#105 - Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis. They're the founders of AptDeco, where you can buy and sell used furniture. They were in the YC Winter 2014 batch, and you can find them at aptdeso.com. All right, here we go.
All right, guys, well, thanks for inviting me to your amazing office.

**Kalam Dennis** (0:23)
Thank you for coming.

**Craig Cannon** (0:24)
Thank you. So what do you guys make?

**Reham Fagiri** (0:28)
So we are AptDeco. AptDeco is a marketplace for buying and selling furniture based here in New York City. We take care of essentially like the whole process from pickup and delivery to payments and everything in between.

**Kalam Dennis** (0:42)
So basically, we kind of took Craigslist and just said we got a trusted community of users. If you can make the pickup and delivery easy between two people and the payments between two people, you'd have something useful. And so that's essentially been the premise since we launched.

**Craig Cannon** (0:58)
And what made you convince that this could be a fully-fledged product? Because I've seen all kinds of blog posts about the fragmentation of Craigslist, right? And some have succeeded as products and others haven't.
What gave you the impression that this could be a thing?

**Reham Fagiri** (1:13)
Well, I mean, we started out of our own frustration.
Just having a really bad experience trying to sell our furniture on Craigslist. But realizing it's a big opportunity was, we did a lot of market research to sort of test if this is something that people would be interested in, sort of the premise of the solution. So for example, we would go on Craigslist initially and test, hey, with delivery, like we'll actually just copy somebody's listing and just add delivery and see how people react to it. And we saw that like, oh, there's definitely a big opportunity there because people seem to be a lot more responsible. When you just add the delivery word to the listing.

**Craig Cannon** (1:57)
How could you know that if you hadn't created the original listing?
Would you, so you would dupe it twice? You would do one with and one without.

**Reham Fagiri** (2:05)
Exactly.

**Kalam Dennis** (2:08)
The only thing we, when we did our research, we saw it was the fifth most popular category on Craigslist.

**Reham Fagiri** (2:14)
Okay.

**Kalam Dennis** (2:14)
Furniture. Furniture was the fifth most popular category. And then when we created like an MVP, and when we actually had launched the site the first day that we had had the Frankenstein of a site back in 2014, we had a transaction the day that we launched it, and this is with no earthly idea of like really what we were doing. So, you know, I just think all those signs kind of pointed to it.
And then when we applied to YC and ultimately got into YC, I think that's when we were like, you know, shit, this is like, this is real, you know? So, yeah.

**Craig Cannon** (2:51)
Were you pursuing other potential ideas? Because yeah, like the market research thing is much more of the business school approach, and it's a less common approach within YC startups, right?
So were there other ideas that you were considering?

**Kalam Dennis** (3:05)
There wasn't any other ideas. And, you know, I just, Reham and I had wanted to work together for a long period of time. And, you know, quite frankly, it wasn't really that scientific. And we weren't, I don't think we're the traditional founders in the sense that, you know, we were in like serial entrepreneurs. We, you know, come from very traditional business background. But we were like, you know, we took a lot of inspiration from Airbnb and other companies. We're like, this seems very obvious.
And that we kind of just took it and ran with it.

**Reham Fagiri** (3:40)
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think for us, like our experience, like we were so frustrated with what happened to us when we were trying to sell our furniture on Craigslist. And then we started kind of really, frankly, obsessing over, like, this just is really, really bad.
That frankly, I don't think either one of us was ready at the time to start a business, but we stumbled upon this idea.

**Craig Cannon** (4:05)
When you were ending business school, right?

**Reham Fagiri** (4:08)
When I was ending business school and Kalam. It was sort of like happened all at the same time. I was finishing business school, coming back to the city to start a job at a startup, not start my own company.