Reham Fagiri’s eureka the moment was result gone not as it is necessary agreements.
It was the spring of 2012, and the recent graduate of Warton tried to sell her television on Craigslist. The possible buyer — the gray-haired gentleman of advanced age — has arrived to her Philadelphian apartment to look. When he has understood that Fagiri has incidentally listed the wrong television model, he annoyed.
"He has been really upset about it: ‘You have forced me to go completely here, a nonsense, a nonsense, a nonsense’", she remembers. Fadzhiri has asked for $200 TV. He has offered $50. When she has changed the mind concerning the agreement, the person declared that he just was going to take television. He has begun to carry away him.
“I’m like ‘Well, I’d rather save my life than have to argue about $150,’” she tells me. “So I was like ‘I don’t even want your money. Just take the TV.’”
This is the basic flaw of Craigslist. The site facilitates peer-to-peer interactions, but does little to ensure that those transactions go off seamlessly. After her harrowing encounter, Fagiri began trading Craigslist stories with friends and classmates, many of whom were similarly frustrated with the site. “That was kind of the second step, like, ‘OK, well, clearly it’s beyond me, and it’s my classmates too,’” she remembers.
Months later, that Craigslist experience still on her mind, Fagiri started outlining a business idea: an online used-furniture marketplace dedicated to the proposition that sometimes consumers want a middleman around to shield them from irrational strangers. She called the site AptDeco, and, like Craigslist, it would allow users to list and view ads for used furniture. Unlike Craigslist, it would also process payments, coordinate pickup and delivery, and serve as a buffer between buyer and seller.
“I’m an engineer, so I started playing around with the idea in my free time,” says Fagiri. “And then I built a small site.” On launch day she sold a West Elm headboard. That’s when Fagiri knew she was on to something. “‘Oh, OK!’” she recalls thinking. “‘I guess this is a real business!’”
More than three years after it ushered that headboard to new ownership, AptDeco is thriving and pedigreed — it was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 class. According to Fagiri, the site is also profitable. (“Obviously there’s fluctuations. Some months are better. But overall we’re at the break-even profitability mark.”) For its services, AptDeco takes a 23 percent cut of the sale price and charges a flat delivery fee of either $35, $95, or $145, depending on the size of the item purchased; the site also lets you hire people to remove unwanted furniture or assemble new purchases.
AptDeco’s functional business model earns it a place of honor amongst the many startups that are vying to disrupt the “moving used crap around” space. There is Chairish, founded in 2013, which focuses on designer furniture and has raised almost $9 million in venture funding, according to Crunchbase; Viyet, founded in 2012, which specializes in high-end consignment; Trove, also known as Trove Market, a mobile-focused used-furniture service that, according to Crunchbase, has raised almost $1 million in seed funding; others include Krrb, MarketSquare, and 1stDibs.
All of these startups are jostling to dethrone the unlikeliest market leader in the history of online retail: Craigslist. The site commands vast loyalty despite doing very little to actively court its users. At times, it seems to dominate through sheer inertia. And yet Craigslist abides, and thrives, as its would-be competitors struggle to establish themselves. Which raises the question: Why is it so hard to compete with a site that is only begrudgingly a business?
In the beginning, there were garage sales. There were also junk shops, and thrift stores, and antique malls, and index cards tacked to cork boards in supermarkets and condo basements. There were auctions, occasionally. At least once a month there was “Big Trash Day.” At last resort, there was the dump.
Then came the internet, and with it, so many new ways to buy and sell used furniture. It was a serendipity engine that made it infinitely easier for people all over the world to exchange old lamps. One of the most useful tools was a list maintained by a guy named Craig. Craig’s list wasn’t a list so much as a collection of listings—a free online classifieds service that made its inky predecessors seem obsolete. Craig Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995 as an email list of interesting events in and around San Francisco. The list soon mutated into a stand-alone website.
Today, Craigslist is the id of the old, weird, non-commercial internet. On it you can seek a sublet, find a job, solicit rough sex or platonic companionship, hitch a ride, and buy or sell everything from antiques to trailers. The site is whatever its users need it to be at any given moment in time: a housing agency, an employment office, a matchmaking service, a lost-and-found board, a town square. Or, if you’re Craig Newmark, Craigslist is an ideology.
“craigslist is about helping people put food on the table, getting that table, and maybe getting a roof to put that table under,” Newmark recently told me over e-mail. (Newmark styles his eponymous website’s name with a lowercase “c”.) “It’s also about a business model that’s pretty much ‘doing well by doing good.’” Newmark incorporated the site in 1999, and stepped down as CEO in 2000. Since then, he has fielded customer-service inquiries for Craigslist, while the site has been run by CEO Jim Buckmaster with what one might call a limited-profit mentality.
It is easy to explain how Craigslist works: People with something to offer post a free, text-based ad; potential buyers respond over email; the two parties take the transaction from there. It’s much harder to explain why it works. The website has looked basically the same since 2000; designers there have pushed small, unobtrusive tweaks over the years, while retaining the classic layout, fonts, and color scheme. The site does next to nothing to convert visitors into users, or to wring profit from those users.
Though Craigslist doesn’t disclose its financials, its profit margin is generally believed to be robust. The site makes money by charging people to post certain types of listings — job postings; dealer ads; therapeutic services. Low operating costs and a massive user base — according to Alexa.com, Craigslist is the 15th most popular website in the United States — can lead to consistent profits, no matter how old your website looks.
The site retains those users by leaving them alone. The “doing good” part of Newmark’s aphorism basically means a consistent emphasis on neither inconveniencing nor exploiting Craigslist’s users. “That’s the spirit of the original internet,” says Newmark. “[To] build something simple and useful to people for making their own connections and then get out of the way.”
For more than 20 years, Craigslist has been getting out of its users’ way, and they’ve responded by sticking with the site. Take me, for example. Since 2002 I have used Craigslist to find four apartments and five roommates. I bought my first piece of grown-up furniture on Craigslist. I cast two short films on Craigslist. I staffed a magazine on Craigslist. I have also met several jerks on Craigslist, to be clear — I lost $1,350 after falling for the same Internet scam twice in one week on Craigslist — but I blame the jerks for being jerks, and myself for being gullible. I don’t blame Craigslist for enabling their jerkiness. Craigslist’s users might flake on each other, or disappoint each other, but Craigslist itself will never do those things. Craigslist itself is unimpeachable.
In other words, that pervasive laissez-faire attitude that Reham Fagiri considers a design flaw might actually be the site’s biggest strength.
AptDeco does not have the luxury of benevolent inaction. Nor can it flaunt its early web credentials. Its lodestar is the simple idea that selling used goods online shouldn’t involve borrowing a car to drive out to Queens to haggle with a scary stranger about a couch he bought 20 years ago from Raymour & Flanigan.
AptDeco is neither a charity project nor a trust experiment. It is a business, and its founders are businesspeople through and through. Fagiri spent six years at Goldman Sachs prior to enrolling in graduate school at Wharton. Co-founder Kalam Dennis spent over a decade in various management positions at L’Oreal. In 2016, speaking to a crowd of aspiring entrepreneurs at a Y Combinator-sponsored conference called Startup School, Dennis drew spontaneous applause from the crowd with advice gleaned from his own experiences with AptDeco: “Build a real business.”
Dennis and Fagiri have lived by this mantra since AptDeco was founded. They initially relocated to San Francisco for the Y Combinator mentorship program, only to move back to New York a week later at the behest of the YC partners. “What are you guys doing [in San Francisco]?” Fagiri and Dennis were asked. “Your customers are in New York. You should be in New York.”
Because they had already sublet their own New York apartments, they crashed with friends while building the company and commuted via red-eye to San Francisco for the incubator’s weekly Tuesday dinners.
In the early days of the site, Fagiri and Dennis found their customers by clicking on Craigslist ads, contacting the people who posted them, and urging them to list their items on AptDeco. Fagiri and Dennis themselves delivered many of the items sold on AptDeco, using these deliveries as opportunities to solicit feedback. “YC is just like ‘Well, you need to get in front of your customers,’” Fagiri recalls. Their deliveries became reconnaissance missions. “You’re seeing how they live, you can then have maybe a brief conversation while you’re wrapping a chair,” says Fagiri.
What AptDeco’s customers were looking for, more often than not, was reliable delivery. Especially in New York, where so few residents own cars, it’s a hassle to purchase something big on Craigslist when you have no idea how you’ll get it home. “Once you add delivery, people become a lot more serious,” Fagiri said. The company now maintains its own fleet of delivery vans and movers. Gone are the days when the site’s founders would knock on your door after hefting your sleeper sofa up four flights of stairs. (True story, and the slight Fagiri almost winces to recall it. “That’s when we learned: Work with your limitations,” she says.)
I recently visited AptDeco’s New York office and talked with Fagiri in a small conference room clad in tropical wallpaper, at a CB2 farm table that Fagiri purchased using her own website. The office suite itself is small, and located in an unglamorous section of midtown Manhattan. But at least it has a view; The windows of their first office looked out onto a brick wall, and channeled fumes from a nearby McDonald’s.
The pedestrian setting seems appropriate given Fagiri’s business philosophy. “I think a lot of people, when they want to start businesses, they kind of think too big. They’re looking to build this huge thing,” Fagiri says. “They’re thinking Airbnb.” Meanwhile, Fagiri lives by lessons she learned at Goldman: Push things in phases, try to make it as small as possible, and get it off the ground.
The strategy has served AptDeco well. AptDeco wasn’t the only used-furniture commerce startup to win Y Combinator funding in 2014. In its cohort was another, similar company, called Move Loot. Move Loot not only offered pickup and delivery, but also stored the furniture for you, took high-quality photos of your items, and promised free returns in the event of your dissatisfaction.
Move Loot raised almost $22 million in venture capital funding before it abruptly closed in mid-2016, an apparent victim of its own appetite for expansion and the demands of its investors. The site is memorialized by a slew of critical Yelp reviews alleging poor customer service, inconsistent delivery, and a flawed user interface.
“In all, after spending at least 2 hours getting everything posted and swimming around their convoluted site, I did not post a single item with them and used my good ol buddy CL,” one user wrote. “Everything sold and taken within 2 days.”
AptDeco has tried to avoid Move Loot’s mistakes by expanding slowly. Right now AptDeco is only open in New York City and Washington, D.C. — and the site is only nominally present in D.C. Ultimately they want branches across the US, but Fagiri is willing to take her time.
She emphasizes the merits of growing in phases and understanding what it takes to succeed in new markets before fully committing to them. “Ultimately, I want to be here forever,” she says, “versus being in 30 cities without actually being in 30 cities.”
My wife and I recently rented an apartment in Washington, D.C., and the circumstances of our move meant that we brought no furniture, except for a mattress and a single hard-backed chair. The Spartan lifestyle has its merits, but after a couple of months we started to get sick of eating standing up. So we decided to buy some furniture.
Our budget is limited, so were looking for items that were nicer than Ikea’s pressboard units, yet not so expensive that we would feel bad leaving them on the curb the next time we move. There aren’t many cheap bookcases on AptDeco; the site’s wares are generally nicer—and hence more expensive—than what you’d find on Craigslist. This higher baseline of quality helps set AptDeco apart. So, too, does AptDeco’s user interface. On the site you can filter your searches by various criteria: price, color, brand, design style, even the material that makes up the goods.
The site just doesn’t offer very many goods located in or around D.C. The nearest workable item I could find was located in New York: a solid-wood IKEA sideboard cabinet with an antique pine finish. The item cost $100—right on the border of my budget. With the standard $95 delivery fee and a $30 tip for the movers, the piece cost $225. Ninety-five dollars for delivery is a stone-cold bargain when you realize that AptDeco is delivering the thing from New York to Washington, D.C. with no additional surcharge. It’s a great deal.
I still don’t have the sideboard. After purchasing the piece, I was asked to select at least three dates for delivery, from a series of Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesdays just don’t work for us, and we’re traveling in February, so most Saturdays are out. The earliest date that worked was three weeks after I bought the thing. I am not really complaining here. AptDeco is delivering this sideboard from New York to Washington with zero surcharge, which is really incredible. Maybe this sideboard will change my life; I don’t know. But it hasn’t yet.
And yet: A Craigslist search for “bookcase” and “Columbia Heights” (our neighborhood) immediately turned up an ad for a small wooden unit with a glass door. The bookcase seemed a bargain at $30, and the seller was located a few blocks from our apartment, meaning we could carry the item home. I emailed the lister and set up a time to go see the case.
As a usual rule on Craigslist, I tried to gauge my interlocutor’s sanity. Lori, the woman selling the bookcase, did not seem crazy. Her response was prompt and grammatical. Nevertheless, you can never really tell, so I decided to bring some people with me. At noon the next day, my wife, my sister-in-law, and I — strength in numbers — went to her apartment to pick up the item.
The building’s exterior stairs were covered in sand, and the façade was a bit unkempt. If it had not been broad daylight, I might have been a bit nervous. Lori came down and led us upstairs, where the bookcase was waiting. It looked fine. I made a cursory inspection and handed her thirty dollars in cash. “Where did you get it?” I asked her. “Craigslist,” she said. Fifteen sweaty minutes later, the bookcase was safely in our apartment.
Craigslist remains good enough, and that’s a big problem for its competitors. Buying and selling used furniture isn’t something that you do every day, or even every month. It’s a sporadic activity, which means that most people will have limited opportunities to become familiar with AptDeco and its fellow startups. “I think that most people use Craigslist because they don’t think they have another choice,” says Fagiri. “So, ultimately, you know, we provide a better service than Craigslist.” Though that might be true, it also might not be enough.
I’ve got this theory that everyone only has about a dozen major websites filed away in their brains. Once a site has made its way onto this list, it takes a lot to dislodge it: It has to start sucking, or change drastically, in order to lose its spot.
Craigslist has been on millions of people’s lists for years, never changing, never getting worse. The site is an institution, and, as such, amiable coexistence with it might be the best-case outcome for AptDeco. “Craigslist is not only focused on furniture, while we’re only a furniture company,” Fagiri notes. “We’re just one of many, many verticals that Craigslist covers from a classifieds perspective. So I wouldn’t say that Craigslist would think of us as a competitor. Because that means that most companies are competitors of Craigslist, right?”
It was the spring of 2012, and the recent graduate of Warton tried to sell her television on Craigslist. The possible buyer — the gray-haired gentleman of advanced age — has arrived to her Philadelphian apartment to look. When he has understood that Fagiri has incidentally listed the wrong television model, he annoyed.
"He has been really upset about it: ‘You have forced me to go completely here, a nonsense, a nonsense, a nonsense’", she remembers. Fadzhiri has asked for $200 TV. He has offered $50. When she has changed the mind concerning the agreement, the person declared that he just was going to take television. He has begun to carry away him.
“I’m like ‘Well, I’d rather save my life than have to argue about $150,’” she tells me. “So I was like ‘I don’t even want your money. Just take the TV.’”
This is the basic flaw of Craigslist. The site facilitates peer-to-peer interactions, but does little to ensure that those transactions go off seamlessly. After her harrowing encounter, Fagiri began trading Craigslist stories with friends and classmates, many of whom were similarly frustrated with the site. “That was kind of the second step, like, ‘OK, well, clearly it’s beyond me, and it’s my classmates too,’” she remembers.
Months later, that Craigslist experience still on her mind, Fagiri started outlining a business idea: an online used-furniture marketplace dedicated to the proposition that sometimes consumers want a middleman around to shield them from irrational strangers. She called the site AptDeco, and, like Craigslist, it would allow users to list and view ads for used furniture. Unlike Craigslist, it would also process payments, coordinate pickup and delivery, and serve as a buffer between buyer and seller.
“I’m an engineer, so I started playing around with the idea in my free time,” says Fagiri. “And then I built a small site.” On launch day she sold a West Elm headboard. That’s when Fagiri knew she was on to something. “‘Oh, OK!’” she recalls thinking. “‘I guess this is a real business!’”
More than three years after it ushered that headboard to new ownership, AptDeco is thriving and pedigreed — it was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 class. According to Fagiri, the site is also profitable. (“Obviously there’s fluctuations. Some months are better. But overall we’re at the break-even profitability mark.”) For its services, AptDeco takes a 23 percent cut of the sale price and charges a flat delivery fee of either $35, $95, or $145, depending on the size of the item purchased; the site also lets you hire people to remove unwanted furniture or assemble new purchases.
AptDeco’s functional business model earns it a place of honor amongst the many startups that are vying to disrupt the “moving used crap around” space. There is Chairish, founded in 2013, which focuses on designer furniture and has raised almost $9 million in venture funding, according to Crunchbase; Viyet, founded in 2012, which specializes in high-end consignment; Trove, also known as Trove Market, a mobile-focused used-furniture service that, according to Crunchbase, has raised almost $1 million in seed funding; others include Krrb, MarketSquare, and 1stDibs.
All of these startups are jostling to dethrone the unlikeliest market leader in the history of online retail: Craigslist. The site commands vast loyalty despite doing very little to actively court its users. At times, it seems to dominate through sheer inertia. And yet Craigslist abides, and thrives, as its would-be competitors struggle to establish themselves. Which raises the question: Why is it so hard to compete with a site that is only begrudgingly a business?
In the beginning, there were garage sales. There were also junk shops, and thrift stores, and antique malls, and index cards tacked to cork boards in supermarkets and condo basements. There were auctions, occasionally. At least once a month there was “Big Trash Day.” At last resort, there was the dump.
Then came the internet, and with it, so many new ways to buy and sell used furniture. It was a serendipity engine that made it infinitely easier for people all over the world to exchange old lamps. One of the most useful tools was a list maintained by a guy named Craig. Craig’s list wasn’t a list so much as a collection of listings—a free online classifieds service that made its inky predecessors seem obsolete. Craig Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995 as an email list of interesting events in and around San Francisco. The list soon mutated into a stand-alone website.
Today, Craigslist is the id of the old, weird, non-commercial internet. On it you can seek a sublet, find a job, solicit rough sex or platonic companionship, hitch a ride, and buy or sell everything from antiques to trailers. The site is whatever its users need it to be at any given moment in time: a housing agency, an employment office, a matchmaking service, a lost-and-found board, a town square. Or, if you’re Craig Newmark, Craigslist is an ideology.
“craigslist is about helping people put food on the table, getting that table, and maybe getting a roof to put that table under,” Newmark recently told me over e-mail. (Newmark styles his eponymous website’s name with a lowercase “c”.) “It’s also about a business model that’s pretty much ‘doing well by doing good.’” Newmark incorporated the site in 1999, and stepped down as CEO in 2000. Since then, he has fielded customer-service inquiries for Craigslist, while the site has been run by CEO Jim Buckmaster with what one might call a limited-profit mentality.
It is easy to explain how Craigslist works: People with something to offer post a free, text-based ad; potential buyers respond over email; the two parties take the transaction from there. It’s much harder to explain why it works. The website has looked basically the same since 2000; designers there have pushed small, unobtrusive tweaks over the years, while retaining the classic layout, fonts, and color scheme. The site does next to nothing to convert visitors into users, or to wring profit from those users.
Though Craigslist doesn’t disclose its financials, its profit margin is generally believed to be robust. The site makes money by charging people to post certain types of listings — job postings; dealer ads; therapeutic services. Low operating costs and a massive user base — according to Alexa.com, Craigslist is the 15th most popular website in the United States — can lead to consistent profits, no matter how old your website looks.
The site retains those users by leaving them alone. The “doing good” part of Newmark’s aphorism basically means a consistent emphasis on neither inconveniencing nor exploiting Craigslist’s users. “That’s the spirit of the original internet,” says Newmark. “[To] build something simple and useful to people for making their own connections and then get out of the way.”
For more than 20 years, Craigslist has been getting out of its users’ way, and they’ve responded by sticking with the site. Take me, for example. Since 2002 I have used Craigslist to find four apartments and five roommates. I bought my first piece of grown-up furniture on Craigslist. I cast two short films on Craigslist. I staffed a magazine on Craigslist. I have also met several jerks on Craigslist, to be clear — I lost $1,350 after falling for the same Internet scam twice in one week on Craigslist — but I blame the jerks for being jerks, and myself for being gullible. I don’t blame Craigslist for enabling their jerkiness. Craigslist’s users might flake on each other, or disappoint each other, but Craigslist itself will never do those things. Craigslist itself is unimpeachable.
In other words, that pervasive laissez-faire attitude that Reham Fagiri considers a design flaw might actually be the site’s biggest strength.
AptDeco does not have the luxury of benevolent inaction. Nor can it flaunt its early web credentials. Its lodestar is the simple idea that selling used goods online shouldn’t involve borrowing a car to drive out to Queens to haggle with a scary stranger about a couch he bought 20 years ago from Raymour & Flanigan.
AptDeco is neither a charity project nor a trust experiment. It is a business, and its founders are businesspeople through and through. Fagiri spent six years at Goldman Sachs prior to enrolling in graduate school at Wharton. Co-founder Kalam Dennis spent over a decade in various management positions at L’Oreal. In 2016, speaking to a crowd of aspiring entrepreneurs at a Y Combinator-sponsored conference called Startup School, Dennis drew spontaneous applause from the crowd with advice gleaned from his own experiences with AptDeco: “Build a real business.”
Dennis and Fagiri have lived by this mantra since AptDeco was founded. They initially relocated to San Francisco for the Y Combinator mentorship program, only to move back to New York a week later at the behest of the YC partners. “What are you guys doing [in San Francisco]?” Fagiri and Dennis were asked. “Your customers are in New York. You should be in New York.”
Because they had already sublet their own New York apartments, they crashed with friends while building the company and commuted via red-eye to San Francisco for the incubator’s weekly Tuesday dinners.
In the early days of the site, Fagiri and Dennis found their customers by clicking on Craigslist ads, contacting the people who posted them, and urging them to list their items on AptDeco. Fagiri and Dennis themselves delivered many of the items sold on AptDeco, using these deliveries as opportunities to solicit feedback. “YC is just like ‘Well, you need to get in front of your customers,’” Fagiri recalls. Their deliveries became reconnaissance missions. “You’re seeing how they live, you can then have maybe a brief conversation while you’re wrapping a chair,” says Fagiri.
What AptDeco’s customers were looking for, more often than not, was reliable delivery. Especially in New York, where so few residents own cars, it’s a hassle to purchase something big on Craigslist when you have no idea how you’ll get it home. “Once you add delivery, people become a lot more serious,” Fagiri said. The company now maintains its own fleet of delivery vans and movers. Gone are the days when the site’s founders would knock on your door after hefting your sleeper sofa up four flights of stairs. (True story, and the slight Fagiri almost winces to recall it. “That’s when we learned: Work with your limitations,” she says.)
I recently visited AptDeco’s New York office and talked with Fagiri in a small conference room clad in tropical wallpaper, at a CB2 farm table that Fagiri purchased using her own website. The office suite itself is small, and located in an unglamorous section of midtown Manhattan. But at least it has a view; The windows of their first office looked out onto a brick wall, and channeled fumes from a nearby McDonald’s.
The pedestrian setting seems appropriate given Fagiri’s business philosophy. “I think a lot of people, when they want to start businesses, they kind of think too big. They’re looking to build this huge thing,” Fagiri says. “They’re thinking Airbnb.” Meanwhile, Fagiri lives by lessons she learned at Goldman: Push things in phases, try to make it as small as possible, and get it off the ground.
The strategy has served AptDeco well. AptDeco wasn’t the only used-furniture commerce startup to win Y Combinator funding in 2014. In its cohort was another, similar company, called Move Loot. Move Loot not only offered pickup and delivery, but also stored the furniture for you, took high-quality photos of your items, and promised free returns in the event of your dissatisfaction.
Move Loot raised almost $22 million in venture capital funding before it abruptly closed in mid-2016, an apparent victim of its own appetite for expansion and the demands of its investors. The site is memorialized by a slew of critical Yelp reviews alleging poor customer service, inconsistent delivery, and a flawed user interface.
“In all, after spending at least 2 hours getting everything posted and swimming around their convoluted site, I did not post a single item with them and used my good ol buddy CL,” one user wrote. “Everything sold and taken within 2 days.”
AptDeco has tried to avoid Move Loot’s mistakes by expanding slowly. Right now AptDeco is only open in New York City and Washington, D.C. — and the site is only nominally present in D.C. Ultimately they want branches across the US, but Fagiri is willing to take her time.
She emphasizes the merits of growing in phases and understanding what it takes to succeed in new markets before fully committing to them. “Ultimately, I want to be here forever,” she says, “versus being in 30 cities without actually being in 30 cities.”
My wife and I recently rented an apartment in Washington, D.C., and the circumstances of our move meant that we brought no furniture, except for a mattress and a single hard-backed chair. The Spartan lifestyle has its merits, but after a couple of months we started to get sick of eating standing up. So we decided to buy some furniture.
Our budget is limited, so were looking for items that were nicer than Ikea’s pressboard units, yet not so expensive that we would feel bad leaving them on the curb the next time we move. There aren’t many cheap bookcases on AptDeco; the site’s wares are generally nicer—and hence more expensive—than what you’d find on Craigslist. This higher baseline of quality helps set AptDeco apart. So, too, does AptDeco’s user interface. On the site you can filter your searches by various criteria: price, color, brand, design style, even the material that makes up the goods.
The site just doesn’t offer very many goods located in or around D.C. The nearest workable item I could find was located in New York: a solid-wood IKEA sideboard cabinet with an antique pine finish. The item cost $100—right on the border of my budget. With the standard $95 delivery fee and a $30 tip for the movers, the piece cost $225. Ninety-five dollars for delivery is a stone-cold bargain when you realize that AptDeco is delivering the thing from New York to Washington, D.C. with no additional surcharge. It’s a great deal.
I still don’t have the sideboard. After purchasing the piece, I was asked to select at least three dates for delivery, from a series of Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesdays just don’t work for us, and we’re traveling in February, so most Saturdays are out. The earliest date that worked was three weeks after I bought the thing. I am not really complaining here. AptDeco is delivering this sideboard from New York to Washington with zero surcharge, which is really incredible. Maybe this sideboard will change my life; I don’t know. But it hasn’t yet.
And yet: A Craigslist search for “bookcase” and “Columbia Heights” (our neighborhood) immediately turned up an ad for a small wooden unit with a glass door. The bookcase seemed a bargain at $30, and the seller was located a few blocks from our apartment, meaning we could carry the item home. I emailed the lister and set up a time to go see the case.
As a usual rule on Craigslist, I tried to gauge my interlocutor’s sanity. Lori, the woman selling the bookcase, did not seem crazy. Her response was prompt and grammatical. Nevertheless, you can never really tell, so I decided to bring some people with me. At noon the next day, my wife, my sister-in-law, and I — strength in numbers — went to her apartment to pick up the item.
The building’s exterior stairs were covered in sand, and the façade was a bit unkempt. If it had not been broad daylight, I might have been a bit nervous. Lori came down and led us upstairs, where the bookcase was waiting. It looked fine. I made a cursory inspection and handed her thirty dollars in cash. “Where did you get it?” I asked her. “Craigslist,” she said. Fifteen sweaty minutes later, the bookcase was safely in our apartment.
Craigslist remains good enough, and that’s a big problem for its competitors. Buying and selling used furniture isn’t something that you do every day, or even every month. It’s a sporadic activity, which means that most people will have limited opportunities to become familiar with AptDeco and its fellow startups. “I think that most people use Craigslist because they don’t think they have another choice,” says Fagiri. “So, ultimately, you know, we provide a better service than Craigslist.” Though that might be true, it also might not be enough.
I’ve got this theory that everyone only has about a dozen major websites filed away in their brains. Once a site has made its way onto this list, it takes a lot to dislodge it: It has to start sucking, or change drastically, in order to lose its spot.
Craigslist has been on millions of people’s lists for years, never changing, never getting worse. The site is an institution, and, as such, amiable coexistence with it might be the best-case outcome for AptDeco. “Craigslist is not only focused on furniture, while we’re only a furniture company,” Fagiri notes. “We’re just one of many, many verticals that Craigslist covers from a classifieds perspective. So I wouldn’t say that Craigslist would think of us as a competitor. Because that means that most companies are competitors of Craigslist, right?”
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