Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis at Startup School SV 2016

TL;DR

Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis, founders of Apartment Deco (YC W14), describe how they built a profitable furniture marketplace in NYC/DC by using a scrappy Craigslist hack (listing items without permission and paying cash), pivoting from a pure platform model to owning delivery trucks after customer feedback, and achieving default alive by cutting marketing to zero, raising prices, and focusing on

Key insights

• The founders’ first breakthrough came from a hack: listing Craigslist sellers’ items on Apartment Deco without their permission, then paying cash to those sellers when the item sold.
• This hack forced them to meet sellers in person with cash, which gave them deep, unsolicited customer insights (e.g., why sellers were moving, economic status).
• The initial plan was to be a pure platform (like Uber/Airbnb) that never touches furniture; they fought for months against owning delivery despite clear evidence that customers loved the in-house deli