Anne Marie Carroll built a fast-growing business by offering a DIY alternative to traditional wedding photography.Wedding WeekenderWhen Anne Marie Carroll got laid off from her job in advertising a month after her wedding, she jumped into starting a business. She found her inspiration in the high cost of wedding videography. Many of her friends said they could not afford to hire a videographer, and, in any case, weren’t happy with conventional videos.“I realized this was the number one vendor that people were giving up in their wedding budgets, and that's when I saw the market potential for this,” she says. Carroll, based in Denver, came up with an answer at a company she called Wedding Weekender: The idea was to send them a camcorder and have their friends and family record each other. Then she, in turn, would edit the footage into a wedding video. “The part of those videos that people weren't relating to was that they didn't feel authentic or candid to the celebrations,” she says. “So, I thought, if it was your family and friends behind the camera, you’re actually going to act very differently. And I saw a rise in nostalgia for the camcorder, and digital cameras.” Having worked at an ad agency, she was familiar with creative production. Supporting herself doing freelance work, she was able to free the time to get started. Working from her 950-square-foot condo, she put up a video on TikTok advertising her services, purchased a Sony 4K Handycam camcorder, which retailed for $680 at the time, and put up a website using the website building platform Squarespace, spending another $290. “I joked with my husband that if we could get 20 orders a month, I'd want to do this full time,” she says. “And we actually got 50 orders in our first week.” She soon became so busy she had to quit freelancing. “It’s definitely taught me to start before you are ready,” she says.MORE FOR YOUCarroll didn’t know, when she started the business in May 2025, that she was planting the seeds for a profitable business that would bring in $780,000 in revenue by that December, before she hired single employee. The business has generated about $2.3 million to date, she says. She ships the camcorders as far away as Australia, Canada and the U.K.One thing that allowed the business to pick up traction quickly was that it is, essentially, customer financed. Couples rent the camcorders anywhere from a week before their weddings to a year before. Wedding Weekender ships the package with the camcorder to them a week before their weddings. Their family and friends film the special moments at their wedding, and then the newly married couple ships it back to her company with a prepaid return label. Her company uploads the footage, edits a wedding video and delivers both digitally. Carroll is projecting $3.8 million in revenue for 2026. She has used some of her revenue to purchase other cameras. She has also built a team. After hiring her first customer care employee in August 2025, she has since hired six more employees.Nonetheless, that is still a small team, and she prioritizes efficiency. For instance, she allows customers to book directly online through her Squarespace website, and 95% of customers do so, without ever needing a phone call. Recent research from Squarespace has found that administrative tasks are slowing many entrepreneurs down, leaving them spending two full workdays a week on this work, and 56% say this is holding them back from growing their business. When they use tools to make themselves more efficient, more than half rely on four or more tools, whether digital or AI-based, to support them, and there can be a time-consuming learning curve, according to Nikki Kuritsky, head of commerce. “They're using a multitude of tools,” said Kuritsky, in an interview. “They have to become knowledge experts of all those tools.”With many owners turning to agentic AI to tackle some of their routine business tasks, Squarespace is looking to simplify their operations in response, particularly with regard to the communications with customers, marketing and social media activities that tend to bog down many small business owners. “We are thinking about an agentic approach to how people are using this, and how you can set up agents to do tasks and handle agent-to-agent conversations,” said Kuritsky. “That's really where we're spending our time right now: thinking about what tools that we can build that take a lot of those tasks off of them and also make sure that they're getting paid.”She recommends that owners who want to run their operations more efficiently audit where they are spending their time during the week and ask themselves what tasks they wish that someone would do on their behalf. At one tour company that uses Squarespace, for instance, she noted that there is a lot of customer management, such as having forms filled out, done over various time periods. “Making sure that that is done in an automated fashion is something that I think will be a great time saver for many people,” she said. And, even in an age of AI, sometimes old-fashioned methods of marketing, like word of mouth, can be the most efficient ones—as long as a business is delighting its customers. Many of Carroll’s customers, for instance have found that the camcorders add to the atmosphere at their weddings, and spread the word to their friends and family. “I think people are always very surprised with how much fun people have with the camcorders, and how much you truly capture,” she says.