AptDeco

“So we cut our marketing to zero dollars. We weren't spending a dollar on marketing.”

“When you're starting a business, first of all, let's just scrap the advertising on Facebook and advertising on Twitter or wherever, and you really need to find out those scrappy free ways in order to see if your product is something that customers are respondi…”

“So we had this one competitor that had raised 20 times the amount of money than us. They had, you know, they were growing so fast, and they were all over the news. They were, oh my gosh, everything. Everywhere we went, it was a what about them... And hundreds …”

“So, before we had our own delivery trucks, word of math probably accounted for around 10% of our business. After we changed to the model that we knew already worked months ahead of, months before, it accounted to around 60 to 70% of our business.”

“It allowed for us to be able to grow a business in a healthy way, continue to grow, and also become truly profitable, more money in than more money going out and this is the reason why we're profitable today, and it puts us in a position to have much more nego…”

“But we could not raise. And we were, we had around three to four months of money left in order to, before we were gonna default die, basically.”

“Probably 45, 50% of our customers are through word of mouth, friends and family type stuff.”

“At some point, everybody in our team knew how to do SQL”

“I mean, when we launched it in, I mean, our I mean, our traffic tripled.”

“So the way that our model works is so we don't warehouse anything. So we only, we pick it up and deliver it in the same day. So we're doing hundreds of pickups and deliveries across three states.”

“When we started as we said, listen, we have a lot of business experience. We work at great companies. We've worked at great companies. We can just apply that knowledge and start this company. And it's the furthest thing from the truth. I mean, we, you know, ju…”

“I don't care how many amazing models you have, how much experience you have, there's, when you do it for the first time, there's gonna be some things that you're gonna uncover that you weren't expecting. And you gotta be able to, you know, modify and change fo…”

“There's 6000 subway cars in New York City and we were in one in six. With one ad in those subway ads.”

“Offering photograph, photographing for customers. Nobody wants to do that.”

“You have to offer delivery, you have to take care of everything, you have to make it simple”

“And toward, toward now it's our one of our, it's our most profitable best channel. And, you know, it's something that it took us quite frankly, three, four years to kind of really figure out how to do it, you know?”

“If it's a shock, that means as a manager you're doing something wrong. If they're surprised, that means you're doing something wrong.”

“And then we review it, and then even Colm and I, ours are public, so the whole team gets to see, because we have to hold ourselves accountable as well, so we find, you know, transparency is very important, so we share with them the raw feedback.”

“Yeah, so around 65, 70% are the top seven brands here in the US.”

“Early on, You can't, like, you have, you can't be optimizing just yet for margins, but, you know, it doesn't mean that you offer your product for free, because you still don't know what goes into it, like, what are the different variables, but once you've esta…”

“You can't, in our opinion, build a business model A sustainable business model by having, by warehousing everything, because you're going to always going to be capped by the space. The cost to cover it, someone is going to have to pay for it, and ultimately to…”

“It was definitely less than 500 K. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big chunk. Yeah, exactly. It was a huge risk. It was like 50 K for just one, you know, one month advertising.”

“Our fees were just so low, we were charging, I think it was like, 10 to 15% transaction fee, versus now it's like 19 to 29%.”