Why I'm here
How a last minute photography gig turned me away from real estate and towards building a startup.
Abstract
For a long time I assumed that unless you were a close friend or family member, you probably did not care what was going on in my life. That started to shift after a last-minute photography shoot gave me a real shot of confidence, then a class project turned into a startup that went from an overbuilt, unfocused idea to a simpler and more useful product called Fora. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized people were not just making conversation, they were genuinely curious about how I was thinking, building, finding users, and trying to turn both photography and software into something real.
So that is why I am here. I am going to share the raw version of what I am working on, what is going well, what is not, and how I am thinking through it as the founder of Fora and as an aspiring photographer. If any of that sounds like something you would want to add to your life, follow along, and if you have been here before, I would love to hear from you too.
Why am I here? I generally have the disposition that unless youâre a close friend or family member, you probably donât care what I have to say or whatâs going on in my life. I donât think itâs personal, I donât have an angst against the world and I donât think the world has one against me. I think that for the most part, everyone has enough going on in their lives that they just canât, or wonât, add something else to the mix.
That position started to change ever so slightly last summer (May of â25). For years, photography has been a little side hobby. Itâs not something I ever took too seriously, and not something I thought I was âspecialâ at. I just enjoyed taking pictures and that was the end of it. Of course, family members said how much they liked my photos, but isnât that what theyâre supposed to say? Then in May, my girlfriend was in a pinch after her photographer cancelled last-minute and asked me to fill in for a shoot of a branded fitness class. I agreed but was immediately nervous and had reservations. I had never shot professionally, never really shot people before, and had definitely never been paid to take a photo of anything in my life. I studied up as best I could, and went into the shoot with the camera on full auto and three backup batteries ready to go. Once I settled in, the nerves went away and I started to have fun. I walked out of the shoot with about 1,500 photos (overkill for an hour-long workout class but what was I supposed to do I was nervous) and a new confidence that I might be able to make photography into something more than an occasional hobby.
A photo from that first workout class hereâŠ
Fast forward a few months - I was in an entrepreneurship class at NYU (while getting a masters degree in real estate finance) and was working on my final presentation for my semester long project. The assignment was to come up with a business centered around real estate, test the hypothesis, iterate, and present the business at the end of the semester. My project was to build self-storage facilities for contractors and builders (I still think this is a good idea). With about a week to go, I had a realization that all of my photography business had come through word-of-mouth referrals, and I decided to try and build a software platform to improve on this process. I scrapped my entire project, sent an email to the professor telling him I was going to present on something new, that it had nothing to do with real estate, and hoped for the best.
After the presentation my professor held me after class and told me how he thought it was a great idea, that he would intro me to a friend of his who built a few businesses and could be a good mentor, and that I should try to get into accelerators. Wow, was I on cloud 9. The entire walk home was one big blur, filled with visions of how Iâd run a software startup, how I was going to design our sleek techy offices, and eventually what it would look like to retire at the ripe age of 35 (Iâm 32). Looking back, that boost of confidence was wildly overstated, but helped me push forward and gave me the false confidence to see if I could turn Fora, then known as Giggl, into something real.
At first I was dead set on building some kind of referral / business generation social network for creatives. I spent an entire month trying to vibe code the site myself. What a bad idea - I am not technical, and didnât have the slightest idea what I was doing. I burned through free credits, then paid credits, and ended up with an ugly and extremely buggy âV1.â A friend then introduced me to someone he met at a wedding that was technical, who wanted to quit their job and build something - how perfect.
We spent the next few months going all in on Giggl. My goal was simple: build a better version of LinkedIn x UpWork x Instagram x Reddit xâŠâŠ it didnât end well. We were unfocused and building something too big without direction.
We decided to get together and have a good old fashioned white board session. After about an hour and several rounds of redesign, he asked me, âwhat is the problem we are trying to solve?â I couldnât answer it without sounding like the guy from Itâs Always SunnyâŠ
We decided to take a few weeks and rethink what we were doing. I pored over my interview notes from our discovery interviews and ultimately decided to pivot and focus on building a better way to manage vendors. Start simple. Thatâs when Fora was born.
Since then, Fora has taken a new shape. I hired a new engineer, I started listening to what users wanted instead of what I thought would be cool to build, and we have onboarded several users from agencies to individual event producers and started generating revenue.
I noticed that since I started doing all this, people would ask me how it was going, what am I working on, how am I thinking about my next steps, how am I strategizing about XYZ, how am I getting users, how am I building the platform, how did I find the engineer, how is photography going, how am I finding work, how I edit photos, what kind of gear do I use, etc. At first I thought people were just being nice and making conversation, but then started to realize that they were genuinely curious, and that, going back to my original point, I might have something to share, even if I am struggling to answer those questions myself.
This is where Iâll share what Iâm doing and what Iâm working on, both as the founder of Fora, and as an aspiring photographer. I will be writing in longer formats like this in a series called Raw Files, and will also post smaller snippets that I think are worth sharing throughout the week. Follow along if it sounds like something youâd want to add to your life, and please share with me if youâve been here before, or are going through something similar.
Kevin