Key to Success? Be Scrappy & Resourceful with Reham Fagiri, Co-Founder of AptDeco

Aug 30, 2021

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Reham Fagiri is the Founder and CEO of AptDeco, an online marketplace that eliminates the hassle of buying and selling furniture.

Reham always knew she wanted to build something but never knew exactly what it would be. The idea for AptDeco came to Reham after she finished business school at Wharton and was preparing to move to New York. Desperate to sell her furniture, she used Craigslist, and was met with strangers coming to her house, heavy negotiations, cancellations, and even moments that compromised her safety. When speaking to her colleagues, she realized so many of her classmates were dealing with the same frustrations.

Although she accepted a job with another start-up, Reham became obsessed with the idea of creating a better platform to buy and sell furniture. Fast forward to today, AptDeco has morphed from a scrappy team poaching furniture sales from Craigslist to now being a leading marketplace that provides a seamless experience from buying to selling to delivery of furniture.

We talk to Reham about how she got the idea off the ground with very little money, some of the hurdles she hit when it came to scaling the business, how to really engage with your customers and create a trusted brand that people truly want, and so much more.

In this episode, we’ll talk to Reham about:

* Reham shares about her life growing up in Sudan and the exposure she had to entrepreneurship [2:46]

* Why Reham decided to leave her reputable job at Goldman Sachs to pursue business school [4:22]

* The importance of having exposure to different opportunities and people when thinking about career changes [7:47]

* How the idea of AptDeco came to life and how she decided to test the concept before spending more time and resources towards it [8:42]

* Reham discusses why she felt comfortable taking the risk to build the business despite the massive amount of school debt she has [22:30]

* The motivations around starting Y Combinator and the biggest lesson she learned: meet your customers [27:14]

* Reham shares her best advice when it comes to connecting with your customer & some of the mistakes she made in the process [30:20]

* How Reham created awareness in the early days & brought in her first few hundred customers [39:22]

* The power of word of mouth and referrals in your business vs. paying for your customers [41:47]

* Reham discusses the difficulty she faced raising money in the early stages of the business & why that was one of the best things that she experienced [43:04]

* How she dealt with the rejections when it came to fundraising & how she deals with the highs and lows of entrepreneurship [48:19]