Agorum came about as an idea in March of 2023.
Graduation season was quickly approaching and I was looking for a graduation photographer. Despite the hypothetical abundance of student photographers in a university environment like Penn, I found it exceedingly hard to connect with them, let alone ones whose availabilities matches and whose style matched my preferences.
After a quick round of questions among my peers, I discovered that this wasn't only a challenge that I was facing, but it was one being faced by other graduands. So I decided to build a quick MVP over spring break.
The first user interview and the first photographer on the platform was Jerry, a neuroscience junior conducting Neuralink research. After a serendipitous GroupMe message, I reached out and the next day I told him about my vision in my dorm. We quickly bonded about our shared interests in AI, data analytics, and the future of work being in the hands of creative fields.
The first MVP was really just a database and was nowhere near fleshed out as a consumer product. But it somehow spread and I'd end up getting a Business Insider article written about me.
It was this chance opportunity that made me renege my full-time offers and put everything at risk (as an immigrant) to work on this fully.
Since then it' be a hard journey. At one point I lived in SF on just $10 a week, building a new version of our product entirely from scratch. I learnt a lot about product design and development during that time. I'd gotten the startup into VIP-X, and with just the right amount of opportunities and hustle, I raised our pre-seed within that 3 month period based on significant traction in the graduation market across the east coast.
Come May of 2024, the pre-seed would give Jerry the conviction to join us full time in building our vision.
But none of this is easy. Based on pure market models and valuations of established segments, weddings and engagements seemed like a clear target. That's precisely what we did, but it was really hard. The market was saturated, the barrier of entry too significant, and the sales cycles too long. It wasn't the answer, but for 3 whole months we slogged through it to prove that it wasn't a viable immediate market.
However, our professional photographers were making upwards of $80M per year, clearly representing the upside potential in the long run.
By September motivation had died, and the team was collapsing. For the longest time we had friends coming to us ask for birthday photographers and for DJs, but we largely sidelined them because the ticket sizes did not seem compelling. But what we'd missed this entire time was that this would be less of an up hill battle, and that it represented nascent unaddressed demand.
So, I made the executive decision to move from Austin to New York and to re-orient ourselves with this new market. Within the span of 1.5 months we rebuilt everything from the ground up. We knew what we needed from the product, what the customers wanted, and we had a pre-existing pool of talent across the country that we could leverage.
By November, we had over 5K creatives on the platform, and we were growing at a 20% rate, with more recurrent transactions and higher LTVs than before.
