SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Is It Possible To Launch a Startup And a Baby At The Same Time? EP 257: Arry Yu
04 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What inspired Arry Yu to launch GiftStarter?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
Chapter 3: How does GiftStarter work and what problem does it solve?
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Arry face while fundraising?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this episode is brought to you by FreshBooks, the invoicing tool that I use to make sure I collect all my money in an efficient manner. To claim your free month, go to nathanlatka.com forward slash FreshBooks and enter the top in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Ferron.
He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter.
Chapter 5: How did Arry's background influence her entrepreneurial journey?
Good morning, Top Tribe. You're listening to episode 257. And coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to hear from Adam Steele, where he breaks down how to run four businesses and pay yourself dividends. He might be the next Warren Buffett. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest this morning is Eri Yuen. She's the CEO and founder of giftstarter.com out of Emotive Labs.
Now, she got her start in advising world-class brands including Microsoft, Google, and L'Oreal at the intersection of where business and creativity
Chapter 6: What lessons did Arry learn from her co-founder experience?
meet technology she's passionate about building businesses with an emphasis on corporate culture and innovation using technology as an enabler she's recognized as an industry leader in the services space and has had the opportunity to offer her expertise to both startups and major brands ari was recently profiled in the puget sound business journal special 40 under 40 publication in 2014. all right ari are you ready to take us to the top
Yes. Let's do this. Okay. So first things first, tell me, uh, it's not a gift starter. What year did you join that business? We actually started, um, in 2014, we incorporated in July. Okay. Got it. So you are one of the founders of the business, right?
Chapter 7: How does GiftStarter generate revenue?
Yes, I am. And why'd you decide it sounds like you were doing an agency or something before that? Yeah, I was working in a consulting company called Logic 2020. And after having spent over a decade in the services, working for various companies. A decade? Holy mackerel. Yeah, I'm older than I look.
That's not what I was saying, but I was just shocked you made it a decade in the services industry.
Chapter 8: What are Arry's goals for GiftStarter in the upcoming year?
Actually, it was like 12 years. Man. Okay, so you quit that. You launched Gift Starter. Is that right? Yeah, we came out of a hackathon. I just joined the hackathon to try out an idea that had been brewing in my mind for quite some time. And we won first place. And I thought, oh, wow, if I can convince other people to quit their jobs and join this with me, then we got something going. And we did.
Were you a developer or what's your background? My background's more on the business side, but I also spent quite a bit of time leading different development and technical teams so I can do both business and technology. And are you, so can you, I mean, do you actually write code or do you have a co-founder that does coding?
I did have a co-founder that did coding, but since then we have some other people that run product for us. Okay, Ari, come on, teach us a lesson. What happened? Well, you know, people are parts of the journey for various reasons. And some people are there for a chapter and some people are there for multiple chapters.
And so early on, it just became too stressful and too much for one of our co-founders. Was it a he or she? It was a he. Did he just have like other stuff going on or he didn't like the business model or what? I think he just wanted to try something else. He, he ultimately joined another startup and now he's working for a big company.
And so just probably wasn't the right fit for the amount of stress and chaos and just unknowns that were going on in the business being so early on. So tell us what, what it's obviously you launched in 2014. It's now 2016, two years later, what does gift starter do and how do you make money?
So gift starter is still around, but over the past two years, we've now focused 100% on the consumer side of the business. And so gift start is a destination for consumers. We allow people to take anything that's sold online and make it into affordable chunks. So that's like a thousand dollar soda for a sofa. It's really hard for one person to afford.
Well, just why not break it into $20 affordable pieces or $50 affordable pieces. And then your friends and family can come in and buy one piece for $20 or five pieces for a hundred dollars. Once it's funded, we ship you the actual sofa. And so it's a full end to end automated process, everything from sourcing the products that are sold online to fulfilling it.
So it's basically crowdfunding or friend funding for
e-commerce so if 20 people bought a you know a six foot leather couch whose house does the couch go to well it depends on who they were buying it for so if they were buying it for you nathan then it would be going to you so it's a gift or by the way don't send me anything i hate material stuff i don't want to deal with it when i move and stuff but but but seriously it's basically a gift right
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