The startup trying to plan your wedding in three minutes

From Shorkot to NUST: two engineers who almost weren’t engineers

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his two guests — Izzah Zaman and Neelam Shreyas, co-founders of Shadiyana — and immediately turning the conversation toward where they came from before the startup existed.

Izzah grew up moving between Shorkot, Murree, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi, attending Fauzia schools before finishing her matriculation and FSC at KRL College in Kahuta. From there, the path felt obvious: “KRL mein har bachche ki dream sirf ek university hoti hai, woh NUST hai” (“In KRL, every child’s dream is just one university — NUST”), she says. She got in, but not into software engineering first. Her parents steered her toward architecture, convinced it was the ideal profession for a girl. She spent a year failing. “F’s thi meri” (“I was getting F’s”), she recalls. The following day she simply stopped going, studied for the NUST software engineering entry test, and got in — then apologised to her father after the fact.

Neelam’s childhood was shaped by a military family that posted her across Pakistan: Quetta, Multan, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur, England, and finally Rawalpindi. She grew up with two sisters she describes as “very girly girls” and compensated with Pokemon cards, chess, and, at one point, forty-seven rabbits — all at the same time. Her parents set one condition: do well in matric and FSC, get into a good university, and after that “we will never ask you for anything else.” She chose pre-engineering not out of a clear plan but because she loved maths and knew she did not want to be a doctor.

Both ended up in NUST’s software engineering programme. Neelam switched from architecture at NUST’s design school — SADA — after a year, mirroring Izzah’s trajectory almost exactly.

What a year at SADA actually taught them

Muzamil presses Izzah on what she took away from the year she spent failing architecture. Her answer is more considered than a simple “it was a waste.”

“Jab bhi main us mindset ke saath engineering mein gayi, teachers kehte the project karna hai — bahut crazy projects, creative,” she explains. The design school had trained her to justify every decision: why is this line drawn at this angle? That habit of interrogating the reasoning behind a choice carried directly into how she later approached engineering projects at NUST, where her team would set up stalls in class, sell paan during presentations, and push for the first presentation slot before anyone else. The architecture year, she argues, gave her a creative confidence that pure engineering training might not have.

Muzamil connects this to a broader point about purpose — that Pakistani education tends to train students to execute without asking why, and that losing that sense of purpose quietly kills productivity.

Fifty-fifty classrooms and why girls tend to top them

An aside in the conversation becomes one of its more substantive moments. Muzamil notes that he rarely hears of women gravitating toward software engineering, and asks how the gender split actually looked inside NUST.

Both founders say their cohort was roughly fifty-fifty. And the gold and silver medals, Izzah notes, went to women. Muzamil offers his own read: girls who make it into Pakistani engineering programmes are there because they chose to be, fighting social pressure that constantly offers them an easier exit. “Unko constantly kaha jaata hai — yaar theek hai agar nahi karna toh easy ho jao, eventually shaadi kar lo.” The ones who stay, he argues, tend to carry a sharper sense of purpose. Neither founder pushes back on this framing.

Corporate, Carnegie Mellon, and the zoom call with 300 ideas

After graduating together in 2017, the two took different routes before converging on Shadiyana.

Izzah joined Teradata as a graduate trainee in managed services, working with telco clients like Jazz and Telenor on big-data analytics. After about a year, Jazz poached the team. She stayed long enough to see a second large organisation from the inside, always knowing she would eventually start something. “Mujhe pata tha ke wapas aakar toh maine startup karna apni company” (“I knew that when I came back, I was going to start my own company”), she says.

Neelam took a month off after graduation, got bored within weeks, and joined Zong as a graduate training officer in mobile financial services. Two years in, she recognised she was not built for corporate pace. She quit, applied for scholarships, and ended up doing a master’s in systems engineering with a specialty in cognitive systems — working as a teaching assistant to cover her expenses, living frugally.

Izzah went to Carnegie Mellon for a master’s in data analytics, public policy, and management, travelling across more than twenty US states before COVID locked things down.

While both were still in their respective programmes, they began a weekly Zoom ritual: listing ideas. The spreadsheet eventually held more than 300 entries — flying robots, self-writing pens, things Izzah describes as “ajeebo ghareeb jo hamare dimaag mein aata tha” (“the strange things that came to our minds”). Each idea was evaluated against market size, viability, and alignment with their skills. Shadiyana emerged from that process. “Weddings ka ek bahut bada market hai Pakistan mein — bahut badi — aur koi aisa platform abhi exist nahi karta” (“Weddings are a huge market in Pakistan and no such platform currently exists”), Izzah recalls thinking. They locked the idea.

Customer discovery before the product existed

Before building anything, the founders conducted more than 100 interviews — split between vendors (photographers, makeup artists, venues) and people who were actively planning weddings. The pain points were consistent on both sides.

Couples described the process of finding vendors as exhausting: messaging photographers on Instagram and waiting days for a reply, visiting venues in person just to collect a menu card, bargaining separately with every supplier. “Aap kisi ko Instagram par message karein — hafte kabhi toh reply karenge hi nahi” (“You message someone on Instagram and sometimes they never reply for a week”), Izzah says. Vendors, meanwhile, were spending time managing social media and chasing leads rather than doing the work they were actually good at.

The university’s entrepreneurship centre offered a customer-discovery grant — reimbursable, for teams at the earliest stage. The founders filled in the form almost as an afterthought, were awarded the grant, and used it to hire freelance designers and developers. The reimbursement deadline became an accidental forcing function. They shipped. Shadiyana went live on October 8, 2021.

Three minutes, 35,000 sessions, and a subscription model

By the time of recording, the platform had attracted around 35,000 users since launch, with an average session duration of approximately three minutes — which Neelam notes is also the stated goal: reduce wedding planning time from three months to three minutes.

The business model is a vendor-side subscription. Couples use the platform for free. Vendors pay a fixed monthly fee — ranging from 500 rupees a month for student makeup artists to 20,000 rupees a month for premium wedding venue listings. In exchange, vendors receive a detailed monthly analytics report: how many users landed on their page, how many clicked their call button, how many visited their Instagram, how far down the page visitors scrolled.

Muzamil pushes on the model directly, asking why they did not go with a commission structure — the Uber or Food Panda approach of taking a percentage of each transaction. Izzah’s answer is two-part. First, commission models create an incentive for vendors and customers to bypass the platform entirely once they have made contact — the same way Careem riders sometimes ask customers to cancel and pay cash. Building the trust required to prevent that takes time. Second, the subscription model is not permanent. “We will be scaling it to other models as well, with time,” she says. For now, it lowers the barrier to onboarding vendors who are still sceptical of digital platforms.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the data argument: once bookings and calendars flow through the platform, Shadiyana would have the kind of industry-wide visibility that makes the business genuinely hard to replicate. Both founders agree that is the direction, but acknowledge they are not there yet.

Breaking down vendor resistance after COVID

One of the more practical questions Muzamil raises is how the founders convinced established vendors — particularly large wedding venues with walk-in traffic and no obvious need for a listing — to pay a subscription fee to a nine-month-old startup.

Izzah credits COVID with doing some of the work for them. “Mere abbu jo hamesha khud jakar apni pasand se seb aur kele lete the, ab Airlift se manga lete hain kyunki convenient hai ghar baithe” (“My father, who always used to go out personally to buy his apples and bananas, now orders through Airlift because it’s convenient at home”). The pandemic shifted enough consumer behaviour that even traditional vendors began to notice younger clients asking for Instagram handles and Facebook pages they had never created. A full website profile, the founders argue, is the natural next step.

The objections still come — vendors who say their reputation is built on word of mouth and walk-ins — but the conversation has become easier. Exclusive deals that vendors offer only through Shadiyana have also helped: customers arrive at venues citing a thirty-percent discount they saw on the platform, which gives the founders a concrete proof point when pitching new vendors.

What comes next: Lahore, three more vendor categories, and a funding decision

Currently operating with active marketing only in Islamabad, Shadiyana has data for Lahore and Karachi and plans to target Lahore for the next wedding season. Three additional vendor categories — caterers, decorators, and mehndi artists — are in the near-term pipeline, alongside the existing photographers, makeup artists, and venues.

Muzamil asks why the platform has not expanded to adjacent events: birthdays, anniversaries, farewell dinners. The founders’ answer is deliberate restraint. “Startups ke failures ki bhi reason dekhein — usme ek sabse badi reason hoti hai ke woh bahut zyada segments ko at once target karne ki koshish karte hain” (“If you look at startup failure reasons, one of the biggest is trying to target too many segments at once”), Izzah says. The goal right now is to own the mental association: whenever someone thinks about wedding planning in Pakistan, they type shadiyana.pk. Everything else follows from that.

On funding, the founders are self-financing and still burning their own cash. They are having quiet conversations with potential investors but have not made a formal decision. “Ideally, of course, hum khud hi apni companies, crazy ideas ke saath jaayein” (“Ideally, of course, we would go forward with our own companies and crazy ideas”), Izzah says — but they acknowledge that growing fast requires capital.

Thirty years from now: just “entrepreneurs,” not “female entrepreneurs”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks both founders how they see Pakistan thirty years from now.

Neelam’s answer is pointed. She notes that investors have already asked the two of them whether they are married and whether they plan to have children soon — and how that would affect operations. “Hum hope aur wish karte hain ke jo thirty year baad ki entrepreneurs hain unse yeh sawaal na hon” (“We hope and wish that the entrepreneurs thirty years from now are not asked these questions”). She also names public transport as the single biggest structural barrier to women’s economic participation: if you cannot get to where the job is, you stay home.

Izzah’s wish is simpler. Today, she says, people say “female entrepreneurs.” “I hope by thirty years it will be just entrepreneurs.”

Muzamil closes by noting that the conversation he wanted to have — about why two engineers with strong international options chose to build in Pakistan rather than take remote jobs — ran out of time. He flags it as a conversation worth returning to.