In 2019, Julia Rodgers was a 32-year-old divorce attorney in Boston preparing to get married when it came time to focus on the least romantic part of wedding planning—drafting her own prenuptial agreement. Along the way, she had an epiphany and started carving time out of her family law practice to work on a side project: developing a low-cost prenup site.
“I was working with so many prenup clients and they were just really unhappy with the process,” says Rodgers, the founder and CEO of Hello Prenup, a four-year-old tech startup in the burgeoning prenup space. “The thought of getting a prenup through a divorce attorney was too expensive. And it was time-consuming.” Her law firm, for instance, required a minimum of three months to draft an agreement and was charging thousands of dollars that most couples would rather spend on building a future together, not tearing apart the past. (Hello Prenup’s own survey pegs the average at $8,000, but that amount can soar for a complicated agreement.) “That's really where Hello Prenup was born,” she says, “I wanted to democratize prenups in a way that would allow all couples access to them and their protections.”
After trying and failing to sell her idea at multiple pitch competitions (she was repeatedly told, “There’s no market for prenups.”) and to a couple different VCs (“I just don’t see it.”), she withdrew her life savings of about $150,000 and hired developers to build the first version of Hello Prenup—a website that allows couples to draft and sign a prenup in around 90 minutes without ever speaking to an attorney. She and her fiancé were the first to test it. “We were number-one beta users,” says Rodgers, who launched the site in 2021.
And there’s always a new customer base. There are around 2 million marriages in the United States every year, according to the CDC, with about 15% opting to sign a prenuptial agreement compared to just 3% in 2010, based on data from The Harris Poll. An internal report reviewed by Forbes shows that Hello Prenup controls about 20% of the overall market. Forbes estimates Hello Prenup’s revenue at $50 million and values the company at $140 million, with Rodgers controlling an estimated 51%.
Hello Prenup charges $599 per couple for its standard service and just under $2,000 if they want to add attorney representation, which includes a prenup review and revisions. The process is familiar to anybody who has ever filed their taxes online. The first step is to select the state where the couple intends to live to ensure compliance with relevant legislation. (Hello Prenup is available in 48 states.) Then, each party fills out a separate questionnaire and completes a financial disclosure form to delineate premarital assets. In addition to developing a game plan for the division of assets in the event of a divorce, there are also some potentially soul-searching questions about more complex life issues, such as what happens to frozen embryos and whether the agreement should remain valid in case of a spouse’s death. At any point, a couple can opt to ask an attorney a question in 20-minute sessions billed at the rate of $49 per partner.
Once each spouse’s selections are made, the Hello Prenup system flags responses that don’t match and the partners enter the negotiation phase, where they select between “agree with partner” or “change my answer” for each point of contention. For many, it can be a life-determining quiz.
Finally, they have the option to sign and notarize the prenup online (for an additional $50 fee), and standard service customers (about 80% of users, according to Hello Prenup) sign a waiver of legal advice and representation.
In 2021, a few months into Hello Prenup’s existence, Rodgers and her cofounder, Sarabeth Jaffe, sought to raise more funding for the startup. That’s when she received an email that she thought was a prank: a personalized invitation to apply to be on ABC’s Shark Tank. “I was totally shocked,” she tells Forbes. She spent the next four months auditioning and didn’t find out about her selection until a month before taping.
Rodgers arrived at the studios in Culver City, California wearing a white bridal skirt and veil, and prepared to walk down the Shark Tank hallway to the sound of the show’s soundtrack with Jaffe (who exited the company in 2024). “There was no music, which threw me off,” she recalls, “It was so quiet.”
Rodgers and Jaffe were looking for a $150,000 investment for a 10% stake in Hello Prenup, valuing the company at $1.5 million. At that time, the company had $20,000 in sales, having done just 25 prenups. But they had made what they called a “conservative projection” of $4.1 million in revenue for the following year.
The sharks thought that forecast was delusional. “I loved it until that [number], that is an absolute dream,” said Robert Herjavec. Billionaire Mark Cuban pushed the knife in deeper: “It is a dream, guys.”
By the time Rodgers had made her case, all of the sharks had passed, including Kevin O’Leary, whose portfolio includes several wedding businesses such as the registry service Honeyfund and the vendor booking app Wedy. “This is a space I’ve been in a long time, but because you actually don’t yet know your customer acquisition cost…I don’t know whether you’re worth a million, five, or whether you’re worth ten million,” Mr. Wonderful told Rodgers and Jaffe, “I’m out.” But interest from guest shark Nirav Tolia, who founded neighborhood social platform Nextdoor, reeled him back in. The two ended up going in on Hello Prenup as partners, investing $150,000 for a 30% stake in the company.
As it turned out, O’Leary needed no education when it came to prenuptial agreements. He tells Forbes that he signed a prenup with his wife prior to tying the knot in 1990: “People say to me, ‘Oh, it's such a bummer to bring out money when you're courting.’ That's not true. I'd argue that money is really romantic,” he says, “Money oozes romance.”
The appearance on Shark Tank changed the fortunes of Hello Prenup. Rodgers estimates that customer acquisition cost drops by 15% every time their episode is actively airing on TV or streaming platforms.
While O’Leary has yet to recoup his investment, he is certain that he will: “She's going to be probably one of my more successful deals,” he says of Rodgers, explaining that Hello Prenup has been growing every month thanks, in part, to a generational shift, particularly a cultural pressure for women to maintain their own financial identity. “A lot of people are doing weddings in a different way now. But prenups are recession-proof,” explains O’Leary. “We have over doubled in revenue every single year,” adds Rodgers.
In 2023, two years after emerging victorious from Shark Tank, Rodgers wanted to raise the company’s profile further so she cold-called famed Los Angeles divorce attorney Laura Wasser, who has worked with A-list clients such as Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, and Angelina Jolie. “It was funny because she said, ‘I know you're going to think that we're kind of…trying to cannibalize,’” Wasser recalls. But Wasser didn’t actually feel that way, having recently joined an analogous business, online divorce website Divorce.com, as their Chief of Divorce Evolution. “My whole jam is, and has been for many years, to make things more accessible for people,” Wasser says. “If you can get education and accessibility about a prenuptial agreement and then decide whether or not that's something you want to do, I love that.”
Rodgers offered her a minority stake in the company—less than 10%—and Wasser became Hello Prenup’s official advisor. “[Julia] reminds me a little bit of myself when I was younger,” says Wasser, “She brings an eloquence and a kind of style to what she does.” Wasser also promotes Rodgers’ services through Divorce.com, which now has a "prenuptial agreements” section which links out to Hello Prenup.
Other divorce attorneys are more skeptical of Hello Prenup’s approach. “The attorneys' fees are so low that these are probably very new attorneys that don't have very much experience in law or in life,” says Laurie Israel, prominent Boston divorce lawyer and the author of three books on prenuptial agreements. She’s even more concerned about Hello Prenup’s attorney-free service: “When you're a young person doing a prenup without attorney advice, then you're going to be…doing it kind of blindly.” David Handler, a Chicago-based trust and estates attorney from Kirkland & Ellis, agrees. “I think it's more susceptible to being tossed out by a court,” he says.
Wasser argues that Hello Prenup took all the steps necessary to ensure the legality of their agreements and that she has no concerns about them being nullified in court. In fact, Hello Prenup is now looking to branch out into other family law services, most likely post-nups.
And if Rodgers needs proof of concept that her website works, she only has to look at her own marriage. In 2023, she ended up divorcing her husband with whom she shares a child. But, thanks to the prenup they worked on together, the process wasn’t so sour: “All we had to do was look at this document that we'd already agreed upon…it made it really, really simple,” she says, explaining that the prenup saved their co-parenting relationship and allowed them to move on with their post-divorce lives “with as minimal stress and disruption as possible.”
Above all, the agreement also ensured that she maintained ownership of the company.