
Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis of AptDeco (YC W14) – Startup School Video and AMA - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/10/aptdeco-startup-school/
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johnathanNYC
I too saw your talk at startup school, wish I had the opportunity to speak to
you both personally; but I'm glad you all are here answering questions. I
found some of the examples given on how to solve the chicken and egg issue
very interesting and helpful to the dilemma I'm currently facing with my
company. Do you mind sharing additional failed and successful strategies to
gain and balance customers within the AptDeco marketplace?

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reham
I'm glad you found it helpful. We've tried so many things, I don't know where
to start. From flyering, to direct mail, to Craigslist and other sites.

Balancing the chicken and egg is definitely a big challenge. My advice to you
is if you can find one side of the market easier to attract then initially
focus on that. If you're just starting you'll need to figure out how to get
supply (or hack supply). Then spend time on getting demand. Then, repeat.

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veritas20
Thanks for sharing the lessons that you learned and evolution of AptDeco.
Great presentation with sound advice. Typically, a VC will go all in one
category with one company. That company in this space seemed to be MoveLoot at
the time. What did VCs miss in their analysis of AptDeco vs. MoveLoot? And,
what do you think the key differences were between AptDeco and MoveLoot?

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reham
Reham and Kalam here. Let us know if you have any questions about AptDeco.

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ahmadss
re: not being married to one idea, are you a moving company now or a furniture
marketplace that moves furniture?

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reham
We're both. We think of ourselves as equal parts marketplace and logistics
company.

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jameslk
Great video! I just watched the presentation and it was really insightful.
It's always interesting to hear how others solve the chicken and egg problem.
It'd be nice to see a resource similar to Founders at Work just for chicken
and egg problems and solutions. If anyone knows of something like that that
already exists, please let me know!

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reham
That would definitely be very handy! Haven't seen anything similar.

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Reno_Web_Design
Hi Guys,

Are you planing to offer sophisticated seller,buyer,transaction feedback
system to attract repeat sellers and buyers?

P.S Similar to [http://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/scores-
reputation.html](http://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/scores-reputation.html)

Thank you!

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reham
We do have a rating system but it's not widely used. Definitely have a lot of
opportunity for improvement :)

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Getpake
Hi AptDeco team,

When growth started coming in quickly, how were you able to distinguish
between good and bad opportunities? Such that ones that would result in big
revenue growth, but didn't fit your core values?

Thanks so much!

~~~
reham
I wish I could tell you there was a magic formula. The reality is we tried a
lot of things, most didn't work and a few worked really well. So we doubled
down on the things that worked. Before writing any lines of code or spent
money on acquisition we tried to build a "hack" version of an idea to validate
it. If we saw that customers were responding to it then we'd start thinking
about scaling it.

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arodceo
What advice do you give to startups who are early and are looking to get to
profitability as quick as possible (~12 months)? What should they be doing and
focusing on?

~~~
reham
Look at your expenses very closely especially customer acquisition costs and
LTV. Are you acquiring customers who will come back and use again? Will they
tell their friends about you? How long before you pay back the money you spent
on the customer? If your payback period is quick then you're on the right
track.

I think one of the more important things is finding channels that organically
help you to scale without having to spend a whole lot of money on acquisition.
Hyper focusing on getting referral/organic growth is a great way to get to
profitability.

Finally, really think hard about hiring. We grow our team very slowly and it
helped us keep our burn relatively low.

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ahmedj2017
Did you have any experince in the field before you got to work on your startup
or did you just learn in the go?

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reham
kalam and I both have experience building and managing large teams. Also, we
both managed pretty significant partnerships. However, we didn't have starup
experience perse nor experience in the furniture industry but it so happened
that both enjoyed decorating our apartments.

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tostitos1979
I really enjoyed their talk ... but wish I could ask the question ... how does
a van explode like that??

~~~
reham
Glad you enjoyed our talk. We still don't know how the van exploded. After
months of investigation by our insurance company and van manufacturer, the
root cause is still unknown.

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berez
saw your talk at Startup School - you guys killed it. One question kept coming
to mind... sounds like you're focused on profitability but not hypergrowth
(smart). Do your investors ever try to push you to value growth more than
profitability?

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reham
First and foremost we had to focus on what made sense for our business.
Initially we were trying to grow super fast without looking at our bottom
line. After a lot of introspection we decided what made sense for our business
is to grow (still fast) but focus on getting to profitability - for us this
meant we shouldn't be "buying" customers who will use us once and never come
back. Healthy, sustainable growth made sense for us.

Ultimately you'll need to partner with investors who align with your vision
and that's what we did.

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mkagenius
Profitability although good can be deceiving, companies get killed if they
don't grow as fast(10x) as the competitors. Should one be careful about being
"just" profitable?

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reham
It's definitely a balance. Now you don't want to grow slow enough where you're
not seeing any growth month over month or year over year. The perception these
days is that profitability = slow growth. That's not the case at all. We've
continued to grow fast but made it a priority to control expenses in order to
be default alive.

There are many ways to become a large company. You only hear about the hyper
fast growth with zero concern for the bottomline.

As far as competitors are concerned, you can't control what your competitors
do but what you can control is building a business that will stand the test of
time. Competitors come and go, so if you pay too much attention to them you'll
end up losing focus.

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mkagenius
The problem comes when the hyper growth competitor becomes so huge that even
your current customers start flocking to those. I do not know the solution to
this, perhaps this is rare.

But the hyper growth company also have a risk of dying because of no funds.

So, either situation is tough.

