We were lucky to catch up with Sara Margulis recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
The idea for Honeyfund came from the combination of personal need and a little bit of serendipity. In 2005, my then-fiancé and I were planning our wedding and, like many couples today, we already lived together in a home full of housewares. What we really needed was not more stuff, but to get away from the stress of our high-pressure jobs. We dreamed of going as far away as we could – and Fiji came to mind. We quickly learned it was half way around the globe and expensive to get to, especially after paying for our own wedding.
As we researched honeymoon registries, we were deterred by the high fees and outdated sites available in 2004. We decided to create our own honeymoon registry! We envisioned a simple web page where guests could select experiences from our dream honeymoon and contribute money directly. My to-be-husband, a software engineer, built the page and our guests went wild for it. They contributed more than $5,000, making our dream honeymoon possible. Beyond the contributions, what stood out was how much they loved the concept. They would say “why don’t you build something where other couples can do this?” We knew we were onto something —a need that wasn’t being met.
Our two-week honeymoon in Fiji was truly everything we hoped for, and we came away with an even deeper love for travel and the conviction that this would be so good for other couples like us, who miss out on these kind of experiences due to financial constraints. We felt we could change that, so we launched honeyfund.com nearly one year after our own wedding.
What excited us most was seeing the joy and enthusiasm from our guests, so we built it out of the love of the idea and our own magical honeymoon experience. Over time, and even more since our own painful divorce, it’s become a mission to help other couples create their own priceless memories so they can stay together for the long haul.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My background is in customer service and digital marketing, and I got my start during the dot.com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. As an associate director of marketing at a private university, I worked on e-mail marketing, website redesigns, software projects, and workflow automation. These experiences gave me the skills to start Honeyfund. Along with my co-founder’s software engineering expertise, Honeyfund was born on laptops on our couch, when wifi in your apartment was a brand new thing and Google Adwords were cheap. It’s been incredible to watch it grow to more than 1.3 m couples and nearly $1 billion in gifts.
Honeyfund is unique because it charges zero fees on cash gifts, ensuring that couples receive every dollar. We focus on ensuring that each registry reflects the couple’s dream honeymoon or other life goals, such as buying a home or starting a family. We make it feel good for guests to contribute funds with a little more meaning and excitement than cold hard cash.
What further sets Honeyfund apart is our commitment to supporting couples beyond their wedding day. We believe in the power of shared experiences and travel to strengthen relationships, and our platform is growing to help couples as they navigate more of their life journey together. Whether it’s funding a babymoon, a first anniversary trip, or unforeseen hardships, Honeyfund will be there to support them every step of the way.
I’m so proud of Honeyfund’s mission to ensure that every couple can achieve their dream honeymoon and beyond, without the financial stress. Honeyfund is built on that foundation of love, personal experience, and a genuine desire to support couples in their journey together.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
When we started Honeyfund, the initial capital came primarily from bootstrapping. We were two young professionals living in San Francisco—a city buzzing with tech innovation—and we had a vision. We invested around $5,000 initially, which was largely spent on Google AdWords to draw traffic to our site. The early days were all about being resourceful and making every dollar count. We focused on creating a user-friendly platform and relied heavily on word-of-mouth marketing from our own wedding guests and early users who loved the idea. The nice thing about Honeyfund is that everyone who signs up invites 150 more people to the platform! So it grew organically.
By 2012 we processed more than $200 million in gifting, and caught the attention of the casting team at Shark Tank. We were invited to apply to the show and got cast on Season 6, with our episode airing in October 2014. The exposure was invaluable, and we secured a deal with Kevin O’Leary, which helped propel Honeyfund to the national stage. The Shark Tank experience taught us the power of strategic investment and helped us form high-level partnerships, such as our registry integration with Target. It was a pivotal moment that took us from a bootstrapped startup to a recognized brand in the wedding industry, a notoriously difficult industry to break into.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
How much time do we have? As you can imagine, going from a scrappy digital marketing background to a site doing $100 m a year in gifting was a wild ride. We barely had enough employees and personal time to keep up, and we had two little kids on top of it. The wild success of the Shark Tank appearance was a blessing and a curse – we were in way over our heads. We didn’t know much about employing people, but we needed a team so we made it all up as we went along. Ultimately we found it way too costly and difficult to find good tech employees in the shadow of Silicon Valley, so we moved the company to Florida in 2017 to be close to a mentor and board member who could coach us on growing the business using Kevin’s investment funds. Sadly, he passed away unexpectedly shortly after we settled into our new home, office and schools in Florida. After that, our marriage fell apart under the stress and we had to find a way to move forward separately. In 2019, I bought my ex out of the business, and we all moved back to California. I was re-committed to making our mission a reality with a remote team when Covid hit. What was to be the biggest wedding year of the century, 2020, become a tragic disaster for the world and our business. We didn’t have the reserves to ride out the storm, so we sought funding from our community of past couples and gift givers, with the help of Kevin O’Leary through a platform called Start Engine. We raised more than $1.5 m in equity and went on to become no. 451 of the Inc 5,000 fastest growing companies of 2024!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.honeyfund.com
- Instagram: @honeyfund
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/honeyfund
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/honeyfund-com-inc-/
- Twitter: https://www.x.com/honeyfund
Image Credits
all original or owned stock