For some brides and grooms, the prospect of writing and publicly reciting their wedding vows can be daunting.
That’s where Katelyn Peterson comes in.
Peterson, 37, is the founder and CEO of Wedding Words, a wedding vow and speech-writing business, and she’s passionate about helping “tongue-tied” couples express themselves.
“I got into this business to help people put their heart into words,” Peterson says.
Since founding Wedding Words eight years ago, Peterson has turned her writing talent into business bringing in six figures a year, and she’s written over 700 speeches for couples, bridal party members and parents.
Peterson worked in sales for years before founding Wedding Words, but she’s always considered herself “a writer at heart.”
The catalyst for her career change came in 2017, when Peterson’s father asked her for help writing her grandfather’s eulogy.
Her father’s original draft sounded “like it could have been written about anyone’s dad or anyone’s grandpa,” Peterson recalls.
Peterson helped her father rewrite the eulogy to include meaningful memories and details about her grandfather.
Her father’s response touched her: “He said, ‘This is exactly what I wanted to say. I just didn’t know how to put it into words,’ and he had tears in his eyes,” Peterson recalls.
That experience inspired Peterson to start Wedding Words just a few months later.
“I thought, there have to be other people that have these milestone moments that they really want to do emotional justice to, but they just don’t know how to put it into words,” she says.
Hitting ‘an emotional chord’
One of the most common misconceptions Peterson hears about her work is that people who hire her “just don’t care enough” to write their speeches themselves.
“I think it’s quite the opposite,” she says. “I think you care so much that you feel like you can’t do it on your own.”
Peterson begins her process with an introductory video call, during which she and the client talk about their goals for the speech, and Peterson teases out significant details and key stories to include.
The process is often emotional, Peterson says, and clients cry “all the time.”
“We’re hitting an emotional chord,” she says. “We’re getting somewhere deep, and that’s a good thing.”
After Peterson drafts the speech, she and the client go over revisions in another video call, before finalizing the speech and practicing it out loud.
“Writing is half of it, but it’s also making sure your delivery is done in a way that hits those emotional and humorous beats,” Peterson says.
By the end of the last call, clients almost always let out a visible sigh of relief, Peterson says.
“They’re like, ‘I feel so much better. I can’t believe I’m actually excited to say this speech in front of 200 people,'” she says. “That’s the moment that I know, OK, I did my job.”
The need for ‘human storytelling’
Starting a speech-writing business from scratch wasn’t easy. In the beginning, Peterson spent hours scouring wedding Facebook groups in search of potential clients.
She took on her first clients for free, instead asking them to share a review or testimonial on her site.
“I found that people weren’t ready to pay me to write something so personal without hearing what the experience is like from other people,” she says.
Soon, Peterson was able to start charging a “nominal fee” of $350 for speechwriting services, and the business grew from there, she says.
Peterson currently charges $999 to write and edit wedding speeches, and $499 for a “Power Hour” editing session.
Wedding Words’ monthly revenue was over $8,000 in August, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, and the company consistently brings in six figures in gross revenue each year.
A point of pride for Peterson is that Wedding Words is entirely self-funded, and the business has been profitable since day one, she says.
Until this year, Peterson was the company’s only employee — “I was super, super precious with not outsourcing my writing for the longest time,” she says — but she realized that scaling the business would require some extra hands.
Peterson hired a full-time writer earlier this year, and she’s in the process of onboarding a second.
“The goal is to be able to serve more clients more quickly and keep it a lower price point as a result,” she says.
As a writer, Peterson’s business has definitely been impacted by AI.
She says Wedding Words’ blog has lost half of its web traffic in the past year, and some of her competitors are churning out content at a rapid rate using AI tools.
Still, Peterson is less concerned about AI impacting Wedding Words’ long term revenue.
“The people that are happy using AI tools to write their wedding speech are not my clients,” she says. “My clients value human storytelling.”
“No matter what changes in the technical world, there is still a need for human touch and the human heart, and I don’t think that that’s ever gonna go away,” she continues.
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