If you got married because of Shaadi.com, you can thank my brother-in-law Sandeep Jain and me.
30 years ago today – July 30, 1996, we bought that domain name.
Honestly, we had no idea what it would become. No grand plan, no market research. Just two guys, a brand new internet, and a name that felt obvious. We went live on October 1, 1996. And the response was beyond our wildest expectations.
For those who want the beginning of the story: the spark was the Netscape IPO on August 9, 1995. Sandeep and I kicked around the two ideas we felt the internet would transform, jobs and matrimonials, and we picked matrimonials. In July 1996 I bought shaadi.com from Network Solutions, the only place you could buy a domain back then, and built version 1 as a static site in Microsoft FrontPage. The full story is in my 2015 post: Origin Story: shaadi.com.
Ahead of this anniversary, I opened up a backup I had of the original member database. The high-level stats are in the image below, our time capsule rendered the way the web looked in 1996. The original deck we used to sell $99 banner ads is right here, Comic Sans and all: Advertising on shaadi.com, 1996 (PDF).
But one number stopped me: 3,982 members signed up with a Hotmail address. That is 35% of the entire database. Sabeer Bhatia had launched Hotmail on July 4, 1996. It was all of 89 days old when we went live, and it ended up carrying more than a third of our members. Somewhere out there are couples who found each other through two things that did not exist at the start of 1996.
I sold the site in 2000. People always ask why. There is a line in the movie Blow where George Jung’s cellmate tells him: “…you had the wrong dream.”
Everything after was timing, luck, and people far braver than us.
