IAM1840 – Entrepreneur Produces Usability Audit Reports for SaaS Companies

Transcription:

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Jinny Oh Teaser 00:00

We want team members that are constantly exploring. Not just for the travel aspect, but it allows them to think differently, allows them to open their perspective, meet new people, understand and have empathy towards different markets of people.

Because in order to create great user experience, you need to be able to empathize and you can't empathize without having those experiences of meeting new people and exploring the world.

Intro 00:30

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:57

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we've hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, just like you, what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on CEO hacks and CEO nuggets. This is by far one of my favorite questions I asked on the show. In other words, I asked, what are the apps, books, and habits that makes you more effective and efficient. Those were the CEO hacks. And then I asked for a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something that you might tell your younger business if you were to hop into a time machine. Those were the CEO nuggets. That's what we'll focus on this month and some of the top ones that can instantly impact your business.

I love all the questions, but with every episode I thought I would walk away with something I could look at and implement right there to save the precious resources, time and money. Or I would also learn about the advice, tips and tidbits or tools of the trade on how to level up our organization. So you'll hear some of these this month. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jinny Oh of WANDR and UXAuditCo. Jinny, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Jinny Oh 02:34

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Gresham Harkless 02:36

No problem. Super excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Jinny so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Jinni is a world-traveling entrepreneur who currently lives a fully nomadic lifestyle and does not have a place she calls home.

She's the founder of WANDR an award-winning product strategy and UX design firm and UXAuditCo which produces usability audit reports for SaaS companies. Both companies have operated location independent with remote employees from around the world. She shares her experiences of running her companies fully remote in her new podcast called Remote CEOs.

Jenny is mostly well known for a story on LinkedIn about funding her employees salaries on her personal credit card for the first six months of the business, a story that has reached over 20 million views worldwide in just a matter of a week. Jinny, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Jinny Oh 03:28

Yes, I am very excited.

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Gresham Harkless 03:30

Me, too. I'm super excited, too. What I wanted to do is kick everything off by hearing about what I call your CEO storyand what led you start your business.

Jinny Oh 03:38

Sure. So things have been pretty much organic. So when I was in grad school, I was building out, e-commerce stores and personal blogs here and there and just getting a feel for the water of building out my own Websites. Then when I was in grad school, that was the first time that I was getting into building out a mobile application. I was working on that throughout the year, and when I finished, I was trying to fundraise for that startup. Long story short, what happened was I had to close down, that startup didn't work out. I couldn't raise enough money.

I got to a point where I was a little bit demoralized, feeling I failed at something, and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. The only thing that was really clear in my head was I wanted to have my own startup again and I wanted to travel. Those were the only two things that I was really clear on. So what ended up happening was, I figured I'm going to just do some freelance work to pass the time and get the money until I came up with the next big idea to pursue again.

Honestly, that big idea just never came. I just continued freelancing and one client led to another, projects became bigger and I had to start hiring for help. A couple of years of that, and I realize hey, I'm no longer a freelancer. I'm actually running a business and incorporated WANDR in June of 2016. So we'll be three years old in just a couple of months. And then launched UXAuditCo just recently. So everything has come organically for me.

Gresham Harkless 05:18

Nice. Absolutely love that. It's funny, I always say how the universe sometimes pushes you in the way, in the direction sometimes you're not expecting to go, but sometimes it just happens like that. It sounds like that's what happened on your end.

Jinny Oh 05:29

Exactly. I think it happened for a reason, of course, because I think when I first started my tech company about five years ago, I just wasn't prepared. I didn't know anything about technology. I was just a freshly graduated student who just had this amazing idea that I wanted to pursue, and I had no means to get there.

I was just running on trial and error, and that's ultimately why I failed. But now that I've gone through this phase of building everybody else's product and learning about different technology, if and when I do start my own product company, I'm at a much, much higher advantage of success because I've had this experience behind me.

Gresham Harkless 06:12

Yeah, that makes sense. As always Malcolm Gladwell like 10, 000 hours, so you're able to put in that expertise and helping out clients. And that's gonna definitely direct you if and when you decide that you want to do something different. You have a lot of those hours put in for that.

Jinny Oh 06:26

Exactly. Yes.

Gresham Harkless 06:27

Nice. Nice. Nice. I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper and hear how you're serving the clients that you work with. Can you tell us a little bit more about your services? And of course, your podcast?

Jinny Oh 06:36

Sure. So in terms of our services, we do mostly user experience, design and auditing. So we'll work with companies whether they're a startup that are just an idea on a napkin all the way to Fortune 500 companies, and we'll work very differently, depending on which stage of growth you're in.

So if you're a startup, we do a lot of validation and brainstorming and getting you to that MVP so that you can go and raise an angel round as we help through all that process. Then if you're an enterprise client, we do a lot of auditing, usability, testing and design work. It's like an extension to their existing team.

So a lot of the enterprise companies that we work with, we realized the makeup of those teams are heavily on engineering and not so much resources on usability. So that's where we plug and play.

Gresham Harkless 07:28

Yeah, and I've always heard and definitely correct me if I'm wrong that it used to be that those two things engineering actually building the product and the design of the product were two separate things. But now it's becoming a lot more combined where your usability is how it's designed, but also the design and the function of it is part of the design as well, too. So it's there's hand in hand it seems like.

Jinny Oh 07:47

Exactly. It has to be. I think in the past, what's been happening was design and development were for sure two separate teams. The designers would create something beautiful and then they'll what I like to call tossing it over the wall, hoping that the development team will catch it and then implement it.

But in reality, it doesn't work that way. The design and the development team has to work collaboratively together. Development has to come in that initial phase and Design has to be throughout the implementation as well. So yeah.

Gresham Harkless 08:19

No, that makes perfect sense. I wanted to ask you for what I call like your secret sauce. This could be for you, your organization or your podcast, but what do you feel sets you apart and makes you unique?

Jinny Oh 08:30

I think what sets me and our foundation to the company and the way that I have been growing the team has been this global perspective. We're no longer bound by the best talent in a 10-mile radius. For me, especially in what we do, which is creative work, I want to make sure that we're finding the best talent from around the world and not limit ourselves to geography. With the existing technology and the globalization I was able to do that. So, I would most definitely have to say our secret sauce is being able to find Global talent.

For me, like I love traveling, and I mentioned that earlier that the two most important things to me was starting my own company and being able to travel. That goes throughout the foundation of both my teams that we want team members that are constantly exploring. Not just for the travel aspect, but it allows them to think differently, allows them to open their perspective, meet new people, understand and have empathy towards different markets of people.

Because in order to create great user experience, you need to be able to empathize and you can't empathize without having those experiences of meeting new people and exploring the world.

Gresham Harkless 09:47

No, that makes perfect sense. I absolutely love that perspective because a lot of times when you're trying to do anything design related any anytime, even you're trying to innovate or do anything like that, you have to think outside the box. And sometimes we're in this box where we are looking for talent, as you mentioned within a 10-mile radius.

But really, with all these tools in this technology that we have in this day and age, you really can tap into an expertise from somebody all the way across the world and be able to implement that into, something that you're building or something that you're growing. We're really missing out on that opportunity if we're not doing just like you are.

Jinny Oh 10:19

Exactly. Yeah. So a lot of the team members that we have are just really some of the most well-traveled people that I've ever met. So I'll give you an example. There was a girl that you know, she spent most of her adult life like studying and working in New Jersey. But when I hired her, she was living out in Bali.

She's originally from Belarus and since we've hired her, she has since then lived in Budapest Portugal, Spain. She's now back in Southeast Asia, so she's now living in Thailand. So, bouncing around quite a bit, but one of the best thinkers, one of the most creative person I've ever met. I think that evidently, it has a lot to do with like her being so well-traveled.

Gresham Harkless 11:04

Yeah, and I was absolutely going to just ask that, how do you think that kind of manifests itself from a business standpoint? Is that because you have a different perspective because you are immersed and actually living in different cultures that you can look at a project completely different than somebody else who maybe is within that same kind of mind frame or environment maybe?

Jinny Oh 11:24

100%. I think for me especially, I've lived in five different countries now, just understanding different markets and how things and technology are in one country can be looked at completely different in another country and culture.

Now I'll give you an example in another one of our clients. So they launched their first product in Korea, and now they're trying to get that product out into the U.S. market. User experience is going to be completely different for those two markets. For me, since I understand both the Asian culture and the North American culture, it's easier for our team to help translate what that user journey is going to look like for the American market.

Gresham Harkless 12:08

Yeah, that makes perfect sense and I absolutely love that. I want to just switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book or a habit that you have, but something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Jinny Oh 12:21

Oh, okay. I like to test around with my schedule. So it's a little bit of compartmentalizing your work. I haven't found the exact optimal schedule yet, but what has been working for me really well this year is blocking out my Monday, Tuesdays and Thursdays for meetings. And then leaving Wednesdays and Fridays completely blocked for deep-focus work.

Because what I've realized is as a CEO, you're pulled in left and right, calls and meetings all day long, and those are so disruptive to what you need to actually get done in your day. So I, block out those three days just for all my calls and meetings and then the other two days for deep focus. That's helped me become so much more effective in, for the lack of terms, getting shit done.

Gresham Harkless 13:16

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Jinny Oh 13:26

There are so many things. Oh my gosh. So many mistakes that I could have avoided. But the one advice that I've been truly living by and that's helped me propel forward, especially in the recent years has been to live fearlessly. I say this because I see a lot of my peers who want to be entrepreneurs or maybe not even entrepreneurship, but within what they really want to have in their lives. They allow society and I guess their norms of thinking to Interfere with what they really want to accomplish. They are held back by their fear of, Oh, if I do this, then I'm going to be judged by my peers.

Or if I pursue entrepreneurship, then I don't have a stable income. How am I going to support myself? But that's all fear. If we constantly think that way, we're not going to make progress in our lives. Yes, it makes sense that you want to have some sort of stability before you jump all into entrepreneurship, but that's also opportunity cost, right? What if you dove into what you really want to do, there's a higher chance that you're going to get more out of that than just half asking it.

So, long story short, yeah, don't let your fears get in the way of what you really want to accomplish in life.

Gresham Harkless 14:58

Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on this show. So I want to ask you, Jinny, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Jinny Oh 15:08

So I think being a CEO for one, you just learned to grow up so fast. I'm 26 years old feeling like I'm going on 40. So you learn to take responsibility for your team and being able to guide them in a vision that nobody else can see.

It's you. It's your vision and you're willing to eat shit and take the risk and go through all this tough time just for that little light at the end of the tunnel. It's a little bit of insanity but at the same time a lot to do with leadership with that vision you have in mind.

Gresham Harkless 15:54

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. We'll have all those links in the show notes as well, but I appreciate your closing argument. I appreciate all the awesome things that you're saying and you're doing, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Jinny Oh 16:05

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Outro 16:08

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast, powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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