Band Baaja Baraat
A marketplace for wedding vendors.
The Context
2021 was an interesting year for the Pakistani startup space. Pakistan raised close to $350 million in VC funding. Airlift and Bazaar were at the forefront, leading the entrepreneurial wave of the country. Investors were pooling money into the fifth most populous country, having one of the world's largest youth markets.
It felt good. It sounded cool. As a Junior year student, I could see myself working on a moonshot project. I started reading Paul Graham's essays in my free time, watching Y-Combinator's summer school playlist while eating breakfast, and scanning through books on entrepreneurship during study breaks.
All set with the theoretical knowledge, in the summer of 2021, it was time to do something big. And that is where Band Baaja Baraat started.
The Problem
The wedding industry in Pakistan is a thriving market worth RS 900 billion per annum. However, despite the growth of the industry, there has been no effort to digitize the wedding process and bring all of the vendors together in a single, easily accessible marketplace.
User Research
Vendors: Any businesses or individuals who contribute to the planning and execution of a wedding event. These may include videographers, florists, or wedding planners.
Customers: Individuals seeking goods or services related to planning and executing a wedding event.
We reached out to businesses and individuals to understand the user pain points and internalize the end-to-end process of planning a wedding. We asked people we knew around us belonging to different educational, social, and financial backgrounds if they are willing to be part of this study and if they believe in this problem space. Similarly, we identified the hotspots of various wedding vendors in the city and talked to the business managers.
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At the start of our interviewing phase with customers, we selected participants male between 25–29 years of age since this is the average age by which a Pakistani gets married. However, we quickly realized we were targeting the wrong demographic. The primary decision-makers in wedding planning are the elders of the family.
We gathered the following insights:
One of the critical factors when choosing a wedding hall is the quality of food served by them. The hall owners invite potential customers to test food quality before finalizing the booking.
Customers do not invest many resources in wedding cards. Their primary expense is on the wedding venue.
Word-of-mouth plays a crucial role when selecting potential vendors. Customers always prefer traveling to the vendor offices and viewing physical samples of the goods.
Brand Development
We named our startup after a famous Bollywood movie, Band Baaja Baraat (BBB). The movie is about the challenges two youngsters face when they start a wedding enterprise in India. Since the name has three words all starting from a 'B,' we chose to base our logo on the same premise. Similarly, we chose red color to display strong emotion of love and passion.
We created social media handles of BBB and started posting regularly. We decided to share our startup experience in the form of blog posts for the budding entrepreneurs to get inspired from our work. In addition, we launched a fortnightly newsletter to keep our subscribers updated with the recent developments.
MVP Development
With vendors on board, we decided to launch our MVP to finally start serving our first customers. Abdullah and I settled on creating a static website and releasing a form for the customers to avail our services. Since we did not have any knowledge on how websites are made, I took up an online course on web development. Within a week, after quick iterations on the design, we launched the MVP.
Version 0
Initial launch — a simple static page with a contact form and brief pitch.
Version 1
First iteration — added vendor categories and improved information structure.
Version 3
Final iteration — refined design with clearer CTAs and expanded vendor listings.
Outcome
Yes! But for a while…
We had started serving actual customers. We provided them with a tailored list of vendors according to their requirements, provided deals and discounts, accompanied them to wedding planners and wedding card outlets.
Despite the initial success, we had to shut down.
Documentation from a customer service session — matching vendors to wedding requirements.
A wedding card sample sourced through a vendor partnership — part of our curated vendor network.
Our semester had taken off and we were finding it hard to manage the startup and our studies.
We were not getting enough customers as we had anticipated. We did not have enough time to market the product outside of our circle.
We did not have enough expertise at the time to develop a complete mobile/ web application.
Reflection
Band Baaja Baraat taught me more about product thinking and user research than any course could. The most valuable lesson was being wrong about our users — we assumed we were building for young, tech-savvy couples when the real decision-makers were family elders who valued personal relationships and physical trust signals over digital convenience.
The experience of teaching myself web development in a week, building a brand from scratch, going into the field to interview florists and wedding hall owners, and actually serving customers — all of this gave me a visceral understanding of the gap between a problem statement and a viable product. The startup didn't survive, but the instinct to understand users before building anything became foundational to everything I've done since.
