Shaadi.com at 30: The Origin Story

If you got married because of Shaadi.com, you can thank my brother-in-law Sandeep Jain and me.

30 years ago today, we bought the 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.