Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Ajouz.
Sam, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I was born and raised in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. At the age of 18, after being evacuated by U.S. Marines from the Middle East during a war that broke out in 2006, I really felt motivated to not take my life for granted and to live life with a purpose.
I spent the next four years at the University of Michigan and graduated from Ann Arbor with my B.A. in Economics. While attending college, I worked for Verizon where I educated and sold all the latest devices and technologies that would change the world we lived in. Starting in the time of Razrs and moving on to Blackberries and of eventually iPhones. I found great pleasure in being an advocate for the smartphone revolution.
After graduating from college, I felt limited staying in the city of Detroit. I wanted to do more and think bigger. I also couldn’t could take living in the cold anymore. So I moved to the biggest city in the country that had the best weather. Los Angeles.
While growing with the company in Los Angeles, I was able to accomplish some major career milestones. In 2015, I launched my first major campaign that drove over $30 million in incremental revenue within a 5 month time-span. I also met some amazing people while in Los Angeles. My colleague, good friend and business partner, Afshin Nahid, and I became very close and had a similar entrepreneurial spirit. We left the corporate arena and set out on a mission to create something special and unique to the world we lived in.
We recognized a major growth in the “gig economy”, especially around social media driven services such as models, personal trainers, stylists and more. Social media was becoming a platform to advertise yourself and your business as much as anything else. However, we continuously saw gaps in the how these lifestyle services were monetizing their business. Relying on email, and direct messages to communicate with customers and using 3 to 4 other apps to conduct their business.
For example, one user would communicate first through Instagram, then through email, move on to schedule their appointment in their iCal, then use a maps to navigate to the user and finally use PayPal or Venmo to take payment. And they’d do all this without capturing any reviews to promote their business to future customers.
There had to be a better way to reduce the amount of apps and make booking lifestyle services easier and more professional. That is where the birth of Let’s RandeVu happened. A mobile marketplace iOS app allows users to search, book, communicate and pay for lifestyle services all in one easy-to-use mobile app. We are also the first mobile app to allow for booking video-chat only services such as online personal training or Q&A with your favorite influencer.
It has been an amazing journey so far and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed helping other entrepreneurs expand their businesses.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It is never a smooth road. You’re constantly hit with setbacks. It’s important to always stay calm and solve one problem at a time.
Personally, there has always been uncertainty with what I wanted to do. I always knew I wanted to do something great and be great. But how? and what to actually do was always tough for me to figure out mentally. At the end of the day I just had to stand back and realize what I was really good at and what did I really have a passion for. When you find that intersection, you start there and eventually everything else starts falling in place.
Professionally, finding the right people to work with was just as important as actual raising the money to build the app. Finding those that will come through for you when you need them to and really put the time into the project was a challenge. As in most startups, most of the work isn’t paid for at the beginning. You have to figure out one problem at a time and balance it with everything else you have going on in life.
Please tell us about Let’s RandeVu.
The vision at Let’s RandeVu is simple. When booking services in the lifestyle industries, such as modeling, photography and other social media driven businesses, clients are looking to directly book the provider they want for the service they are looking for. Clients should be able to effortlessly book the complete service within one simple app privately and securely.
We live in an era where service providers use mobile tools such as social media to promote their brand and business like never before. A service provider’s name and social media profile is their brand and reputation. It conveys a story of the experience they can offer. A potential client typically builds confidence in booking a provider after reviewing a provider’s online presence, specifically social media. Once a client is ready to book the service they want, they typically turn to email, calls, direct messages and texts to contact the provider. And that’s where the experience falls apart.
Naturally, the typical email or response time for a busy provider can take up to several hours days. Couple that with insecure payment methods and the inability to know the provider’s authenticity, clients become hesitant to book the service.
Let’s RandeVu, or LR for short, aims to be the revolutionary new way to book services from independent providers you see online. LR’s advanced mobile platform allows for customers to communicate, schedule, pay and even video chat with their desired providers directly through the application in an efficient and secure fashion. Since most service providers have identical client book flows, LR is the one stop solution for a variety of services.
LR service providers are all qualified specialists that utilize the latest technologies from our mobile application to manage their business and brand. Since there’s no company calculating overhead costs, LR providers are able to individually charge their lowest price to their clients depending on the experience and skill set. A complete solution for a new generation of service providers!
Let’s RandeVu is not an employer but a network of independent quality providers that are looking to build their own business and brand. Let’s RandeVu believes in the entrepreneurship spirit and supports these providers by providing a one stop simple tool to solve their business needs.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
If I had to start over, I would have probably started Let’s RandeVu in a mobile web platform first versus a mobile app. It has becoming increasingly expensive over time to make changes on a mobile app and Apple is not an easy company to work with when it comes to meeting their guidelines. I think mobile web has come such a long way that we could have started there and later transformed into a mobile app.
Pricing:
- App Is Free To Download & Use
- Providers that Offer a Service Are Only Charged 10% of Their Set Service Price
Contact Info:
- Website: www.letsrandevu.com
- Email: support@letsrandevu.com
- Instagram: LetsRandevu
- Facebook: Let’s RandeVu
- Twitter: letsrandevu
Image Credit:
Benji – @benjixbenji
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