Sara Margulis launched Honeyfund nearly 20 years ago. That was before crowdfunding was a word, before the iPhone, and long before every startup was expected to have an AI angle.
Since then, she’s navigated massive shifts in consumer behavior, built a remote team, survived a pandemic-era collapse in weddings, and come out the other side with a business 5x bigger in annual revenue than it was just a few years ago.
What’s kept Honeyfund going, according to Margulis, is a mix of grit, creativity and the ability to reformat. As she puts it, that means finding new ways to serve couples beyond the honeymoon and embedding AI into the customer experience without losing the human touch. It also means crafting a mission statement.
“Honeyfund didn’t even have a mission statement until about three years ago. Once we discovered that couples who take a honeymoon are more likely to stay happily married, we thought, wow, our job was to get every couple to their honeymoon.” —Sara Margulis
That clarity didn’t come overnight. Nor did the $10 million, the expanded product lines or the AI roadmap.
As a founder of a company that has outlasted Twitter and is still building today, Margulis shares a perspective that’s both seasoned and refreshingly candid.
In this episode, we cover:
🔶 How Honeyfund grew from a DIY wedding workaround into a $10M business
🔶 The surprising staying power of a 19-year-old idea in the age of AI
🔶 Why Margulis sees AI not as a competitive advantage, but a competitive necessity and how a large language model could become your next honeymoon planner
🔶 What elevator operators can teach us about how people adopt new tech
🔶 Her advice for other female founders, and how the investor landscape has changed for them
🔶 Lessons on managing a remote team, leading through crisis and embedding company values in small moments
Shark Tank fans might remember Honeyfund from 2014, but this isn’t a throwback episode. It’s a conversation about relevance, reinvention and what it means to stay the course while continuing to evolve.
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