we had found an amazing book agent, Chris Tomassino. And our, you know, remember, our aspirations was always to create these multi-brand, branded platform. And she actually managed to get a bidding war from multiple publishers on a three-book deal for The Knot.
28:53 Guy Raz? And that money, actually, that infusion of cash saved The Knot at that time?
28:57 Speaker 00 We, we lived off of that advance for probably a year and a half.
29:00 Guy Raz? What was the advance?
29:01 Speaker 00 About $350,000.
29:03 Guy Raz? For three books?
29:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:05 Guy Raz? And so you put that back into the company, but then you had to write books. You had to write three damn books.
29:10 Speaker 02 You're telling me.
29:11 Speaker 00 Well, Carly, we, we had just had our first baby. And so Carly literally came back from maternity leave of all of maybe three weeks. And I still, the image I still have of her is like breastfeeding our daughter while furiously typing away at the computer because we had to deliver the first manuscript at a certain time.
29:29 Guy Raz? Oh, this sounds miserable.
29:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. I'm getting hives listening to this, my own story.
29:33 Guy Raz? Did you go to investors? Did you think, "We need to go to like private equity people or, you know, venture capitalists and try to get some money"?
29:41 Speaker 00 We, we hadn't thought about it yet. We were trying to think of other ways that we could make money and build the business.
29:49 Guy Raz? Yeah.
29:50 Speaker 00 And we had this idea, and we said, "You know, the thing that brides seem to be really vexed about is this whole registry process."
29:56 Guy Raz? Yes.
29:57 Speaker 00 Isn't there a way to like completely reinvent that and create an online gift registry? Where they can register everything they want?
30:04 Speaker 02 Imagine, you're not picking the gift anyway, so why couldn't you just like buy it on the internet?
30:09 Speaker 00 And we said, this has got to be the thing we do. And that actually prompted us to go try to raise money to build the first online gift registry.
30:17 Speaker 02 So remember, this is 1997. And so when we-
30:21 Speaker 00 We just launched a website in July.
30:23 Speaker 02 Right. When we act like it's super mind blowing to think of an online gift registry, you have to remember that like, nobody even really bought anything on the internet yet.
30:34 Guy Raz? And so how did you, what did you do? How were you going to make that a reality?
30:38 Speaker 00 We needed to raise money.
30:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's when it became extremely clear because no one had online gift registries yet, or really, there was no way to do it. We actually realized that to do this, we would have to get the inventory ourself.
30:52 Speaker 00 Right.
30:52 Speaker 02 At that time, our bride count, or whatever we called it, our member count, was really growing in a very significant way. And word of mouth was our only way we were marketing.
31:06 Speaker 00 We didn't spend any money advertising.
31:07 Speaker 02 No, but like brides who discovered us in this, I think was a lot about our brand and our attitude. Like, once you found us, you wanted to tell anyone you knew who was getting married about us. And so we were growing in that way like wildfire. Like, people really were very loyal and excited about the brand, but it still wasn't a way to make money.
31:27 Guy Raz? So when you took the concept of the registry to potential investors, what did they say?
31:33 Speaker 00 It was a really long slog. I mean, it was hard to raise money for anything that was female centric in the digital space. And the fact that a large component of our business would now be predicated on e-commerce on top of advertising, you know, the first question people said was like, they're not going to give you a credit card number. It's like, you know, people are too paranoid about that. They're not going to register, they're not going, you know. And I think we probably were marketing for almost a year before we came across venture capitalists out in the West Coast that said, you know what, this is really interesting. And I think, you know, we're going to take a flyer on this.
32:12 Guy Raz? How much money did you guys raise?
32:14 Speaker 00 Three million. We launched the registry and-
32:18 Guy Raz? Was it on the not, was it like the not.com slash registry?
32:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. And we-
32:22 Speaker 02 New tab.
32:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, new tab. And we suddenly saw, within, I think, three or four months, we had close to 150,000 couples registered.
32:32 Speaker 00 In our registry. Put that into context, that's more than what Bloomingdale's was registering back then.
32:36 Guy Raz? Wow. So 150,000 people registered within the first few months. How did they even know about the registry?
32:46 Speaker 00 This is actually the critical thing, where Carly was the secret weapon. Carly became the person who, when we published our first book, suddenly appeared on the Today Show, and became sort of the-
32:59 Guy Raz? The wedding lifestyle guru.
33:01 Speaker 00 Guru, exactly.
33:02 Speaker 02 Meanwhile, not telling the world, word one, about my actual wedding day. I remember the first time I was on TV, a friend of mine was like, "Um, I was at your wedding."
33:13 Guy Raz? And all of a sudden, you're a wedding guru? So were you profitable at that point, or were you still-
33:21 Speaker 00 No, we were bleeding.
33:23 Guy Raz? How were you funding this?
33:24 Speaker 00 The 3 million, we made that last, but we were, we essentially were looking to raise another round. And within a year, we raised another 15 million.
33:36 Speaker 02 Also, no one in our office had Aaron chairs. Like, everything was Ikea, or hand-me-down, or, I mean, we didn't, we sort of, that whole culture of the internet companies now-
33:47 Speaker 00 No foosball tables.
33:48 Speaker 02 No foosball tables, no catered lunches. You were lucky if you got a pizza.
33:53 Guy Raz? Were you guys nervous at all? I mean, you had a kid, and eventually you'd have two more. But at that point, you had a kid. You were not making any money, because you were just funding this company. So you guys were probably earning-
34:05 Speaker 00 Nothing.
34:06 Speaker 02 No, I know. I think we made $35,000 a year, if I remember correctly, which seemed kind of unfair and exorbitant. Like, we shouldn't be taking this money.
34:14 Guy Raz? I mean, did you guys ever have conversations, you know, at night, where you were like, "I don't know if this is going to work. Maybe I should just, like, maybe I should go to law school or something." Like, did you ever, or were you totally confident this was going to work out?
34:26 Speaker 00 I don't think we felt we had an option. We had BFAs. We were unemployable, so we had to make this thing work.
34:35 Guy Raz? So by this point, you guys, you've got the gift registry going. And things seem to be humming along, I guess. And then in 2000, you decide to take the company public on the NASDAQ. So I'm assuming this was to raise more cash?
34:51 Speaker 00 Yes. So in 99, we actually had just raised money to build out and flesh out the registry. We raised $15 million. And literally a week later, we were approached by bankers who said, the window's going to close. You need to go public. And we were, you know, we had fresh money in the bank. And I couldn't understand why there was such urgency. But we took their advice, fortunately. And within, I think, seven months of that meeting, we were going public. So that was December 2nd, 1999. We go public. The entire internet world collapses four months later.
35:28 Speaker 02 And we were really lucky to have that additional $35 million.
35:32 Guy Raz? So when you went public, you raised $35 million more?
35:35 Speaker 00 Yes.
35:36 Guy Raz? And then four months later, the dot com crash. Does that do anything to your stock price?
35:41 Speaker 00 We never had the super spiky jump. And we didn't have the super cataclysmic crash. It just, over the course of a year and a half, went from $20 and settled down to 26 cents.
35:54 Guy Raz? 26 cents. So people lost their shirts on this.
35:59 Speaker 00 Yes.
35:59 Guy Raz? Presumably, you guys had a lot of shares, too.
36:02 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. We were not allowed to sell. I mean, we were locked up. And by the time the six-month lockup had released, you know, we, and honestly, we were also, we were way too loyal and dedicated. We did not want there to be any indication that the founders had lost faith. And so we were going to hold on to the bloody end.
36:18 Guy Raz? But I mean, the optics of going from $20 to 26 cents over a year and a half must have been rough. I mean, there must have been market analysts and people even in the industry were saying, this company's not going to last.
36:30 Speaker 00 Oh, it was horrific. We had our competitors faxing our stock charts to our advertisers, saying, look what's happening. They're going out of business. Do you really want to give them their money?
36:40 Guy Raz? And did that in any way affect, you know, how much money you had to use? Like, did you have to fire people? Did you have to lay people off at that time? Or could you still kind of plug along?
36:53 Speaker 00 We never had layoffs. We were able to downsize through attrition, but we never formally had to lay people off, in part because we were always running relatively lean. And there were people who panicked and basically sort of got out.
37:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think the biggest challenge was controlling the psychology of your team.
37:11 Guy Raz? I bet.
37:12 Speaker 02 Who they didn't understand. Your advertisers didn't understand the distinction between your growing revenue and how that had nothing to do with your stock price. I mean, it is kind of illogical.
37:22 Guy Raz? Most people don't understand it.
37:23 Speaker 00 Right.
37:23 Speaker 02 No, exactly. So between your young staff, who also is looking like, remember those options that I got? They're underwater by about $9.00. And advertisers. So there was so much emotion control. I think that was the hardest part, to keep people focused. And it was exhausting. And also, you do go home at night and you're like, remember when we were actually going to walk away from this business with, you know, $30 million together? And now we have like $300,000. It doesn't seem worth it. It doesn't seem worth it. There were definitely moments where you feel exhausted.
37:57 Speaker 00 The low point was the summer of 2001, where the stock dropped below $1 for over 90 days. You get delisted.
38:06 Guy Raz? Nasdaq delisted you.
38:07 Speaker 00 We get delisted.
38:08 Guy Raz? You're no longer in the newspaper.
38:09 Speaker 00 No, exactly. And you had to go down to
38:12 Speaker 02 It's a funny concept to deal with.
38:13 Speaker 00 DC and beg Nasdaq to reconsider. And I still remember, there was a little tribunal, you make your case, and then this old gentleman looks over and says, I'm sorry, we're still going to have to delist you, but you have a great little business. Don't let it fail.
38:27 Guy Raz? What does it mean when you get delisted? You're still a stock, right?
38:32 Speaker 00 You're still a stock. You're trading in the bulletin boards. But the key difference is now the major funds are no longer allowed to hold your stock.
38:41 Guy Raz? If you are, you're delisted, you cannot, the big funds are not going to invest in you.
38:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, the fidelities. And unfortunately, that's where a lot of the volume and the support comes from with public stocks. And so the moment we got delisted, 2 million shares just automatically get ejected into the system. And that's when the stock just really cratered. We went down from like 90 cents to that 26 cents in a matter of minutes.
39:05 Guy Raz? And to be listed in the Nasdaq, you have to be above $1 for a certain number of months.
39:10 Speaker 00 To get relisted, you have to be above $5 for 180 days without institutional support.
39:16 Guy Raz? And so essentially, once you're delisted, it's almost impossible to presumably to get back on there because you would have to convince people, individuals, to buy shares, right?
39:26 Speaker 00 Exactly. So, in fact, I spent the next three years going to dentist investor club meetings at the back of the Red Lion Inn, going to small cap conferences, drumming up retail support to try to get the stock relisted.
39:44 Guy Raz? Because that was the only way you could increase the share price.
39:46 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:46 Guy Raz? So you had to get individual investors to just buy shares.
39:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, you needed, exactly.
39:52 Speaker 02 Thank you, dentists of America.
39:54 Guy Raz? That just sounds so grueling.
39:56 Speaker 00 It was, and I think, you know.
39:58 Speaker 02 I think that's when you put on like 25 pounds, too.
40:02 Speaker 00 Well, I had this one meeting with a competitor, and I think he said these fatal words that sort of propelled this thing forward. They saw this as an opportunity to acquire us, and they said, "Listen, you have a broken IPO. We should just put these companies together, 70/30 their way. We can repackage it and go public again three years."
40:21 Guy Raz? You were offered, this was another company, offered to buy you out.
40:24 Speaker 00 Yeah. And he said, "'Cause you're delisted."
40:27 Guy Raz? Yeah.
40:27 Speaker 00 "And getting relisted is like carrying a gorilla up 30 flights of stairs. It's impossible. It's too hard." And I remember the day we got relisted in 2005, I was dying to send him a postcard with a big gorilla on it saying, "30 flights delivered. Take that."
40:42 Guy Raz? So, it is four years you're off the Nasdaq. That's a long time. I'm trying to figure out why you didn't just cut your losses and say, "We're still young. We can still kind of try something else out. This is not going to be the way that we're going to make a sustainable life."
41:03 Speaker 00 I think it was because we were never doing this for the money.
41:07 Guy Raz? Well, but you had kids. You needed, at a certain point, you need to have some money.
41:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, but I think it was, I think it was the work. We were launching a TV show. We were launching, you know, a national magazine. There were so many really exciting things that we were building. You know, The Nest came, The Bump came.
41:26 Guy Raz? The Nest and The Bump were like the next iterations. The Nest, obviously, about, as if anyone knows, about your home, and The Bump about babies, children.
41:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, our audience had been begging us for years to take them beyond the wedding day. And we, you know, people on our staff who had like grown beyond the wedding phase and all had babies, they all wanted to launch it. So it just seemed incredibly fun. There was so much more to do. We always said to each other, like, if this ever becomes like super boring, we should get out. I mean, we're not particularly like planner people anyway. We didn't think about our future. We were just thinking like six months in advance.
42:03 Speaker 00 Exit wasn't part of our vocabulary.
42:05 Guy Raz? I mean, you, you get relisted in 05. You then launch The Nest and The Bump as part of the, the whole sort of media empire. You're working on a bunch of different projects. At what point were you, did you guys feel like, okay, we've turned a corner? Like, we are, we're gonna be okay. Not, we're gonna be more than okay.
42:24 Speaker 00 I'm not sure we're there yet.
42:28 Speaker 02 No, I think once we were like profitable, or it's like Sisypheus, like you keep thinking you're ahead and then all of a sudden the boulder seems really heavy and you're going backwards and you have to keep pushing again.
42:37 Speaker 00 I mean, in 2006 and '07, we wound up, we bought Wedding Channel. There was unbelievable sort of frothy expectations on what that acquisition was going to net us. And the stock hits $32. We have a billion dollar market cap. And, you know, then precipitates the next, you know, minor nuclear winter where the stock starts to decline again because you just can't live up to those expectations. And then 2008 happens and it's the Great Recession.
43:08 Guy Raz? And where does the stock price go at that point?
43:11 Speaker 00 Our stock actually held up relatively well. I think, you know, most media companies were down 20%. We grew 5%. You know, we actually grew that year because a lot of the marketers realized that the only people who were going to continue to spend money during this Great Recession are brides and grooms. You know, weddings were truly recession-proof.
43:32 Guy Raz? What do you think it is about your personalities that work so well together? Because you guys went through such intense emotional highs and lows building this business. So what do you think it was about the other person in the relationship that made it work?
43:48 Speaker 02 This is where you declare your love of me and how amazing I am.
43:52 Guy Raz? This is the romance moment.
43:54 Speaker 00 Exactly. You know, I think we were ultimately so different as people. I wouldn't say that we necessarily worked well together, but we were incredibly complimentary. Where there is no overlap, there's less conflict. And when there was overlap, oh my god, it was like World War III.
44:12 Speaker 02 Fireworks, yeah. Like, the two of us are both incredibly bullheaded. There are really distinct differences. Like, David can kind of look up, look ahead, and think of something like really bold and strategic way down the road. And then I can grab that ball really quickly, believe in it. Like, I'm not a naysayer, so I'm like, OK, you want to do that? And then I figure out how to get that thing done.
44:36 Guy Raz? When you think about the fact that you both have bachelor's degrees in fine arts, and you met, you know, a long time ago, and you probably were never gonna, had you pursued a traditional path, never really gonna make a whole lot of money. The fact that you built a company that's now, I guess, worth close to half a billion dollars, does it seem like a dream? Does it seem like weird? Or now that you look back on it, do you think, yeah, OK, that makes sense. We're gonna do this?
45:05 Speaker 00 It's surreal. I mean, at one point, someone said, "Do you realize 700 families are gainfully employed because of what you've built? And that, you know, they can send their kids to college and buy homes and actually thrive." And there's a great sense of satisfaction to that. I think the, you know, the company has always been just this extension of our family. And we- There's a great deal of pride in having been able to build something that is sustainable and can continue to grow that way.
45:35 Speaker 02 So we never really cared that much about money. But I can tell you, not being worried about money.
45:40 Guy Raz? Is different.
45:41 Speaker 02 That is the true, like, that is what I'm so grateful for.
45:45 Speaker 00 I still panic, but.
45:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, but that's like a personality, you know.
45:49 Speaker 00 Disorder.
45:50 Speaker 02 Disorder.
45:51 Guy Raz? You know, out of all the people I've interviewed, I think more than anybody else, your business really reflects the progression of your adult lives. And what I love about it is you clearly did all of these very imperfectly. Like, your wedding was kind of a disaster. And then, you know, you kind of struggled with kids because you were busy and you didn't properly do everything that all the perfect parents were doing. And all these companies that you started reflect all the things that you've done in your lives.
46:21 Speaker 02 And I think, almost even, you know, more to that point, our whole set of brands kind of celebrated the imperfect. I think what appealed to people is that we were like, there is no perfect.
46:37 Guy Raz? Although there are some parents who do seem perfect.
46:39 Speaker 02 I'm not friends with any of them.
46:41 Speaker 00 No, in fact, when I picked up Carly from the hospital with our daughter, the first time.
46:47 Speaker 02 I really don't want you to tell this. No, go ahead.
46:50 Speaker 00 In our used Honda, our friend had come to help and we had, you know, her van in the little car seat in the back. And as we're driving back from Mount Sinai, our friend asks.
47:02 Speaker 02 We stop at a stoplight and there's like a CBS or Duane Reade outside the window. She's like, so you have all the things you need, right? Like diapers. We were like, right, diapers. She's like, David, pull over.
47:13 Speaker 00 We were about to bring home a newborn. We didn't have anything.
47:16 Speaker 02 There were three diapers in the kit.
47:18 Guy Raz? Yeah.
47:19 Speaker 02 We were going to be fine.
47:21 Speaker 00 Oh, my God. I think it also made us good business people.
47:24 Guy Raz? Yeah.
47:25 Speaker 00 Because I think we never walked around with a hubris. A notion that we knew better. And that the process of discovery and the process of learning was constant.
47:36 Speaker 02 And a team effort.
47:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I think we would never be in a position to say, oh, my god, we know exactly how things in weddings should be done, or how things in pregnancies should be done. We learned it by the seat of our pants, and we embraced the people who are courageous enough to do that as well.
47:51 Guy Raz? And you didn't. I mean, a lot of entrepreneurs will have a spouse who will teach music lessons on the side, or will be a schoolteacher, or a lawyer, or have some kind of income coming in. You guys did not have a Plan B, because you're both in this.
48:06 Speaker 00 No, this was the high-wire act.
48:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, although I think back, I would have hated to be married to an entrepreneur and not be one. One, you never see them, and they're just totally stressed out all the time. And I think that it was super, super stressful, and really dangerous and painful and complicated in so many ways. And it was the most romantic, amazing, exciting, exhilarating thing on the other side. I mean, it was literally both. Like, you're building something from scratch. And it was like the early days, you know, so it was so exciting, and you're in the thick of it, and you're hiring these people. I mean, it was something so exciting to be doing it together.
48:48 Guy Raz? Carly Roney and David Lu, founders of The Knot. Since 2011, they've expanded their lifestyles empire. It's now called the XO Group, and it includes a site about pregnancy called The Bump, one about home decor called The Nest, and a website called How He Asked, which is a marriage proposal planner. Who knew? In 2014, David and Carly both stepped down from the day-to-day running of XO, which means more time for the kids, for hanging out with friends, and never, according to Carly, ever serving paella. And please do stick around, because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about
49:32 Guy Raz? the things you're building.
49:38 Guy Raz? Hey, thanks so much for sticking around, because it's time now for How You Built That. And you may want to turn up the volume on your device for just a second, because I want to play the sound for you. It's kind of subtle, but I think you'll know what it is.
49:57 Guy Raz? OK, a needle scratching on vinyl, which is kind of a cool sound, right? It's full of romance and anticipation, especially if you grew up with it and even if you didn't.
50:09 Speaker 03 I started being really interested in records when I was a kid. I would go through my parents' record collections and play Herb Alpert or Creedence Clearotta Revival.
50:18 Guy Raz? And this was in the late 1980s, when Mike Dixon was growing up in Wichita Falls, Texas.
50:23 Speaker 03 And I just was always fascinated with the fact that you had to really interact with the music in a physical way, to pull the record out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable, and play it.
50:33 Guy Raz? As Mike got older, he started hanging out in clubs and recording some of his friends' bands. And a lot of them wanted to put their songs on vinyl because, as we've already established, vinyl is kind of cool. But to cut a vinyl record at a legitimate pressing plant is expensive.
50:51 Speaker 03 Your general investment was about $2,000, and if you couldn't sell 500 copies, you were definitely not going to break even.
51:00 Guy Raz? But around this time, Mike discovered that if you just want to do a really limited run of records, like, say, 20 or 30, you can learn to do it yourself with something called a record lathe.
51:13 Speaker 03 A record lathe basically looks like a large turntable, and the needle is vibrating as the disc turns underneath it, and the sound wave is etched into the disc.
51:22 Guy Raz? And you would have seen these old record lathes in recording studios or radio stations in the 1940s and 50s. And you can still find them, usually in a dusty attic or, of course, on eBay.
51:35 Speaker 03 I got really obsessed with the machines. I bought every one that I could find. And eventually, I had so many machines, I was having bands from out of town come over to my kitchen and cut records straight to the lathes in the other room.
51:52 Speaker 03 The drummer would be right next to the sink. The guitar player and bass player would be next to the refrigerator. And I would be cutting the records while they played the song.
52:03 Guy Raz? Anyway, this is all happening in Olympia, Washington in 2010, 2011. And I should mention that in real life, Mike was teaching high school. But he's also got this vinyl record label going. And eventually, he moves out of the kitchen and into a studio and then into the world to small events and pop-up festivals where he uses his portable record lathes to cut vinyl on the spot. And then in 2012, Mike and his partner got a phone call.
52:34 Speaker 03 We got a call from Converse about cutting records for a band called The XX at their Coachella VIP party.
52:42 Guy Raz? Right, so Coachella, huge. The XX, also pretty huge. And suddenly, Mike and his partner Chris are at this big party with two record lathes, making vinyl dubs of Jamie XX for like 200 people.
52:56 Speaker 03 The attendees would go and listen to some samples. And they'd say, I want this song on the A side, I want this song on the B side. And then we would cut it for them right there. And then they walk away with a disc that they can take home and play and show their friends.
53:10 Guy Raz? And after that event?
53:11 Speaker 03 We had a ton of people that said, hey, I want this at my party. I need this at my activation or at my festival.
53:17 Guy Raz? And that's how Mike launched mobile vinyl recorders. He quit his teaching job, he moved to Tucson, Arizona. And now he and Chris do about one event a month, making vinyl record dubs at festivals, parties, even weddings. They've been making about a quarter of a million dollars in revenue, doing quite possibly the coolest job ever.
53:39 Speaker 03 It's something that I fell into. And yeah, I can't imagine having a cooler job either.
53:45 Guy Raz? You can find out more about mobile vinyl recorders at our Facebook page. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to. And thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. Please also subscribe to our show at Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts. You can also write us, that's h i b t at npr.org. You can tweet us at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner. Ramtin Arablouei composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Thomas Lu, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Noor Kutsi. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This
54:30 Guy Raz? from NPR.
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