While growing a marketplace, she kept her team small – then sold to a wedding-industry giant

For about eight years, Janessa White ran her company, Simply Eloped, similar to how the couples she worked with approached their weddings: she kept it small.

White and her co-founder, Matt Dalley, started the business in 2016 to connect couples with venues and vendors for their elopements or micro-weddings. They worked on the business alone for the first year and a half before assembling a small team, White said in a FounderStory podcast.

That changed in a big way when Simply Eloped sold to The Knot Worldwide, a wedding industry and lifestyle brand behemoth, in May 2024.

Growing wedding marketplace Simply Eloped

Simply Eloped may have had humble beginnings as a two-person team based in Boise, Idaho, but its revenue grew quickly.

The business brought in $40,000 in bookings in its first year, $300,000 the following year and $1.4 million in year three, White told Hampton. By 2021, she’d built an $8-million business, according to Bootstrappers. (It’s unclear where Bootstrappers got that number; they didn’t specify whether it was revenue or company value, and White did not confirm either for They Got Acquired.)

White brought users to the website by leaning into search engine optimization and developing relationships with reporters who covered weddings, who then included the company in their articles, she told They Got Acquired.

As the business grew, Simply Eloped added more team members. White said that was one of the most challenging aspects of running the company.

“We struggled for quite a while to figure out how to find the right team members,” White told They Got Acquired. “Everything we did at Simply Eloped was bespoke, and neither my co-founder nor I had ever started a company. We really had to put a lot of focus (much more than expected) into hiring, vetting/interviewing, training and company culture.”

White and Dalley, who were romantic partners in addition to business partners, bootstrapped the company for its first two-and-a-half years before raising venture capital, White explained in an interview with CanvasRebel. They raised $750,000 in total, she told They Got Acquired.

The money from investors came in handy when bookings drastically dropped in the early months of the pandemic, and Simply Eloped had to process thousands of cancellations and postponements, White told Hampton. But by the fall of 2020, business boomed as couples shifted their big wedding dreams to elopements and microweddings out of necessity.

The following year brought on another significant shift, as White and Dalley decided to part ways, and White bought out her co-founder.

Getting acquired by The Knot

By 2024, after helping about 13,000 couples get married, White was ready for someone new to take over the reins at Simply Eloped.

“It seemed like the next natural phase of the company’s life cycle,” she told They Got Acquired.

She listed the company on a popular marketplace, but “none of those conversations with potential buyers panned out,” she said. However, Simply Eloped had an existing relationship with The Knot, and she decided to pitch them directly on an acquisition.

“We were excited when the Simply Eloped team proposed the idea of an acquisition to join our family of brands, as we have long admired the business,” Tim Chi, The Knot Worldwide’s chief executive officer said in a press release.

It took less than three months from the initial conversation with The Knot to finalizing the acquisition, White said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

White and her team of 11 employees, including contractors, stayed on with the company. White’s title became director and general manager of Simply Eloped.

“They acquired the entire team, so figuring out how to integrate with a much larger company while still running business as usual took a bit of a learning curve,” White told us.

In another Hampton blog post detailing White’s journey to what she called the “exit of her dreams”, she shared her biggest tip for entrepreneurs considering an acquisition.

“Target who you want to buy your business early on and get a foot in the door,” White said. “Build relationships with the people in charge of or connected to those who would be in the decision-making role to acquire your business.”