Insight
Fagiri: Online furniture marketplaces must offer delivery and full-service convenience
“You have to offer delivery, you have to take care of everything, you have to make it simple”
Insight
Fagiri: Early-Stage Startups Need Structured Weekly Meetings Despite Small Team Size
“Early on, sure, you're a tiny team, maybe you're like three or four people, and people sort of dismiss the idea of, oh, we don't really need structure, we can just talk to each other all the time, but having regular checkpoints, like weekly meetings, and you k…”
Insight
Fagiri: Surprising an employee with their termination is a management failure
“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.”
Insight
Fagiri: Optimize pricing and margins only after proving repeat customer demand
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fagiri: In-house delivery grew AptDeco word-of-mouth from 10% to 70%
“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.”
Insight
Fagiri: Profitability gives founders complete control over their destiny
“Once you get to profitability, you're really in control of everything, and this is why we're very excited about the next chapter for App Deco.”
Disclosure
AptDeco founders share their raw 360 performance reviews with the entire team
“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.”
Assertion Supported
AptDeco successfully raised its marketplace transaction fees from 10–15% to 19–29%
“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%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fagiri: AptDeco bet 10% of its cash on a single subway campaign
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Fagiri: An AptDeco competitor raised 20x more funding before folding
“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 …”
Assertion Supported
Fagiri: Post-2008 Crash, Wharton MBAs Shifted from Banking to Tech
“There was definitely a shift where more, I went to Wharton, and there were more, my class, there were more people talking about tech. Versus going into banking and finance. So like, the market had crashed a few years before, and, you know, a lot of people are …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fagiri: AptDeco customer photography services failed because sellers didn't want them
“Offering photograph, photographing for customers. Nobody wants to do that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fagiri: At one point, every AptDeco employee knew SQL
“At some point, everybody in our team knew how to do SQL”
