Get World Savvy

This is the first of a series of guest chats each month with entrepreneurs in unique markets. This series is focused on the Creator Economy. We will interview entrepreneurs in North America, Asia, and Africa to learn more about trends and opportunities in the creator space across the world.

This third episode is with Harsh Snehanshu, co-founder of YourQuote, India's largest writing platform focused on short-form written content. We chat about the creator space for introverts, how India's culture dictates the preference of content consumption and Harsh's ideas on what is missing in the passion economy.

"The homogeneity around the Latin American cultural experience helps to actually aspire to create regional platforms."

Felipe Echandi is the co-founder of Cuanto, a YCW19 startup based in Panama. Cuanto allows small merchants and independent Latin American entrepreneurs to create their mobile-first online store to sell over social-media. Think of Shopify for LatAm's social media-based e-commerce experience. Prior to Cuanto, Felipe has extensive experience in blockchain and Fintech. 

In this episode, we discuss the state of the LATAM fintech and e-commerce ecosystem, where he draws inspiration as he builds his startup, and the future of mobile in emerging markets.

Today we are here with China Marketing Expert, Olivia Plotnick. She is the VP of the International Professional Women’s Society in Shanghai China and previously a manager in marketing and communications at Ogilvy Shanghai. After leaving Ogilvy last summer, she now runs her own marketing agency helping companies scale their brands using social media in China. 

In this episode, we talk about the Chinese marketing ecosystem, the role WeChat plays in China, how brands can succeed on WeChat with a low marketing budget, and what we can learn from WeChat best practices to apply to other social media platforms.  

“Brands have penetrated the feed and group chats to touch their customers again and again with live stream, promotions, lotteries, and educational videos to seamlessly get return purchases.”

In part 1 we talked about how to get discovered and attract new followers. If you haven’t checked out that episode, it’s episode 17.  Last week I interviewed Olivia Plotnick on how to best grow an account on WeChat - that’s episode 18. Today we’re going to dive deeper into relationship building and converting your followers into clients in order to make more sales. 

In this episode, I present two cases. One on how Perfect Diary grew to over 1B in valuation over 3 years as a Chinese beauty brand leveraging WeChat and RED (小红书) and, in contrast, how Glossier is now a 1.2 billion dollar brand that grew primarily by building a community on Instagram.

With over 1 billion users, both Instagram and Wechat have become cultural phenomenons. Over the last few months, I found a whole ecosystem of 7-figure plus entrepreneurs whose businesses were fully brought up by these platforms and the relationships they have attracted and nurtured with their audience. I was so intrigued at the claim that anyone today can build an audience for free on platforms like Instagram and Youtube and then sell services or products to them building multi-million dollar empires. Turns out, there's a lot of strategy to using these tools.

This episode is the first part of a two part series on how to use the features on Instagram to create an in-demand brand, for relationship management, and a business tool to drive sales. As a comparison, we'll also look at how Wechat is used in China for the same thing. We'll talk about how Instagram vs. Wechat is used, top tactics for both, and what strategies on Wechat we can learn from that are not yet used on Instagram. .  

In this episode, I interview Taymour Sabry, the co-founder of Wasla Browser based in Cairo Egypt. Wasla browser is a gamified mobile browser that rewards users with free mobile internet. They have a mission to connect the next 500 million people in emerging markets to subsidized mobile internet while fostering digital and financial inclusion.

We talk about everything from achieving product market fit with Wasla after gaining 10k organic users in the first 2 weeks of launch, how users in emerging markets are using the internet for discovery instead of search, and why getting people to transact online and bringing them out of the unofficial economy famous in Egypt will pave for economic growth and success in the future.

COVID-19 is hurting us more than just being a public health crisis due to the following problems: 

Population growth, especially in the cities.

The rise of the global middle class, which brings about mobility and travel, and interconnectivity.

The phenomenon of global value chains.

Anti-globalization tendencies, especially as manifested in the case of trade wars.

Problems of governance regarding political regimes and failed states.

The phenomenon of fake news.

Anti-science attitudes and denia

The most vulnerable populations

In this episode, I'll go into why each of these factors contributes to problems we are facing today because of COVID-19, what's being done to solve these problems, and what opportunities are arising for you and me to build solutions to these problems.

Alex is a global venture capitalist with Cathay Innovation, a global firm that invests across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. He is also the author of Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs - from Delhi to Detroit - Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley 

Everything we think we know about startup best practices is rooted in a time and a place. It's Silicon Valley, in a time of abundance, for a very particular type of asset-light software-based startup that wants to grow extraordinarily fast. And yet around the world, some of the best entrepreneurs operate in ecosystems, that just looks different. They have less capital, less depth of trained startup human capital, or they may regularly face more macro-economic shocks. Yet, no one is telling their stories of how entrepreneurs have scaled startups in an ecosystem that looks different than what the valley is.

In this episode, we go into who the frontier innovators are, why Silicon Valley should be learning from them, and the potential of these learnings when applied in our home markets.

"Sell a story and a product can be part of that story. Sell a person and have the person sell the product. That's how it works." 

3 weeks ago none of my friends were on TikTok. 2 weeks into social distancing, everyone is getting on TikTok. The content is finally moving away from 13-year old dance parties and ridiculous memes that only GenZ understand. 

In this episode I am here with Fabian Bern, Founder of UPLAB, a Douyin and TikTok marketing agency with operations in Asia and Europe. They have been helping brands and creators on the platform since 2016 with influencer marketing and content creation services. 

We talk about the future of influencer marketing, how brands can leverage TikTok, and how creators are the most important asset on the platform. 

Now that China is recovering from COVID-19 while the rest of the world dips into quarantine, what did Chinese businesses do to succeed during these turbulent times? What interesting strategies did we see so that we can know what to expect in other places in the world?

By learning from what Chinese businesses did, what industries or cases ended up doing really well, we can take action today to make sure we as individuals and our companies make it out of this crazy time better than when the virus even started. 

In this episode, I talk about how businesses in the food, retail, entertainment, and e-learning industries in China re-invented themselves during the coronavirus crisis so that they can come out stronger. We also touch on consumer behavior during and after social isolation and what we can expect from the rest of the world.

Karthik Vaidyanath is the Director of Product at Indeed Singapore. Prior to Indeed, Karthik was the Chief Product Officer at GoPlay, the video-on-demand app under the GoJek ecosystem.

Karthik is originally from India and is a 3-time entrepreneur with one unicorn exit. His start-up InstaLively was acquired by Hike Messenger in India. When launched in 2014, InstaLively was the first mobile live streaming app in Asia and one of the pioneers of Live Streaming in the entire region.

In this episode we dig into the difference in launching products in global markets, the approaches of Western vs. Asian expansion, and the pros and cons of international business units that operate independently from HQ vs. centralized decision making.

When I first went to China in April 2019, I was shocked by how little I knew about Chinese tech companies and consumer products. Even as a Chinese (Canadian) working in the US, at a cross-border company, Wish, I paid little attention to the Chinese e-commerce environment, China, and the rest of the world.

I googled "Unicorns in China" and came across the first hit, Wikipedia's list of global unicorns. At the time of this search, I could probably count all the public and private Chinese tech companies I knew on my fingers and toes - this proved to be accurate as Wikipedia listed 227 Chinese unicorns, and only 20 of them had links. This means 207 Chinese companies valued at over $1 BILLION USD practically don't exist on the entire Western internet.

How can we learn from the best, connect with the world, and increase global productivity if we don't even know what we don't know?

 In this episode I talk about three defining characteristics of the Chinese tech ecosystem and how we can all take advantage of opportunities presented to us by the state of Chinese tech!

Albert Qian is the founder of Albert's List, an online facebook community with over 43,000 job seekers, recruiters, supporters, and professionals in the Bay Area. It is one of the most active groups on Facebook and many job seekers have found overwhelmingly warm support and community through the group - including myself! 

Are you at a place where you feel like your professional growth is stalling, yet you’re ambitious, impact hungry, and just want MORE out of your career because you’re bursting with energy and inspiration but can’t quite find an outlet?

In this episode, I talk about two of the frameworks I use when I'm feeling stuck in my professional life. You'll learn the channels you have to choose from to grow in your career and how to use marketing concepts on yourself so that you become indispensable. 

Brandon Li is the General Manager at Setter, a concierge service for homeowners. In this episode, we talk about what other companies like TaskRabbit and Yelp may be getting wrong about the home improvement space, how to build out new markets from zero, and the concept of trust when it comes to tech.

I wanted to build a global network early so that it can pay back in multiples no matter where I decided to work or what I decided to do.

 In 2019, I traveled the world interviewing tech leaders and learning about emerging markets and emerging tech. I was in search for the best possible career opportunity which I share in Episode 4 of this podcast and I had the intention of expanding my global network. 

I spent the last year grabbing coffees and lunches with tech leaders in 16 different markets from the likes of Tencent in China, Jumia in Kenya, Softbank in Japan, Grab and Go-Jek in South East Asia, and many more.

In this episode, I talk about how I managed to get face time with all these successful and extremely busy people, how I built my open network, and how you can start building your network without traveling the world. 

Hugh Olliphant is the Senior Director of Analytics and Data Science at Bill.com, which recently IPO’d and now has a 3.55 Billion Dollar Market Cap. Hugh has been in fintech for over 20 years and has been a multi-time founder. His first startup, G-Money sold to Paypal in the early 2000s and Hugh went on to become a senior product leader at Paypal.

I met Hugh because he was my first boss in the Bay Area and has been a tremendous mentor to me since. In this episode, we talk briefly about Product and then deep dive into the scope of data science in tech companies today, how to ask the right strategic questions to use data effectively, and how the data team has evolved over the last two decades, and how it will change again over the next ten years as data tools begin to replace jobs. 

“Where someone sees a challenge, someone else will see an opportunity”

After checking out all the emerging markets, where do I think has the best opportunities?

 Turns out, there’s opportunity everywhere - if you are competent, hard working, and focused. 

There’s really about-to-emerge markets like Ethiopia, just starting to privatize telecom and opening up to private companies. Think China 30 years ago.

Then there’s Japan, who’s hey days were in the 80s. But those like Aditya Mhatre, Director of Product at Pay Pay and India’s Paytm, are seizing the opportunity to bring new tech from emerging markets to mature ones.

In Israel, Shahar Matorin at Startup Grind showed me a startup nation built on exporting tech and being the off-shore research center for the world.

If you’re lucky enough to have your pick in where to go pursue your career, the world is your oyster. 

Connie Chang has been a customer advocate for 12 years. She is currently the Director of Community Engagement at Wish, where she leads a team of global community managers who are building a trusted community of content creators to provide engaging experiences on Wish and collect valuable insights that help drive product decisions. She previously fostered vibrant communities at Facebook, Gogobot, and Yelp.

Community is just starting to become one of the hottest non-technical teams in tech. Community is the bridge to a company's customers.

In this episode, Connie and I discuss why a community is important for business, what are practical tips in growing an engaging community, and what growth is made possible only by teaming up with the amazing community of top shoppers on Wish.

Joyce is a Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford alum, multiple time founder, and has worked in Silicon Valley for several years. She is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alariss, a global talent marketplace that matches talent educated or working in developed countries with emerging marketplace opportunities.

In this episode, we discuss what anyone with Western experience can contribute to developing marketings.

Andre was one of the first 25 employees at Uber and Hired. He is also the founder of Maple VC, a firm that invests in Canadian startups. Andre chats about what to look for when picking a company to join or invest in.