![]() "When I spent time with Jessica and Marcela, I was immediately taken by a few things. The entire Disrupt speech was written on Post-it notes and I practiced it over and over and over again until I could do it until it didn't matter how many people were in the room." "But you have to remember, we had a year's worth of data running the business, so the one thing we had going for us was we had a ton of conviction. We did a lot of our prep work the weekend before," Sapone says. The only thing we were trying to optimize for was not to look silly. "Getting into Disrupt was kind of a surprise. In September 2014, Sapone and Beck left Harvard and Boston and flew out to San Francisco to take part in TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield competition. "People were paying $400 for Alfred's service in Boston when we first started." "The entire world reaches out to you when you win"Īlfred launched in Boston in May 2013. "This happened from the point where people were paying $25 a week all the way up to $90 a week for the service that we have today," Sapone says. But any time the founders went to their customers and told them they were considering pumping the brakes on the company to focus on school, their customers would freak out and offer to pay more and more money to keep Alfred's services afloat. Sapone and Beck were still in business school while they built their company, and it wasn't easy. "We created a bunch of postcards with different prices and different bundles of services, and we put them under the doors in all these different neighborhoods in Boston, and we got our first 10 customers that way." "We really thought about it as a smaller business," Sapone, who is CEO of Alfred, said. ![]() Alfred has raised $12.5 million from investors including Spark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, SherpaCapital, and CrunchFund.īut when Beck and Sapone were still in Boston, they weren't sure Alfred was a company that even needed venture capital funding. You pay $99 a month for the service, plus the cost of things like your groceries. Today, Alfred is a startup that hires employees - Alfred Client Managers, or just "Alfreds" - to run weekly errands: things like buying your groceries, sorting your mail, dropping off packages, and taking care of your laundry for you. "It was a little bit of an accident: We built the product for ourselves, and over time people in our apartment building said 'Hey, can I get in on that?'" Sapone says. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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