Sri Lanka’s MyWish.lk, an all-in-one platform for wedding services

Shageevan and Indulekha, Co-founders of MyWish.lk, first met at a Hackathon hosted in Sri Lanka, one of the very few Hackathons that are conducted in Lanka. That is when they came up with the idea of their startup - to make weddings more social and easy to plan. Soon after their encounter at the Hackathon, they started building the website.

MyWish.lk went live in May 2012 under private beta. The team went ahead and submitted their business idea at the Venture Engine competition. The team was one of the Top 10 ideas among 70 good quality submissions. MyWish.lk team managed to raise initial funding to fuel their venture to the next level. The website was full-fledgedly launched in January 2013.

To know more about this interesting venture, we catch up with Shageevan, who has over 6 years of experience in building complex online systems and web services.

Tell us in detail about the offerings of MyWish.

MyWish was created with the modern bride and groom of the digital age in mind. Today, couples want to make their wedding beautiful and memorable with least hassle. We at MyWish love to make this a reality for all couples who are planning their wedding.

MyWish wedding services offer couples options to create beautiful wedding web pages, digital wedding invitations with RSVP facility and a wedding registry where they can incorporate just about any gift they like! And the best part is, MyWish wedding services are completely free of charge at this point in time and it’s easy to register and start your very own beautiful wedding page.

The newly launched first version of the “Wedding Budget Planner” is going to be a very useful tool for couples who are planning their wedding as well. The highlighted features of the Wedding Budget Planner are that it’s on a cloud platform, it’s well protected, a single user can manage any number of event budgets and they can invite their spouse, dad, mom, wedding planner, their best friends or anyone else they want to help them out with their budget.

What motivated you to start this MyWish?

For my partner, Indulekha, it was her personal experience during her own wedding, that she saw the need for a wedding registry that would cater to the needs of couples in Sri Lanka. And for me, it was the huge market opportunity that existed where there was a lack of connection between various wedding service providers.

Today we are a team of 4 people.

How big is the market you are trying to capture?

With 200,000 weddings taking place in Sri Lanka per year and with at least 100 guests attending each - and considering local internet penetration at 15%; we are looking at around $11 million market, being safe on setting up the price per gift at an average of $25. It can grow around 10% per year based on gift pricing, online user growth etc.

What were your early challenges?

Setting up the initial team was hard, as startups are new concept in Sri Lanka. Lack of credit card penetration was a big challenge. Today we offer Cash on Delivery. Distribution and marketing were big challenges as well. Getting traction for unconventional online services is challenging because of the relatively less internet penetration compared to most other countries in the world. But with increasing internet penetration, online service providers have a huge potential in Sri Lanka.

How has the traction been so far?

We are based in Colombo and our office is located within Orion City, an office complex largely popular for hosting numerous tech companies and startups in Colombo. Our potential users are between 18 - 35 years old, who are in a relationship or engaged, who have internet access plus their friends and family also have online access.

The number of new users on the site is currently raising at a speed of around 10% per month given that this is a very new concept for Sri Lanka. In addition, there is a traditional barrier for gifts and registries where people usually do not like to ‘ask’ for gifts. However, with the traditional system of gift giving, people end up with duplicated items or completely unnecessary gifts, which is a huge waste of money. To gain a much faster traction, this barrier has to be destroyed. Currently we host around 300 wedding profiles and counting. Even though most of them are experimental, we did see some extraordinary uses for example, one of our users used her wedding page to invite her online contacts and requested them to send her their postal addresses so that she can post printed invitations. People are slowly getting used to the idea of wedding registries but we have a long way to go.

What are your expansion plans?

We’re planning on expanding the concept of gift registries beyond weddings, in to other areas such as birthdays, christmas, baby showers etc. We’re also looking at building tools that people can use for the planning and the daunting task of managing all the activities involved in organizing a wedding ceremony. Our aim is to become the most successful online wedding service provider in South East Asia.

Advice to people looking to startup in Sri Lanka

Don’t sit on your brilliant idea for too long. Someone else might do it before you do.

Don’t be afraid to share your ideas and get feedback. Not everyone is out there to steal your idea.

User testimonial

We have completed our first high value transaction with a Samsung Galaxy S4 from our online store, in a single credit card transaction. We were amazed given that it is worth LKR 90K, the customer went on and purchased without a single question. When we asked him for the reason for the swift purchase, he said our site is the only site he felt easy to use. We were thrilled as this is a huge motivation factor for us.

To know more about MyWish, visit their webiste https://www.mywish.lk/