Today we’d like to introduce you to Farhaj Mayan.
Farhaj, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I was 14, I stumbled across a robotics lab for the first time in high school. Back then I didn’t have the resources to get a starter kit so my parents helped me pull together some money and we bought my cousin’s. That’s probably where it all started. After that, I competed for 3 years straight in National and International Robot Olympiads representing the UAE. The first two years I just didn’t match up to the competition. But my senior year of high school, last year of competing, I knew I had to something crazy so that I could stand a chance. And we did just that by making the first LEGO Mindstorms controlled quadcopter.
When I saw people’s reaction when my robot first took flight, the risktaker in me was born. And for the first time in UAE’s history, a team proceeded to place first at World Robot Olympiad in Indonesia that year. That moment inspired me to convince my parents to let me pursue studying robotics in college. After moving to UT Arlington, I did an internship with the UTA Research Institute on unmanned aerial and ground vehicle communication my freshman year. Then took a step back and started to get involved on campus through various organizations that helped me hone my leadership and communication skills.
During my sophomore year I saw an interesting post on Facebook, apparently Red bull was going to choose 150 something teams from universities across the world to compete in a challenge similar to the amazing race. So I rounded up two good friends and we turned in a video last minute. But to our pleasant surprise, the video went viral and the next thing we knew we were chosen to represent the United States in the 2016 Red Bull Can You Make It? Challenge. Our team ended up traveling around 1200 miles across Europe with no cash, cards or phones trading only Red bull as currency for about 7 days and it was honestly, just an incredible experience. It helped me understand that people are truly kind, they want to see others succeed and that makes people happy.
And this was also where a couple of fellow contestants told me about how entrepreneurship helped them create a career for themselves working on what they were truly passionate about. So when I got back I decided to immerse myself in the startup scene and surround myself with likeminded individuals. I got involved with an incredible Virtual Reality company called 360foundry, and a custom drone solution startup called Neu robotics. After my time at these startups, one day, I coincidentally walked into my friend’s apartment (now business partner) getting a haircut in his bedroom. And he paid his barber with a 6 pack!
That’s when we both realized, that there is no reliable platform for men to turn to for grooming advice – whether it’s finding the right barber, hairstyle or products.
So I decided to learn the nitty gritty details of what it takes to start a company. We got introduced to a program at UTA called EpicMavs where we learned everything from how to do CAP tables, make a great business model and create a pitch deck. It was like the domino effect from there forward. To be able to fund my startup, we decided to apply and compete in as much as startup competitions as possible. We competed in numerous competitions and would make it right to the end or final round and lose them. We applied to numerous accelerators and got denied.
Road tripped from Dallas all the way to Palo Alto to try to raise money and that didn’t work out either. But during this time I was able to build a team, pivot and perfect my idea and it’s execution, but most importantly got to really build a network and get involved with the incredible startup community here in DFW. One year and numerous applications later, and after two heavy rounds of judging our team was selected as one of the 84 startups out of over 520 applicants to get accepted into the Masschallenge accelerators inaugural Texas cohort.
So far, we’ve also built incredible relationships with barbershops across the DFW metroplex and have begun onboarding them for our beta version. It’s honestly crazy to think we’ve come so far from where we started just about a year ago, but I guess that’s where we’re at now. Motivated, ambitious and eager to take on our next challenge!
Has it been a smooth road?
It’s been a pretty rocky road. Lot’s of highs and a lot of lows. I feel, as an entrepreneur starting out, one of the hardest things to do is to get your own friends and family to believe you and your vision. There is such an apparent risk to starting a company and investing the time out of your own life to make it happen that it looks like you threaten the possibility of pursuing the normal life, a 9-5, good salary, the apartment in uptown and a car on the credit card. But I’ve always been a person to take the risks too often and it doesn’t always work out, honestly, sometimes it has played out badly. But as long as I live my life pursuing and doing what I’m truly passionate about the other things just don’t seem to affect me.
In terms of the struggles with respect to FADE, funding has been a challenge. Convincing talented individuals to come on board and work part-time with no pay was also no easy task. But ironically enough even though I’ve learned everything about starting a company from UTA, we’ve never been able to win a pitch competition there. Pretty sure there’s a joke there somewhere. But from my perspective, the problems that we’ve faced so far were all good problems to have. In fact, I believe they were breeding grounds for opportunities in disguise.
Even if things didn’t work out as expected, I was exposed to a crash course in real-life learning lessons that usually take people years to learn from. If the journey is too easy, you just won’t appreciate your success as much.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the FADE story. Tell us more about the business.
Our company is called FADE and we’re making the world’s first men’s lifestyle app!
Primarily, we’re building a platform through which men around the world can schedule, book and pay for appointments with local barbers in their area, and around this service, we’re also building fashion extensions that help men achieve the style that they truly desire.
The bottom line is that men today are looking to learn more about haircuts and how to groom themselves well. A report from Google Trends indicated that men searched for hairstyle tips and recommendations 8 times more than women last year. Although there is such an apparent need, currently other than by word of mouth and google searches, men don’t really have a reliable way to find the right barbers or styles for themselves. Your local barbershop is also at a significant disadvantage when it comes to growing their clientele base since they’re not equipped with the right tools to be in the same league as their competitors.
The franchises with the big marketing dollars, like Supercuts and great clips, who have cleverly cornered the market by boosting themselves on search engines with good SEO. And that’s what we aim to change with our platform, by leveraging technology to put the local shops on the map. With FADE we also want to create an experience catered to each user. When a user creates a profile, he answers a series of 8 questions that help us create an anonymous artificial consumer profile, so we can recommend barbers, hairstyles and grooming products catered specifically to his needs.
And for the barbers and barbershops, we provide an entire client management suite to help them manage their financials, appointments while keeping track of client activity and trends. Unlike our competitors, we wanted to create a platform that provides real value to both shops and barbers. Barbers can onboard all their existing clients to the platform during their first 2-3 weeks. After that FADE will only charge 50% of the first transaction a new client makes with the barber as a recommendation fee, then provide lifetime value for that customer at no cost.
Where do you see your industry going over the next 5-10 years? Any big shifts, changes, trends, etc?
The Men’s haircare and grooming market are worth 21.9 billion dollars in the United States alone today and the Men’s fashion industry is approaching the 400-billion-dollar mark globally. Streetwear and luxury menswear has also seen a significant rise in adoption and complementing hairstyles are becoming a necessity. With the accelerated growth of this market, brands have to come up with the best marketing tactics to stay on top. With the explosive growth that the industry is seeing, it is surprising that it hasn’t experienced significant reform using technology.
For those reasons mentioned above, I think that over the next 5-10 years tailored advertising is going to have a significant impact on the way content is marketed. Apps created for a niche community that have a loyal user-base will be able to build out very smart and powerful AI marketing extensions into their platforms. They will advertise products and content to the ideal target consumer with pin-point precision.
For example, a sports platform who learns from its users’ interactions in-app could recommend oars to someone who favorites kayaking spots in Austin or advertise the latest Lebron’s to a user who organizes pick-up basketball games. Because the user is on the platform for that specific purpose, the ad is much more relevant and has a greater impact. It doesn’t feel invasive, as it is focused on adding value to BOTH the company AND the user, without retrieving their users’ private information.
This is why the titans of the industry today, especially in the fashion industry (GQ and Esquire), will have to fight to stay relevant. As the interest from men continues to grow, they will begin seeking out niche platforms for grooming and style education. By doing so, they won’t have to sift through advice from writers trying to appeal to a massive audience of their perceived readers. Instead, they begin to connect with content that is catered specifically to their taste, and the experience will be much more enriching for each individual as a result of this.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fadenow.com
- Email: farhaj@fadenow.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fadenow/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fadenow/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/fadenow_
- Other: http://texas.masschallenge.org/startup/fadenow
Image Credit:
Gary Lewis Jr., Michael Nguyen, Bryson G
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