Chapter One

During college, how did you balance school life (academia, social life, clubs, etc) with VentureStorm?

This was always one of the toughest things, but it taught me so much about time management. Managing an engineering course load as well as a social life was tough to start, but throw in running a business and my days were completely booked. I had to become very good at time management to section off time for homework, time for business, and if I could squeeze it in, time to go out for drinks and socialize a bit.

The best thing our team did was set aside a few hours from 8-11 certain nights to sit down as a team and work on the product/business. We each put in a lot of time to the business outside of this, but working face to face every other day helped keep the team driven and focused on the task at hand. My sleep, social life, and grades suffered a bit due to lack of time, but I found something I was truly passionate about.

How do you effectively market your web platform? What do you do differently from your competitors to stay ahead in this industry?

Since we're a 2 sided market place, we're basically marketing to 2 different people/groups all the time. For the developer side we sponsor a ton of Hackathons, go to developer meetups, and run some targeted Facebook ad campaigns. Hackathons have been a great resource for us since it's a nice community that's been easy to get involved in. As you saw, we like Hackathons so much that we decided to build a team formation tool to get even more involved. For the entrepreneur/startup side, it's a lot of networking and word of mouth. We partner with University entrepreneurship centers, coworking spaces, and other entrepreneurial organizations to help spread the word about the platform. We recently started to run some Facebook ads for entrepreneurs, but paid marketing for entrepreneurs is something we're still experimenting with.

Describe to us an example of your typical workday.

This is a tough one because I don't have a typical work day. The main thing I do everyday is wake up at 8-8:30, eat, and go straight to the gym. That's probably the only consistent thing about my days. One day I could be spending hours programming to add a feature or make adjustments from user feedback (WE LOVE FEEDBACK). Other days I'm sending emails, on the phone with users/potential users, traveling to events, networking, etc. My day typically lasts till 9-10pm, but that varies as well.

What are some of your biggest challenges while running VentureStorm?

We're a completely bootstrapped company thus far, so it's definitely been a challenge to grow our user base and grow our revenue without having much money to do so. So we find ways to stretch our dollars as far as they'll go and stay as lean as possible. We've done a lot of random hacks (technical hacks and non-technical hacks) to stay lean, survive and grow. Just to give a taste of something we've done: Heroku charges $35/mo for worker dynos, we hacked together a $5 chip to run cron jobs and scheduled tasks so we don't have to pay. There's a few more I could talk about, but I'll save that for another time :)

What are some exciting things we should be looking out for in the next iteration of VentureStorm?

One awesome thing that I am leading right now is our new Project Management Service (need some help on a cool name for it). We'll work with clients that have a budget higher than $5,000 and do the design work for their project, write a technical scope, and then select a top vetted developer from our network to contract the work to and make an intro. We're extremely excited about this because it removes a lot of the friction for non-technical founders as well as anyone that doesn't have a lot of time to do developer on-boarding. It also makes it a much smoother experience for the developer as they can just hit the ground running (or should I say coding). We take a percentage of the overall project budget to make it worth our time. We believe that we can make it easy for tech entrepreneurs by guiding them through this process, making the intro between an awesome/talented developer that meets their commitment needs (the dev could even join their team full time if the two parties wanted), and overseeing the development process for the lifetime of the project. Think of it as a Gigster or Toptal model, but where at the end of the day the developer and client can maintain any sort of relationship they'd like without having to go through us once the initial build is over. Super excited about this as I've already begun to work with a couple clients and the responses from both sides have been great!

What stage are you in your capital investing phase? Are you currently looking for more funding?

Currently Bootstrapped. We may raise an angel round within the next 4-6 months (if we can find the right investors that have the right background and/or connections). But until then we're going to keep grinding to increase revenues to get to a point where we're self sustaining.

How does VentureStorm generate net revenue?

So we currently have 2 revenue streams. The first is the premium service on the platform that allows an entrepreneur or startup to use our recruiting tools. They can search through our database of developers based on skill, location, university, etc and reach out and message them vs waiting for developers to reach out. This increases the talent pool available and is only $30/mo or $300/yr right now. The next is the Project Management service I spoke about in a previous question.

How do you see VentureStorm being a major key player in the entrepreneurial world within the next 10 years?

VentureStorm will be a resource where you can take an idea (tech idea for sure, but we could expand down the road) and get the resources you need to take that idea turn it into a product and take it to market. There is so much that goes into starting up that a lot of people don't think about, and we really will take all that pain away.

Any advice for our future entrepreneurs?

Just begin. Entrepreneurship is a tough road that has many obstacles in the way, but it's one that makes you grow. It's also one of the greatest communities because everyone is always so receptive of people's ideas and willing to help each other. Make sure you always have a vision and a goal (these can change all the time, but regardless they're important). And hustle your ass off to achieve the vision and goal. Set actionable items that you can do each day to get closer to that goal, because if you can make it a quantitative battle, you'll win 9/10 times.

If you want your startup to be interviewed, please reach out to me at taehong.min18@outlook.com. Thanks!