So, in late 2010, Kellee moved to New York City, started networking in the tech community and invested $75,000 from personal savings to hire a team of developers — then turned her idea into reality. She raised $2 million in seed funding and on February 14, 2012, launched Lover.ly, a place to find wedding ideas — and actually buy the products and book vendors. Think of a search engine with the visual elements of Pinterest, where all the suggestions come from top wedding bloggers and are well-organized and tagged so they can be bought immediately. A search for bridesmaid dresses, for example, can be filtered by color, price, style and numerous other elements.
Now, the company has grown from two to 16 employees, sells 250,000 products from 2,000 brands and has 2.6 million visitors a month across their bridal blog network, responsible for a total of 40 million image views. We talked to Kellee about building her business and how, as someone who sells inspiration, she finds inspiration in her own life.
You’ve said you heard “no” a lot during fundraising. How did you inspire more yeses?
Fundraising is never easy. I think I pitched more than 250 people over the course of three years, and I think maybe 20 of those have said yes. Every time I’m pitching someone, the most important thing is really to understand their objection: What about the business did they not like or understand? Oftentimes that requires you to change your story. Maybe it’s not that they don’t like the business; maybe they don’t understand what problem we’re trying to solve or the approach, so it’s all about storytelling and being able to articulate your value proposition. I’m constantly trying to modify our pitch and the message of the story based on the feedback we’re getting from people.