Advice Line with Niraj Shah of Wayfair

Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show. Who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. Alright, let's get to it. Joining me today is Neerj Shah, CEO and co-founder of Wayfair. Near, welcome back to the show. Guy, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

You were first on the show back in uh 2018, a long time ago. Um, and his amazing story told us about how you and your college roommate Steve. co founded like uh all these businesses together out of college when you guys are in your twenties, and then you came up with the idea Of launching hundreds of separate websites. You had uh dinnerplates.com. You had racks and stands dot com, you had just shag rugs dot com. You even told us about a website w that you had where you sold birdhouses, only bird houses, and then grandfather clocks. Amazing. Just all these different

Businesses selling just those things. Exactly. That's kind of what led to creating Wayfarers. We sort of ended up working our way through all of home goods one category at a time. We ended up with, as you said, over two hundred websites. And then we thought the big opportunity would be to be known as a destination for all those categories rather than having them in separate sites. Yeah. Then that's when um You know, ten years into the business in twenty eleven, we launched Wayfair dot com.

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