7 lessons I learned building 3 startups and making tough decisions

A photo of Jonghwa Kim, founder of Vonvon.

Hi, I’m Jonghwa, founder and CEO at Vonvon, where we make quizzes on Facebook. I am a serial entrepreneur with three startups under my belt, two of which were founded and run part time. I’ve learned a few lessons along the way and I hope they will help others avoid inevitable pitfalls and reach their vision.

A good product doesn’t quickly attract users

My first startup was Wingbus, a Korean equivalent of TripAdvisor. Launched in 2005, it provided overseas travel information for Koreans. Here, I learned the hard way that a good product doesn’t automatically attract users.

I didn’t figure out immediately that Koreans actually preferred packaged tours where everything was already planned. I had to bring in visitors manually and make and share free travel guides until 40 percent of Korean tourists had my guides.

The visitor count increased, but that wasn’t enough. So, I decided to pivot fast and created a sister service, WingSpoon, which provided information on good restaurants in major tourist spots. This brought in a huge influx of visitors, and Naver, a popular search engine in Korea, eventually acquired both companies for US$2 million in 2009. I joined their sales team.

Don’t face scary times alone

After paying off my taxes and debts, I only had 10 percent of the proceeds from the WingSpoon sale left to my name. Considering that I had been working with almost no pay for four years, it was nothing to write home about.

What I did get out of this experience, however, was priceless. Going through the scary periods of running out of money to pay my employees, I spent a lot of time taking long walks with my then co-founder, Chang-Wook Kim. I learned then that running a startup isn’t a straight path, and that you need a person you can count on.

Keep the entrepreneurial spirit burning

After my not-so-successful initiative, I still had entrepreneurial spirit burning in me. I am also always very conservative and risk-averse, and that actually guided me to pursue only the opportunities with the best risk-reward ratios.

Later that year, I spotted another opportunity while working at Naver. I was studying Groupon very closely, and social commerce seemed like a good business model, with relatively low setup costs and a huge upside potential.

I then founded Daily Pick with two co-founders in 2010 and ran it in my free time. I tweeted our first deal for a trendy restaurant to my 30 followers. Word got out quickly and we sold out in a few hours. That was a good sign of a product-market fit. From then on, we didn’t spend any money on ads; it was all word of mouth. We still had deals selling out in five minutes. I was up until 3 am every day, but the sheer thrill of selling out the deals kept me going.

Stay true to yourself

Of course, high demand attracts competitors like sharks. I hate competition and I actively try to avoid it. So, I focused on our niche market—trendy restaurants for people who are in their early 20s. We knew exactly who our target market was and that set us apart.

As much as I tried to avoid competition, I actually saw a potential for synergy with one of my competitors, Ticket Monster. Their team was mostly young and passionate, while our team had more experience. We decided to join forces in late 2010, where Ticket Monster bought Daily Pick for US$9 million. I was still working at Naver at that time.

I could have kept running the company, but again, I stayed true to my nature. I just knew that this market would become a bloodbath, and I wasn’t built for this kind of competition. I was much better off starting something else.

Give people more of what they want

My third startup, Vonvon, is my most global undertaking. What struck me was that 80 percent of the total shares on our platform were coming from less than 10 percent of our content—quizzes. The same thing was happening outside of Korea where Buzzfeed had a quiz that had more shares than 1,000 articles combined.

Create for different cultures

Love what you do and do what you love