Jinny is a world-traveling entrepreneur who currently lives a fully nomadic lifestyle and does not have a place she calls ‘home.’

She is 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-independently with remote employees from around the world. She shares her experiences of running her companies fully remotely in her new podcast called Remote CEOs.

Jinny is most well-known for her story on LinkedIn about funding her employees’ salaries on her personal credit card for the first 6 months of business-a story that reached over 20 million views worldwide in just a matter of a week.

• CEO Hack: Meeting for three days and two days deep focus work
• CEO Nugget: Don't let your fears get into the way of what you want to accomplish
• CEO Defined: Taking responsibility for the team and guiding them into your vision

Website: http://www.jinnyohh.com/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/jinnyohh
Twitter: www.twitter.com/jinnyohh
Facebook: www.facebook.com/jinnyhyojin
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jinnyohh

FULL INTERVIEW

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

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 0:29

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 Jennie o of Wonder and UX Audit Co.

Jenny is awesome to have you on the show.

Jinny Oh 0:40

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:43

No problem, super excited to have you on, and what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Jinny so we can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And Jinny is a world-traveling entrepreneur who currently lives a fully nomadic lifestyle and does not have a place she calls home. She is the founder of Wonder and an award-winning product strategy and UX design firm. And UX Audit CO which produces usability audit reports for SaaS companies, both companies have operated locations independently with remote employees from around the world. She says she shares her experiences of running her companies fully remotely in her new podcast called Remote CEOs. Jimmy is most well known for a story on LinkedIn about funding her employee's 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?

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Jinny Oh 1:35

Yes, I am very excited.

Gresham Harkless 1:37

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

Jinny Oh 1:45

Sure. So thanks, I've been pretty much organic. So when I was in grad school, I was building out no e-commerce stores and personal blogs here and there and just getting a feel for the water of building out my own websites. And then when I was in grad school, that was the first time that I was getting into building out a mobile application. And was working on that throughout the year. And when I finished I was trying to fundraise for that startup.

And long story short, what happened was, I had to close down that startup didn't work out, I couldn't raise enough money. And I got to a point where I was a little bit demoralized. Feeling like I failed at something, and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. And the only thing that was really clear in my head was I want to have my own startup again.

And I wanted to travel, those are the only two things that I was really clear on. And so what ended up happening was I figured I'm gonna just do some freelance work to pass the time and get some money until I come up with the next big idea to pursue again. And honestly, that big idea just never came. And I just continued freelancing, and one client led to another project that became bigger, and I had to start hiring for help. And a couple of years is that and realize, hey, I'm no longer a freelancer, I'm actually running a business and incorporated Wonder in June of 2016. So we'll be three years old in just a couple of months, and then launched UX Audit code just recently. So everything has kind of come organically for me.

Gresham Harkless 3:42

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

Jinny Oh 3:54

Exactly. And I think it happened for a reason, of course, because 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 want to pursue, and I had no means to get there. I was just kind of 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 higher vantage of success because I've had this experience behind me.

Gresham Harkless 4:40

Yeah, that makes sense. It is always like Michael Malcolm Gladwell is like 10,000 hours so you're able to kind of put in that expertise and help our clients and that's going to definitely direct you when you decide that you want to do something different. You have a lot of those hours kind of put in for that.

Jinny Oh 4:56

Exactly, Yeah.

Gresham Harkless 4:58

Nice, nice, nice and I wanted to go down a little bit deeper and hear how you serve the clients that you work with. Can you tell us a little bit more about your services and of course, your podcast?

Jinny Oh 5:06

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 is just an idea on a napkin, all the way to Fortune 500 company will 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, and we help through all that process.

And then if you're an enterprise client, we do a lot of auditing, usability testing, and design work as kind of like an extension to their existing team. So a lot of the enterprise companies that we work with, we realize the makeup of those teams is heavily on engineering, and not so many resources on usability. And so that's where we kind of plug and play.

Gresham Harkless 6:01

Yeah, and I've always heard, and definitely correct me if I'm wrong, that it used to be those two things engineering, like actually building the product and the design of the project, 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 there's kind of hand in hand, it seems.

Jinny Oh 6:22

Exactly it has to be. And I think, in the past, what's been happening was design and development, were for sure two separate teams and 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 have to work collaboratively together, development has to come in that initial phase and design has to be throughout the implementation as well.

Gresham Harkless 6:58

That makes perfect sense. And I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for you, your organization, or your podcast. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

Jinny Oh 7:10

I think what sets me and our foundation to the company, and the way that I've 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. And with the existing technology and globalization, we're able to do that. So I would most definitely have to say our secret sauce is being able to find global talent. And for me, I love traveling, and I mentioned earlier that the two most important things to me were starting my own company and being able to travel.

And that goes throughout the foundation of both my teams that we want. We want team members that are constantly exploring, not just for the travel aspect, but because it allows them to think differently, allow them to open their perspectives, meet new people understand, and have empathy towards different markets with people. Because in order to create a 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 8:36

That makes perfect sense. I absolutely love that perspective. Because a lot of times when you're trying to do anything design related even if 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 and this technology that we have in this day and age, you really can tap into 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. And we're really missing out on that opportunity if we're not doing just like you are.

Jinny Oh 9:09

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 spent most of her adult life studying and working in New Jersey, but when I hired her she was living out in Bali. She's originally from Mello Roos. And since we hired her she has since then lived in Budapest, Portugal, and 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 and one of the most creative people I've ever met, and I think that evidently is a lot to do with her being so well-traveled.

Gresham Harkless 10:03

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

Jinny Oh 10:25

100%, I think for me, especially since I've lived in five different countries now. And just understanding different markets and how technology in one country can be looked at completely differently in another country and culture. Now, I'll give you an example and 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 US market, user experience is going to be completely different for those to vote for those two markets. And for me, since I understand both the Asian culture and the North American culture, it's easier for our team to translate what that user journey is gonna look like for the American market.

Gresham Harkless 11:15

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

Jinny Oh 11:29

I like to test around with my schedule. So it's a little bit of compartmentalizing your work. And I haven't found the exact optimal schedule yet. But what has been working for me really well, this year is blocking out my Mondays, 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. And so I block out those three days just for all my calls and meetings, and then the other two days for deep focus, and that's helped me become so much more effective.

Gresham Harkless 12:31

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

Jinny Oh 12:39

Me, oh, my gosh, somebody was thinking 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 recent years has been to live fearlessly. And I say this because I see a lot of my peers who want to be entrepreneurs or not even maybe entrepreneurship, but it is within what they really want to have in their lives. And they allow society, and, I guess, fair norms of thinking to interfere with what they really want to accomplish. They're held back by their fear that 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. I mean, if we constantly think that way, we're not going to make progress in our lives. If you guess 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, if you don't dove in, to what you really want to do, there's a higher chance that you're gonna get more out of that than just half-assing 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 14:27

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

Jinny Oh 14:37

So I think being a CEO, I mean, for one, you just learned to grow up so fast. I mean, I'm, I'm 26 years old, feeling like I'm going on 40. So you learn to take responsibility for your team and be able to guide them In a vision that nobody else can see, it's you, it's your vision, and you're willing to take, you're willing to eat shit, and take the risk and go through all these tough times just for what you see at the end of the tunnel, 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 15:38

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And 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 phenomenon today.

Jinny Oh 15:49

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

Outro 15:52

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. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating 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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