Back in 2000, Golshid Mola was a graphic design student at Tehran's Azad University.

She belonged to a small but close-knit community of artists and designers. "We made hand-made jewelry, clothing, even home decor," she recalls. "It was a lot of fun."

But their reach was limited to their friends and family. The Internet crawled along at a snail's pace, making it difficult to showcase their work to the outside world.

A few years later, Mola was in New York City, working at an ad agency after graduating from New York University. Yet she kept thinking about the friends she left behind in Tehran. Every time she visited, she was surprised at the vibrancy of the city's art and design communities, even despite the limitations artists face in Iran.

"Everyone was talking about the Iranian underground music scene, but there was also this very active underground art and design scene as well," she says.

She came up with the idea of a website that would showcase the works of those independent, underground artists and designers based in Iran. Alangoo was born.