The Founding Story & First Steps For Starting AptDeco

But could you maybe just share more about, you know, that founding story and what the first steps were that you took to actually start Appdeco at the time?

Sure. So I, I was trying to sell my furniture on Craigslist to move back to New York actually for a job that was waiting for me at another startup. And I don't know if everyone here has used Craigslist or like, you know, now also Facebook Marketplace is pretty big. But, you know, I was I was everything from like everything, because I was moving from Philly to New York. I was just trying to get rid of everything and kind of start new. And so I listed everything on Craigslist, and, you know, people were showing up, and some people were not showing up, and it was just like very awkward with everybody, strangers in my apartment. And so for me, I actually had this moment where I felt very unsafe also in my, in my own space. I had this gentleman come to my apartment and He was kind of getting angry and I just didn't understand why. And I'm just like, wow, this is crazy. Like, why are we doing this? You know, there has to be a better way to do this. Like, and safety first, especially as a single female at the time. And, you know, I was also, you know, like, I started obsessing over it, but also I was in business school and a lot of my classmates were also asking similar questions like, what are you going to do with your furniture? So everybody, most people from Philly end up moving out of Philly after business school. And so everybody was talking about it during like the time of graduation. So I had this like very personal experience and then I saw everybody was kind of complaining about it and that was like the first aha moment. But what ended up happening was my now co-founder, then friend, and also my co-founder is also my husband now as well. He was in New York trying to sell his SoFi also on Craigslist for no safety reasons. Like, it wasn't a safety issue for him, but he was trying to sell it and people were just not showing up or like they were lowballing him. And for him, that was like very frustrating. So I was moving from New York and I had a U-Haul with whatever left that I couldn't sell. And so he asked me that day, he's like, can I just borrow your U-Haul for one day? And he relisted his stuff, like his sofa on Craigslist with one day only, you know, free delivery. And I kid you not, immediately someone showed up, paid full price, did not negotiate, and he helped them just like lug it to wherever they were going. And that was like the aha moment. So for us from the beginning, we're like, if you build a trusted community, if you have pickup and delivery, if you bring payments online and, you know, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. And so Airbnb and Uber and all these companies had already taken off at the time. So like, you know, we felt like furniture is the next frontier.