PIC CAPTION: Chelsea Bartosz, founder of Plan My Wedding tech startup is excited about pitching her startup to investors at the AfricArena Johannesburg Deep Tech, AI & Green Economy Summit on 23 April 2024. Image: Supplied / Plan My Wedding
Being in the wedding industry, juggling various queries, demands and unexpected scenarios is not for the faint of heart. And given that there are about 11,500 weddings taking place on any given day across the world, one could be forgiven for thinking that the wedding industry is already oversaturated. Not so for a savvy entrepreneur who saw a gap in the $300 billion global wedding industry. Chelsea Bartosz, founder of founder of tech startup Plan My Wedding sits down with AfricArena’s Jabulile Sonya Ngwenya to chat about how tech and weddings make a perfect marriage in the heart of Africa’s stunning wedding-worthy venues.
“Anything is possible if you set your mind to it,” Bartosz laughs as she tells AfricArena that this is the motto she lives by. Helping couples virtually plan their dream destination wedding in Southern Africa is just one of the things she does really well. She is clearly passionate about what she does.
A go-getter at heart, Bartosz laughs when she recounts her startup’s humble beginnings. “The company started in my last year of university with zero funds and then I bootstrapped for the first four years, learning through many mistakes but also learning what is involved in an online business, which is a completely different ball game to a wedding business,” she tells AfricArena.
Bartosz shares that she always knew she would become an entrepreneur, but she never dreamt that she would become a tech entrepreneur. Passionate about Africa and all Africa has to offer the world, Bartosz, a proud born and bred African says, “Leading an African-bred company has been nothing short of amazing, presenting itself with its own set of challenges. This is what keeps us excited and motivated in the business world, constantly reinventing and navigating the new challenges while remaining true to our core values.”
What keeps Bartosz leaping out of bed each morning with joy are two things: Her commitment to “motivating individuals to reach their full potential and seeing an incredible love story come together.”
“My life is a bit of an African love affair really,” she laughs. “I was born in Zimbabwe, lived in Mozambique for 12 years and then founded my base and operations in South Africa! Being a female in an African-bred startup is such a beautiful experience, being able to share my love for my country and its surrounding countries. We have so much to offer the world and I’ve enjoyed educating and showing the world about what Africa has to offer.”
Oozing confidence, a key ingredient in becoming a successful startup founder, Bartosz says, “Personally, I have always been inspired by the love shared between two humans at a wedding and after studying wedding planning and cum laude at chef school, I knew that weddings are my forte and it is going to be a part of my core life.” But she shares that she quickly learnt that “there was more to it than just planning weddings and with Southern Africa’s increasing diaspora, I found a niche and a need for our internationals wanting to get married back home and this is where the concept developed from and the business was then started.”
M-Net Shark Tank selected Plan My Wedding to pitch on its platform in 2016 and it was an incredible experience, Bartosz says. “When we were featured on M-Net Shark Tank, we were given three offers and we went ahead with two investors who since then were both bought out of the company, and I remained the 100% woman-owned shareholder in the business.”
An incredible achievement for this woman-led company that is disrupting Africa’s wedding industry, daring to dream big and think outside the box. M-Net Shark Tank, Bartosz says, was the defining moment when we realised there was a real need in the market for our tech-driven business solution.
“When we launched and soon realised how hard it is to find all the components in one place and signed up 400+ couples, being on M-Net Shark Tank verified our business concept with the uptake with the right media.” From there, things just took off for the Plan My Wedding team.
M-Net Shark Tank was not Bartosz’s first rodeo as an entrepreneur raising funds. “I had actually received investment from an angel investor at the age of 18,” she chuckles. It is clear entrepreneurship and business runs in her blood. “There were three of them who pooled together a very small amount of money, but the mentorship I got from them to get an official business registered and started was worth more than the investment itself,” she says. This insight proves how critical the right mentorship is at the right time in helping startups succeed and scale their businesses.
Bartosz explains that her startup is first and foremost, “a 360 degrees digitized wedding platform with a wedding coordinator virtually holding your hand through the process.” She adds, “we base our success on us being the first online source of wedding tools and largest inspiration platform in Southern Africa especially for the ever increasing diaspora.”
Bartosz is more than a wedding planner and a chef. Within her skills arsenal, she has project management and computer software engineering expertise. Building a startup requires the ability to pivot and learn new skills. “We knew if we were going to be a successful tech business having lost a lot of money in building our MVP, then we needed to quickly learn new skills.” And learning these new skills has been an incredible value-add component to the business as she says, “it has been so important to have the range of skills and knowledge to really understand all the components of my business.”
Technology, she notes, is not only changing the wedding industry - it is rapidly changing the way people do business across the world. Technology, she adds, is “already incorporated into everyone’s lifestyle in some way, shape or form.” Emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and development for tech startups, Bartosz says, “We cannot, as humans, rest on our laurels with the way the world is going. It only seemed natural that the wedding industry is a part of this from e-commerce businesses to tools, apps, virtual worlds and most recently AI - there is something for every wedding business to be a part of the online world. You will fall behind if you haven't explored a small part of being in the tech world.”
Being a wedding planner is stressful, and no two days are the same. Bartosz says a typical day in her life is “checking her calendar, motivating people and helping them change their mindsets, identifying market gaps and innovative solutions to drive profit, incorporating social impact, and empowering and equipping people to become the best version of themselves.”
She pauses, and then admits she can’t go through a day without looking at her calendar. “I live and swear by my Google calendar and often stress to the team the importance of diary entries. If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t happen!” She laughs, thinking of a few memorable moments throughout her career. “A day could potentially be filled having meetings with my beautiful couples from around the world or working with our developers in Sri Lanka online, having a partly global team our clocks don’t stop and therefore rest is fitted in between. I quickly learnt how important diarising family time and time to get to your computer and do the admin side of our business was too, otherwise the most important things can be left to stray.”
Good planning and time management is key to building a successful, thriving tech startup. Bartosz mentions Danielle Carr, who is Head of Weddings and Coordination in Cape Town, is an invaluable member of her team, coordinating all their physical weddings.
The covid pandemic, Bartosz says, turned many businesses upside down, and presented her team with many interesting challenges. “However, in a very conservative market, the pandemic helped boost everyone to give planning a wedding online a go.” And that, she smiles, was very good for her business. Their biggest challenge as a digital business operating in a very conservative market, says Bartosz, “is incorporating our suppliers and the local market into our digital platform. The covid pandemic helped boost this immensely as everyone quickly learnt how important the online world is.”
Keenly aware of the challenges women founders and women-led startups face in spearheading business growth and procuring funds across the African continent, given that a small percentage of funding is distributed to women founders and entrepreneurs, Bartosz says: “As women founders, I think we can either look at it as a challenge or an exciting mountain to conquer.”
Touching on the interesting terrain she and her team faces, she says while there are positive elements to bootstrapping, it is not without its challenges. “We soon realised that as a bootstrap startup our goal was to launch to market and get healthy and serious about our cash flow, so we have always made sure in growing our business to have a lean startup and grow accordingly. Raising external funds is no small feat, however we know it won’t break our business because of our focus and foundation.” This is good advice to founders, to maintain focus as they build their startups.
Speaking on the challenges women founders face, she says, “Whether it be me or not, I like to always think of everything as a level playing field. My challenges must be as even as our counterpart makes because business is business, and no matter who we are we will be faced with similar challenges in creating a successful business. How we tackle them is another story. I believe women are amazing and often far more advanced and more equipped than we think we are at achieving the task at hand. Plan My Wedding is 90% female run in our business.”
Plan My Wedding is currently part of a French Tech South African Labs cohort. Bartosz says it is important to stay humble because, “no matter what level you are in business, there are always things to be learnt or improved on.” Plan My Wedding has never pitched on the AfricArena stage, and they will make their first AfricArena pitch debut at the upcoming AfricArena Johannesburg Deep Tech, AI & Green Economy Summit taking place in Johannesburg at 22 On Sloane, Africa’s largest startup campus on 23 April. Bartosz says she and her team are thrilled to have this opportunity to pitch at AfricArena and kickstart a new round of fundraising for 2024.
The largest amount of funds Bartosz has raised for her startup is $20 000 and “it was deployed to build the tech platform and get it to market with successful marketing.” These funds helped them massively with expanding their business to where they are now through strategic public relations, media relations and marketing while maintaining their focus on being a lean startup.
She shares that this year, they are looking at raising $300 000 in funds which will be used to “enhance our platform to be a global wedding leader, strategic marketing and data collection, building a steadfast team.” She adds that they are still on “the lookout for the right tech cofounder with both business acumen and knowledge and the right experience in tech” to help them accomplish their goals to scale their business.
Bartosz shares that the best advice one of her mentors gave her is that “Cash flow is king.” She adds that one of the sharks on M-Net Shark tank shared a powerful analogy: “You could have a Ferrari or an old rusted VW buggy. Either way, you need fuel to get to your destination and you will get to the exact same destination.” That advice has helped her in her financial decision making processes and keeps her motivated to stay in a lean startup mode.
Her advice to founders, particularly women founders who want to build a tech startup is, “stay lean for as long as you possibly can, and remember you don’t make money while building your business as you are constantly putting money back into your business to go from good to great.”
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