Digital Nomad Building a $5M+ E-Commerce Business: IntelligentLabs CEO Rus Hughes (Part 1)

Rus lives the life of a digital nomad. He started life as a techie, and with a very small team and a cofounder, has built a $5M+ niche e-commerce business selling supplements. Excellent story full of lessons and nuances. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Tell me about where you

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A Conversation on Regional Language Content: Kocowa CEO KunHee Park (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many consumers do you have currently? KunHee Park: Five million. If I counted paid subscription, we have over one million. Sramana Mitra: What’s the monthly subscription fee? KunHee Park: $6.99. Sramana Mitra: Do you have a sense of who is paying to subscribe to this? Is it mostly Korean speaking people?

A Conversation on Regional Language Content: Kocowa CEO KunHee Park (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You became the CEO of Kocowa? KunHee Park: No, CTO in the beginning. My original plan was to stay in the States for a year. After one year, they asked me to be the CEO. That was in 2018. Our seed money was very tiny. Seed money was just $15 million. Sramana Mitra:

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A Conversation on Regional Language Content: Kocowa CEO KunHee Park (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens? KunHee Park: I could not speak English at all at that time. It was my handicap. NDS is a global company. I could hear Indian English, British English, Hong Kong English, and American English. It was challenging for me. I tried to communicate properly. I tried to learn all the

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A Conversation on Regional Language Content: Kocowa CEO KunHee Park (Part 1)

There’s quite a bit of white space in the domain of regional language content. KunHee talks about Korean content. It should give you ideas that you can extrapolate into other languages. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start from the very beginning. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get to a million dollars in revenue? Natalie Youn: It took until year two – around the end. Sramana Mitra: $5 million?

Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The real issue is, can you find a niche that is not overcrowded? Every niche is so crowded. Doing advertising is not easy because keywords cost so much money. Maybe you were getting traffic from pee pads and potty training. Even that traffic, by now, is super expensive. What’s intriguing is that you

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Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to get to a little bit of a methodology here. Oftentimes, you do get positive bias or negative bias. It sounds like you were getting a false negative in this case where you were convinced about your own pain point, but the people you were talking to were giving you false

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