How I Built a $20M+/Year Business While Traveling the World with Sean Kim | Ep.96

Summary

Built Online: How I Built a $20M+/Year Business While Traveling the World with Sean Kim | Ep.96

Host: Cody McGuffey
Guest: Sean Kim
Release Date: April 14, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 96 of Built Online, host Cody McGuffey sits down with Sean Kim, a seasoned entrepreneur who has successfully built a multi-million-dollar business while embracing a digital nomad lifestyle. This episode delves deep into Sean’s journey, the principles that guided his success, and the strategies he employed to scale his ventures globally.

Defining Freedom: Time, Financial, and Location

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around the concept of freedom. Cody introduces the idea by outlining what the podcast’s audience seeks: time freedom, financial freedom, and location freedom.

Sean Kim [04:00]:
"For me, freedom is definitely the highest order of value. Being able to separate the time from the amount of money that you make is crucial because you can only work so many hours in a day."

Sean emphasizes the importance of decoupling time from income. Unlike professionals who trade hours for dollars, entrepreneurs like Sean create systems where money flows passively, ensuring continuous income even when they're not actively working.

Sean Kim [04:55]:
"Physical freedom is another big one for me. Being able to work anywhere and reach a global audience allows me to live my life on my own terms."

Sean’s Entrepreneurial Journey: From South Korea to Success

Sean shares his early life experiences, moving from South Korea to Canada at a young age due to his father's job loss during an economic recession. This move sparked his entrepreneurial spirit.

Sean Kim [08:55]:
"I started Totempass, a discount card for students, handing out 20,000 to 30,000 cards and partnering with local businesses for monthly fees. This was my first taste of entrepreneurship."

Despite initial successes, Sean faced significant challenges, including business failures and personal struggles, leading him to undertake a transformative 10-day silent meditation retreat in Hawaii.

Sean Kim [13:37]:
"The silent retreat was the hardest thing I had to do at that time because I was such an extrovert. Being alone with my thoughts for 10 days was a profound experience."

Building Jump Speak: Identifying and Solving a Real Problem

After overcoming personal hurdles, Sean founded Jump Speak, a language learning platform designed to bridge the gap between basic language apps and real-world conversational fluency.

Sean Kim [39:00]:
"Jump Speak combines the gamified learning of Duolingo with the personalized interaction of a human tutor, creating an immersive experience that truly prepares you for real-life conversations."

Cody McGuffey [39:20]:
"It's like Duolingo and a human tutor combined."

Jump Speak’s unique approach leverages AI to provide personalized feedback, enhancing grammar, pronunciation, and conversation skills. This innovation allowed Jump Speak to stand out in the crowded language learning market, following the blue ocean strategy of finding an untapped niche.

Sean Kim [44:00]:
"We positioned ourselves as focusing entirely on immersion-focused language learning, differentiating us from established players like Duolingo."

The Blue Ocean Strategy: Creating Uniqueness in a Crowded Market

Sean discusses the importance of differentiation in business, avoiding direct competition with giants by carving out a unique space.

Sean Kim [45:01]:
"Don't try to be better, try to be different. Position yourself uniquely to tap into an untapped market segment."

This strategy not only helped Jump Speak gain traction but also laid the foundation for scaling the business effectively.

Lessons on Focus and Resourcefulness

A pivotal moment in Sean’s journey was realizing the necessity of focus. Initially juggling multiple ventures, Sean learned that spreading efforts thin hindered growth.

Sean Kim [58:16]:
"I was afraid of failing my main business, so I diversified my bets with multiple ventures. In reality, this divided my attention and energy, leading to failures across the board."

Cody echoes this sentiment, emphasizing that sustained focus on a single business can lead to exponential growth.

Cody McGuffey [62:00]:
"Focusing your energy on one scalable business model can skyrocket your results, as seen with Jump Speak's eight-figure revenue."

Scaling Jump Speak: From Concept to Eight-Figure Revenue

Jump Speak’s growth is a testament to the power of focused effort and leveraging modern entrepreneurship tools.

Sean Kim [65:19]:
"We're now in the eight-figure range, reflecting what you can achieve when you focus on a scalable business model and leverage the right tools and strategies."

Sean attributes this success to understanding market needs, effective use of AI, and maintaining a relentless focus on delivering value.

Understanding Business Valuation and Exit Strategies

The conversation shifts to the valuation of businesses like Jump Speak and the factors influencing their worth.

Sean Kim [69:17]:
"Public companies like Duolingo might get higher valuations, but for private companies, it's often based on recent acquisitions, typically around a 10x revenue multiple."

Cody adds insights on how different business models and revenue streams affect valuation, highlighting the importance of annual recurring revenue (ARR) in SaaS businesses.

Cody McGuffey [70:38]:
"For software or recurring revenue businesses, multiples can range higher, especially as ARR grows."

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Leverage and Persistence

Sean and Cody discuss the critical elements that drive successful entrepreneurship today, emphasizing leverage through technology and media.

Sean Kim [73:06]:
"Focus on businesses with high leverage, like software and media, which offer infinite scalability. Combine these with capital to maximize growth potential."

Cody reinforces the idea that persistence and consistent effort are key to staying in business and eventually scaling to significant heights.

Cody McGuffey [55:06]:
"Sometimes the key to success is simply not giving up and staying in business, letting your consistent presence enable you to grow over time."

Rapid Fire and Personal Insights

Towards the end, Sean shares personal reflections and philosophies on entrepreneurship.

Sean Kim [84:02]:
"A creator is someone who expresses their unique value through tangible outputs, whether it's art, software, or conversations."

Cody McGuffey [85:53]:
"Building a business requires immense focus and dedication. While diversifying can seem attractive early on, it’s essential to channel your energy into a single scalable venture."

Closing Thoughts

In their concluding remarks, both Sean and Cody underscore the importance of resourcefulness, focus, and leveraging modern tools to build impactful and scalable businesses. Sean’s journey from a struggling entrepreneur to a CEO of an eight-figure company serves as an inspiring blueprint for aspiring e-commerce and online business owners.

Sean Kim [87:56]:
"I'm always working on building something new, but maintaining focus on a scalable business like Jump Speak has been crucial to our success."

Cody McGuffey [78:05]:
"It's hard work, but the potential rewards make it incredibly worth it."

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Notable Quotes

• Sean Kim [04:00]:
  "Freedom is definitely the highest order of value. Being able to separate the time from the amount of money that you make is crucial because you can only work so many hours in a day."

• Cody McGuffey [39:20]:
  "It's like Duolingo and a human tutor combined."

• Sean Kim [45:01]:
  "Don't try to be better, try to be different. Position yourself uniquely to tap into an untapped market segment."

• Cody McGuffey [62:00]:
  "Focusing your energy on one scalable business model can skyrocket your results, as seen with Jump Speak's eight-figure revenue."

• Sean Kim [73:06]:
  "Focus on businesses with high leverage, like software and media, which offer infinite scalability. Combine these with capital to maximize growth potential."

Conclusion

Sean Kim’s story is a powerful example of how resilience, strategic focus, and leveraging modern technologies can lead to extraordinary business success. Built Online offers invaluable insights for entrepreneurs aiming to build and scale their online businesses, inspiring listeners to pursue their dreams with determination and an innovative mindset.

For more episodes and strategies on building your online business, tune into Built Online and subscribe to stay informed and inspired.

Transcript

[Sean Kim]

You want to find a niche that not a lot of people are targeting. And that niche doesn't have to be big initially. The whole idea is that it's so noisy in the world of business and in the market that you're in is you have to be able to stand out somehow.

[Cody McGuffey]

Welcome to Built online. I'm Cody McGuffey, and this podcast is all about one thing. Building the business of your dreams. Selling art, teaching classes, starting a blog, launching a brand. Whatever your passion is, we show you how to turn it into real income. I created Everbee to help anyone with a dream start and scale business.

[Sean Kim]

Ever be, ever be, ever be, ever be, ever be, ever be.

[Cody McGuffey]

We now serve over 800,000 creators all across the globe. On this show, we bring on real entrepreneurs who've done it. They share their secrets, they share their failures, the exact steps that you can take to get started. What if you can get one golden nugget out of today's episode? And it's the breakthrough that takes you from just dreaming to actually living a life on your terms. At Everbee, we believe that every human is a creator, and every creator should own a business. Sean, we're here.

[Sean Kim]

What's up, man?

[Cody McGuffey]

What's up, man? How are you?

[Sean Kim]

Good to see you. It's been a minute.

[Cody McGuffey]

I know, man. How long has it been?

[Sean Kim]

I think like six months or so. Hey, since the Hampton retreat.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah. We did a retreat for anyone has is listening or watching this. Met Sean. I had a retreat. Like an entrepreneurship executive or CEO retreat. What would you call that thing? Like, founder retreat?

[Sean Kim]

Founder retreat, entrepreneur retreat. Very high growth, selective group of folks that are ambitious, doing cool shit.

[Cody McGuffey]

It was cool. And it was here in Austin. And if I recall, the first time. We haven't talked about this. The first time I saw. We saw each other was in the elevator, I think it was, right?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. When we first came in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah, I remember your energy was just, like, friendly and warm.

[Sean Kim]

It's good.

[Cody McGuffey]

When we got into that elevator, Canadian vibe. What was it?

[Sean Kim]

Was it a very, very Canadian vibe?

[Cody McGuffey]

I guess I don't have much experience with Canadian vibes.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, we're known to be.

[Cody McGuffey]

But I remember being like, he's a. He's a genuine great human.

[Sean Kim]

I appreciate it.

[Cody McGuffey]

And at that point, I didn't even know that you're part of the retreat. It was. It was cool.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Because I remember there was a woman helping us take our. Take our luggage, show us to our room or something like that. Right. And we happen to be in the same. And you were just so kind to her. I remember that. And I remember being like, okay, yeah.

[Sean Kim]

They were super nice.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah, yeah, Crazy, man. I'm really excited that you're here. So thank you for flying in from Brazil to come and do this podcast.

[Sean Kim]

Just for this podcast, brother. We got a pump in as well and yeah, Feeling pretty energized. Yeah, yeah. Ready to provide some value for your audience.

[Cody McGuffey]

Super cool, man. We have a really cool audience listenership who are, I've talked to you about, about the people that listen to this podcast. High growth minded people. They want to grow, they want to learn, they're building businesses, they're creating audiences, they're creating podcasts, they're creating physical product businesses, digital product businesses. They're creating content, they're, they're, they're doing things and they want to create a better life for themselves and their families. Specifically, the thing that they're searching for and they're chasing down is freedom. I don't know if they would describe it this way, but the way I describe it is the three freedoms of time. Freedom, financial freedom, and location freedom. That's what they want most, time. When they're listening to this, we all have different definitions of that. But I'm curious, how do you define freedom in your life?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, so for me, you know, people have different values of what they are looking for. Whether it's growth, contribution, freedom, materialistic things. Sometimes it's lust right. Some people are fantasizing about finding the right partner. For me, freedom is definitely the highest order of value. And you can kind of see, based on my lifestyle, I've lived traveling and being a digital nomad for the last 10 years of my life. And, and freedom comes in all different aspects for sure. I think the biggest is like being able to separate the time from the amount of money that you make. I think that's probably the biggest part because you can only work so many hours in a day. And this is, let's say a doctor or Lawyer can charge 300, 400 an hour, but they can still only work 8 hours a day or 9 hours a day or 12 hours a day. And the moment that they are feeling sick or that the moment that they're not feeling well and they can't actually trade time for money. They're not, they're out of the business, they don't have the ability to make money. So that's really a big part of that. And being able to sell online and sell products online, that's really a big part of that. Physical freedom is another big one for me. So I. The fact that I can.

[Cody McGuffey]

Time freedom. I mean, is that location freedom for you?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, for me, it's the. The ability to work anywhere that I want. The ability to reach an audience that's global as well. So for me, I can be in Brazil. I can be here chatting with you, where we're going to get in a good work session after this as well. And being able to do that from anywhere is probably the biggest one as well. And emotional freedom, the ability to be free and to be able to be childlike, to be able to talk about what I want, to not feel censored, to. To be able to share my thoughts, not care about what anyone thinks. I think that. That all those are the three aspects for me of what I call freedom is you have to be freedom in all. All aspects, not just financial freedom.

[Cody McGuffey]

Do you. Would you say that? And to what degree does financial freedom buy the other freedoms?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, it's a good question. I think financial freedom is a big part of it, for sure. The problem with relying on just financial freedom, though, is you have a lot of people that, let's say, I don't want to single these people out, but let's say investment bankers or people that work in physical locations that are making a lot of financial freedom. But what happens is they are trying to keep up with the Joneses and they're trying to get the next car, they're trying to get the next house or the next version of this technology, and their expenses get so high and they're not really free. Like, I look at even some of my friends or family members that are making a lot of money. So on paper, they're really rich, but their expenses are so high where they're not able to travel because they still have to work. They feel like they're tied down to their jobs and they have to continue working more hours. And because of that, they're not emotionally free either. They're not spiritually free. So is that really freedom? Yeah, I don't feel like that is.

[Cody McGuffey]

I don't think so either. It's like the. The salesperson who was chasing the next deal, right? Like, yes, he stops. It stops.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Like the money flow kind of stops. And maybe he can live off of it for maybe another 12 months, but eventually it stops.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And I think about it, like, with. Yeah, sales is probably the best thing, but. Or the real estate agent, right? There's probably real estate agents, like, so many of them. I have family members that are real estate agents. And you always. You're only as good as your next deal, you know, Whereas the freedom that we're talking about here is it doesn't stop. It doesn't have to stop. It's. It's a significant amount, typically. It's usually like you're chasing a bigger number, but also you're, You're. You have this freedom component of I'm building things that will make money while I'm sleeping. So I don't feel like it always takes my energy or my time to make that dollar.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And that's the businesses that you've built historically.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. And it's really. Anyone that is currently trading time for money, I think they're in a position where if they are able to. If they get sick or if they're not able to come in and they're not able to trade their time for money, they're not able to make money, that's the end of it.

[Cody McGuffey]

Right.

[Sean Kim]

If they can't have the ability to make money when they're sleeping, to me, at this point, they're not free because they're still reliant. It's still reliant on them to be showing up at the office or making those calls to be able to earn money and provide a living for their family.

[Cody McGuffey]

Take me back to where it began. Now you. You. You live this free life from my perspective, who a lot of people inspire, are inspired by, and aspire to get to this point. You were raised in South Korea and then Canada, is that correct?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Can you take us back to the beginning and kind of like maybe the elevator pitch of.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Of your history?

[Sean Kim]

Damn. Yeah. We'll go way back. Yeah. So born in Seoul, South Korea, and when I was seven, Korea was going through a recession at that time, so the IMF was involved, international Monitor fund to try to save Korea. And my dad lost his job, so we had to fly all the way to Canada. We decided to go there because my uncle was living there. So we're there. I didn't know word of English. None of my parents knew a word of English. We just decided to completely start a new chapter in our lives. And, you know, I don't know how far you want me to go back with kind of how this relates to entrepreneurship. But, you know, when I first got to university in. In McGill, you had to speak French to get a job. So this is actually when I first started to kind of play around with entrepreneurship. So what I first started to do, I had this company called Totempass. And obviously we were in College. So we were all trying to save money. So it was a discount card. I think you guys have a version of this called, like, SPC or something like that. So it's a physical card that I started hand out. And I handed out maybe 20, 30,000 of these. And you could get discounts on places.

[Cody McGuffey]

Like Subway, Dairy Queen books, or not even coupon books. They're books, though, I remember, like, yes, totally.

[Sean Kim]

Exactly. So then I would go to every restaurant and say, hey, I've got like 10, 20,000 of these cards handed out across the school and McGill with the university that I went to, can you provide some sort of a discount? And then I would be able to get some sort of a monthly fee for promoting them. So this is kind of how I started to, like, hustle. And I would start getting, like, these mini checks here and there, $50 here and there. And I just got this entrepreneurship bug, and a lot of it was out of necessity because I wasn't able to get a job because I didn't speak French, the city that I lived in. And then this evolved into trying to create an app and trying to compete with Groupon for that. And it just kind of evolved from. So I think I've always had this entrepreneurship bug, which is not the coolest thing when you're coming from a Korean family, because I don't know if you know that saying, if you're an Asian family member, lawyer or doctor, you're either a doctor or lawyer or a failure. And I was neither of those. And I actually ended up dropping out of university on my last year because I got into this entrepreneurship program. It was called the next 36. And they basically select 36 of the kind of the top students across Canada. And it's kind of like the. Do you know the Thiel Fellowship program? What? Peter Thiel, for people that don't know. It's a program that Peter Thiel started where he would provide funding to make students drop out to start a business because he didn't really believe in the traditional education system. So this is a similar program done for Canadians. There was pretty top people involved, like former CEO of Facebook Canada, Goldman Sachs and so forth, to kind of bring in this new era of entrepreneurs. And luckily, I was able to get selected, and I started. You know, we started building this company. And funny enough, the entrepreneurship program that I was. It was supposed to be a reality show.

[Cody McGuffey]

No way.

[Sean Kim]

Because it was so dramatic, filled with this egoistic folks that were top of their class. And what they did is they randomly matched us to Become co founders. So the moment that we got selected through this competitive process, they just put randomly three people together and they said okay, you guys are not co founders. Pretty much a marriage as you know like legally binded. You have to think of an idea and you're going to start a company over the next six months together. Living together.

[Cody McGuffey]

If you're younger it is right. Probably enjoy that actually if you're as an adult too you're like yeah, I wonder personality because you just know it's not going to work.

[Sean Kim]

It's not going to work. Yeah. So it's funny, within the first like two months half of the businesses failed all because of co founder fights. So then people would started joining into other groups and stuff. So in the end our business also failed and within the first six months I dropped out of university, I had my business fail and I couldn't tell my parents that, that I dropped out. So I went through really conundrum. Ended up doing this 10 day solid meditation retreat in Hawaii where I had these.

[Cody McGuffey]

What retreat was it?

[Sean Kim]

Was it Vipassana?

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay, I heard of it.

[Sean Kim]

Okay, I haven't heard of it. Yeah, it's, it's a 10 day silent meditation retreat where you can't have your laptop, any technology, you can't speak to anyone, you can't look at anyone, you can't touch anyone, you're eating like once or twice a day and you're meditating for 10 hours a day out in the rainforest in Hawaii. So I slept in like a little.

[Cody McGuffey]

Little tent and it sounds very challenging to do.

[Sean Kim]

It was the hardest thing I, I've had to do at that time because I was such an extrovert. So imagine just being with your own thoughts for 10 days silently in your own little world.

[Cody McGuffey]

Could you talk out into the abyss?

[Sean Kim]

No.

[Cody McGuffey]

You're not supposed to.

[Sean Kim]

No. Because you're gonna distract other people as well. So within the first like day I think like 33 like 30% of the people left like we came back from the meditation. Those people left. You would hear people like grown as adults crying at 2am because these people were going through such an emotional experience.

[Cody McGuffey]

You don't want to do that. I'm curious, how did you even get attracted to something like that? Especially at a young age?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, Yeah, I was 20, 21 at that time. So a friend of mine actually did it and she had a drinking problem and she just told me about how much has changed her life. She was also similarly like an extrovert like myself. She stopped drinking after that. She kind of went through this spiritual path and kind of found herself stopped. She started to really focus on her business. I was like, damn, like, I want some of that, you know?

[Cody McGuffey]

So you were kind of just searching for meaning maybe at that time or searching for clarity.

[Sean Kim]

I was lost. Your life, I was completely lost. Yeah. Because imagine like I left all my friends, so I moved to New City. I was supposed to be this entrepreneur that, you know, all my friends drop out of school.

[Cody McGuffey]

You're gonna like, yeah, like, you know, be that next.

[Sean Kim]

And back in the day, like you drop out of school and it's kind of like, oh, you're like the next Zuckerberg, right? Like the Canadian. So I'm like, there was like a lot of pressure on me to perform. I got into this program and imagine like all my friends, all my parents, they think I'm doing this big thing and then little do they know, I'm like a failure. You know, in my mind at that time, our business failed. I felt lonely, didn't know what I wanted to do. I was broke. Like all the things that could go wrong was going wrong. And I couldn't tell anyone, couldn't tell my mom that I dropped out of school. I couldn't tell my friends that my business failed.

[Cody McGuffey]

And.

[Sean Kim]

And I just kind of had this pressure of trying to keep up an appearance that I was this successful little kid yet in the inside and what was actually happening was a complete disaster.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah.

[Sean Kim]

And I just didn't really have anyone else to go to. So that's really where started to, you know, things started to break down for me and I needed to search for something that would just allow me to find some clarity in terms of the things that I wanted to do.

[Cody McGuffey]

Fast forward through through that. Did you end up getting the clarity that you needed?

[Sean Kim]

I did, I did. And the clarity that I was trying to find was whether I was going to go back to university and go follow this traditional path of the education system and get a job or to do something wild, which is kind of what was calling me. And I ended up actually booking a one way ticket to South America.

[Cody McGuffey]

Where in South America?

[Sean Kim]

So I had to go to Peru because I couldn't afford a ticket to go from Toronto at that time to Argentina. And I ended up going to Peru first. But actually the reason why I did all this stuff, by the way, was I forgot one step that I'll just mention for people to know is I ended up getting a job at this company called Handy initially right after I dropped out, because that's what I thought I wanted to do was join a startup, got the job. I was their first product manager and I book a ticket, I paid for online, immigration lawyer, all that stuff because I couldn't afford at that time, packed up all of my bags, took a bus, fucking Greyhound bus from Toronto to New York. It was like 1am at that time and I had my little suit on and they rejected my visa at that time. That was really tough, devastating because I had my apartment rented in New York. I put all my savings into the immigration lawyer knowing that I would get a pretty decent job. And here I am at 3am at this time getting my fingerprint scanned. They took a photo of me back in the immigration office. Almost like treating me as if like I'm a prisoner, you know, and I was scared, right.

[Cody McGuffey]

So they're 22 at this time, right?

[Sean Kim]

21. 21, 21. Didn't know what to do. The whole point was that I would get the stable job and then be able to tell my friends and family that, you know, at least I'm now doing good, I'm living in New York, have a good job, couldn't even get that. So they put me in a police car, drove me from up upstate New York all the way up to Toronto, the border there. And I had to figure out my own way to get a Greyhound bus back. Didn't know what I was going to do at this time because I didn't have any money. So I ended up checking into a hostel for the first week and just lived pretty much in a hostel for seven days. Didn't know what the hell I was gonna do and was trying to brainstorm. At one point I was gonna sell like buy a bunch of stuff from Groupon and then resell it. Like just desperation to figure out how.

[Cody McGuffey]

Do you make ends meet, how do.

[Sean Kim]

You survive, just survive to survive. Had an old friend of mine that I knew from elementary that I figured out that was living in Toronto at that time and slept on his couch for like a month and a half. So through all of this, that's after that is when I did the silent meditation retreat. So from there I decided to book a one way ticket to Peru because I couldn't afford a ticket to go all the way to Argentina. I had like $700 in my name and I took a 72 hour bus ride from Peru to Argentina because that was the cheapest route that I could go. And it's this super dangerous path that you have to go through Chile. It's like one of the most dangerous Path. But it's so cheap. I was like, boom, let's do it. So that's. That's what happened, man. I landed in Argentina, had $700, and I don't know how much you knew about before Melly came in, they had the differences of currency. So they had like an official peso market. And then for people to trade that from dollars to. To pesos in the official market, if you go to the bank, it was like $1 was 8 Argentinian pesos at that time, which is crazy because now it's like 150 or something like that. But if you took the physical cash of the dollars that you had and you went into the streets, there's people that you'll see on the street corners that are selling like, cameo. Cambio. Cambio. And you take that physical cash because for them, think about it like the way we treat gold is the way they treat US Dollars because their inflations are so high. So from there, you would kind of go into this little alleyway and you would go into a room and you would trade your physical US Dollars into Argentinian pesos. And if you did that, you can double your money. So I literally went from having $700, I took all of the cash that I had and I turned it into 1400 or 1500 at that time in Argentina, pesos, which is all I needed. Right. To pay for my food, for my rent. So I pretty much, like went from having a month of rent, and then I was just going to go fly back to Toronto using the credit card, and then I turned that into, like two and three months just from that experience. I didn't even know at that time that you're gonna do that. Yeah, yeah. I had dictionary. I was trying to, like, negotiate using, like, Spanish words that I never learned.

[Cody McGuffey]

Because you didn't. You didn't speak Spanish.

[Sean Kim]

Speak a word of Spanish at that time. Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay. And does this all lead to where you are today when it comes to the language? Because you've. You've built a couple companies now, and I want to kind of jump forward just a little bit. Yeah, you've built two companies all around language.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Was that inspired because of this barrier that you had by going from just other countries to other countries to other countries without having this language thing?

[Sean Kim]

Can you talk about that a hundred percent? Yeah. So when I first got into Argentina at that time, this is 2014, the two methods of learning a language at that time was either you go through an immersion program, like going through a school, or going to Have a private tutor that you hire, we have to meet in person and all that stuff. Or you use YouTube or a free app like Duolingo.

[Cody McGuffey]

And was YouTube even a thing back in 20?

[Sean Kim]

You have some videos here and there, but, you know, it just wasn't the quality of the content that you have today. And there's two extremes that we saw there, which was one, you have to pay for this incredibly expensive program where you have to go in physically. So talk about freedom, right? Like, you have to really go in efficiently, show up, schedule it totally high cost. Then you have this free solution, which is good from a cost perspective, but you're kind of learning these useless words and words that aren't really going to help you. You would learn things like, you know, a cat is stuck in a tree. But what I really wanted to do was, you know, flirt with girls. I wanted to order stuff at the restaurant. I wanted to negotiate. There was a bit of a disconnect there. So the idea of the first company, Ripe, was to be able to connect teachers online and students where they can have the physical freedom. They can learn and take classes online at a much more cheaper cost and have an immersive learning experience where they're actually speaking, but it's also affordable and accessible. So that's really where the idea that came from. And, and the way it started was I just started connecting like my teacher in Argentina, like my actual teacher in Argentina that I had. And then I had a teacher in Colombia that I use as well when I lived there. And those were the first two people on the platform. And I just called up my friends in New York or Toronto and said, hey, like, you wanted to learn Spanish, right? And I just would connect them. There was no product built. I had, I used Calendly at that time when it first came out, I think we were like one of the early users of that. Put together a WordPress website and just started calling and emailing people. And I think we got to like $5,000 a month of revenue just doing that.

[Cody McGuffey]

Super inspiring. I want to pause on that for a second because that's so inspiring and that's how this is how businesses are built. You know, like we, we think about businesses and like after they're already successful. But these are the early stages of, like, if I want. If anyone listening to this is starting a business, this is how it starts. You have to do things that don't scale. First you have to connect a friend to your teacher. And like, you have to be the inter. You have to pretend like you're the website in between.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And then if it works, it proves like, oh, wow, they traded value and like, oh, look at, there's a 10, 20, 30 margin. Oh, got it. Now I'll throw a website in between.

[Sean Kim]

Yep.

[Cody McGuffey]

And how do we automate this? Okay, how do I connect two more people, get two more tutors on it? Very similar. When we. Before I launched Ever Be years ago. Very similar. I. I was playing with multiple tech. Tech products at this stage. And one of the projects that I had called Projects. Because they weren't companies yet.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Was called Handy Run. And it doesn't exist, by the way. If anybody wants to look it up, it might like the Facebook group or the Facebook thing might show up. But it was literally like Uber for construction workers. So picture yourself. Or let's say if you're a general contractor and you're like redoing a house and you have a project, you're. You, you. All of a sudden you realize you're like, oh, I need this pipe fitting. Oh, I really need this tool. Oh, I really need this part. And you'd have to literally send a person from your job who you pay $15 an hour to in us. Send them to Home Depot or a supply house. Yeah, go and do that. It takes four hours of. Three hours of time or two hours of time or whatever it is, and he has to come back and then you finally get the part. But it just, it's. It's actually a problem. Right. So that identified that as a problem. And so I'm like, cool, that's a problem.

[Sean Kim]

Were you doing construction before? Like, did you work in a construction job?

[Cody McGuffey]

No. Yeah. I grew up in blue collar construction. My family was always like in construction and in. To blue collar work for sure. So I was very familiar with.

[Sean Kim]

You knew the problem.

[Cody McGuffey]

I was that runner.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, yeah, I was that.

[Cody McGuffey]

They call him a runner. And I would go and run to the store and get this stuff.

[Sean Kim]

So.

[Cody McGuffey]

And then when I flip. Started flipping houses, I recognized that. I'm like, dude, we had a crew of five people here. But, but, but now he's always running. And so my point was with the, with this is, I'm like, there's a, there's potential business here, Airbnb. I'm sorry, Uber for this, this service. And there'd be a runner would always be getting like handyman stuff. Right. Doing stuff like this. I didn't have a website. I literally just posted something on Craigslist. I will go get your parts for you. And so I started Building relationships with regular people, sometimes for their home projects, and also relationships with general contractors or, you know, foreman's.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And I'd be like, dude, just if. When you need something, when you're on a job, call me. There was no website, there was no fancy, like, marketplace type of model, yet there was no map in the fancy map. There was like, dude, just call me. Here's my number. And they were starting to call. And I eventually got this call from this person who was redoing their garage, like, and they're doing like insulation. And it was an 800 order. It was like $800 GMV. Right? Gross value versus volume merchandise or whatever.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yes. Whatever it is, I'm like, dude, let's go. Didn't have a truck at the time. Borrow my, my, my stepdad or my, my father in law's truck. Yeah, go. Go to Home Depot, get all this stuff, deliver it to her house literally in the middle of the night pretty much. And dude, I made money. Like, there was a margin. It was like a $50 profit margin. Right. It wasn't a lot on that GMV, but.

[Sean Kim]

But that first dollar, I'm sure you're like, yo, let's go.

[Cody McGuffey]

Who cares? Yeah. And then, by the way, my phone died in the middle of that thing. So I end up having to buy a charger for like way markup at Home depot for like $25 for my phone charger. That ate into my margin. But the point was, is like, oh, this could scale if I just like started putting the technology in between. So, yes, I wanted to pause there for a second because this is how it works. You build stuff that doesn't scale. First you do stuff that doesn't scale, and then you eventually do things at scale.

[Sean Kim]

Yep, 100%. Yeah, I would. If I had to restart, like with, with everything that I know, that's probably what I would do again, you know what I mean? Like, I think the first step for people, when currently, if you're in a position where you're trading your time for money, the next level up from that is to be the facilitator of the people that are trading time for money. Right. So what I became was instead of being the language teacher myself, which I would be horrible. Right. Which I didn't really know much about. Right. The business that I was in was not in the language. The business that I was in was to connect people and to have a distribution platform that allows people to connect. That's the business that I was in. And instead of trading time for Money I was trading. I was allowing people to connect and my teachers were trading time for money. And I was the facilitator of that. And that's really one of the easiest things that you can build, actually, because you don't need a lot of technology for that when you're the facilitator. And for me at that time where I didn't have any money, the whole business cost like less than $100, dude. Like WordPress calendly. I was paying five, ten dollars a month for that and my time. I spent a little bit of money on Facebook ads to get the initial customers, but that was it. And if I had. If I didn't have any money and I didn't have any network, I was starting in Argentina. So, like, this isn't even like for people that are listening outside of the US and they're living in India or the Philippines, wherever it might be. Like, I didn't. I wasn't living in the US either. I wasn't living in Canada anymore. You don't have to.

[Cody McGuffey]

This was 10 years ago, right?

[Sean Kim]

This is 10 years ago. Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

So Ripe still exists, right?

[Sean Kim]

Still exists. It's under jumpspeak. So we facilitate. We kind of integrated it as part of the platform for people that want to learn and take live tutoring.

[Cody McGuffey]

With live tutoring.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

So can we talk about Jump Speak? And then we. We could jump around a little bit too. But Jump Seek is your. Is your baby.

[Sean Kim]

That's the flagship product right now.

[Cody McGuffey]

That's your flagship product right now?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And you're the CEO. You're the founder of Jump Speak. What is that? Okay, can we talk about Jump Speak?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Cody McGuffey]

All right, so how did it start and how many years ago?

[Sean Kim]

Dude? Same. Same. Same situation, right? Like, we talk about how we try to validate the product and we tried to launch the product, ideally without. Try to get customers without launching the product. That's basically what we did. So we had a video that we made in my apartment in Mexico City. We were filming some videos and I hired a production crew. Maybe spent like $150 for that day. I wrote the script myself. It's the video that's still up on our website right now. People can go watch it and Jezreet.com and it was this comical video that's similar to like a dollar shave Club video that went viral back in the day. And we spent like a day just filming that and took that same video. We launched a Kickstarter campaign made with Kickstarter And Indiegogo, we made about $100,000 from that. Didn't have a single product. All. All I wanted to do was validate whether this is a problem that exists and get initial set of customers without spending any money to see if this is something worth building and to get feedback on the customers as we build it. So that's what we did. That.

[Cody McGuffey]

Actually, I was.

[Sean Kim]

This. This was four years ago, five years ago.

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay. So a good amount of time, but also very young.

[Sean Kim]

Like pretty young.

[Cody McGuffey]

This is a kindergartner.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, yeah. Because we didn't have like ripe, we bootstrap completely. So we didn't have money to like pour back into. Into building, jump speak. Right. So we. I wanted to see, like, if we can just get a separate set of. Set of funds to be able to just build this separately.

[Cody McGuffey]

And when you do Kickstarter, I'm not super familiar. I've backed a couple Kickstarter things back back in the day when I was in college. It was just fun to like throw five bucks or even 50 bucks.

[Sean Kim]

Sure, yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Which seemed like a lot. And it was. It was cool at the time. But do you trade any equity or do you have any promises that you have to like, keep to these backers or. I forget what they're called.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, so you. I think to the platform with Kickstarter or indiegogo, you give 10% or 15% or something like that for the backers. It's really just to support the projects. So most projects actually on Kickstarter go out of business. So when customers, for us especially, an app is not very popular to do, most people launch physical products or. Yeah, mostly physical products like bags or shirts or technology, hardware stuff. So even backing a software product was not a popular thing to do back in the day. I think we were like one of the top software products that we launched on the platform because it's so rare and people are surprised. Like, I'm surprised that you guys actually still here ended up launching and, you know, kind of throwing that money away.

[Cody McGuffey]

They're kind of just pretty much, yeah, five bucks. It makes me feel good at night knowing that I got back to an aspiring entrepreneur.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Futuristic thinking. So, like, I'll back them. That's kind of the idea.

[Sean Kim]

Totally. Dude. We still have customers. I think, like three months ago, I had a customer email me and say, like, dude, I totally forgot that I backed this. Are you guys live?

[Cody McGuffey]

No way.

[Sean Kim]

I was like, yeah. Like, here's the lake, here's the code, dude.

[Cody McGuffey]

When I was in.

[Sean Kim]

It's so funny.

[Cody McGuffey]

When I was in college, I backed. And I felt so proud of this, too. I remember telling, like, somebody I backed this. It was a ring. It was like a. It was a. It was a ring where you can text with your hand. That was the concept, at least. Right. Where it's like, I would wear this ring and I can, like, write what I want to say.

[Sean Kim]

Huh.

[Cody McGuffey]

I'm not sure exactly how it works.

[Sean Kim]

But on your phone, like, it connects to your phone or something.

[Cody McGuffey]

It must have connected with my phone. Yeah. At the time.

[Sean Kim]

Huh.

[Cody McGuffey]

And this was probably 10. 10 years ago, I guess. Yeah, 10 or 11 years ago. They're definitely not. Not in business anymore. I'm pretty sure they're not in business. I don't remember what it's called, but I remember it was like, five or ten bucks. And I remember bragging about it, too, to somebody, like, oh, yeah, I backed that, you know. Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Kim]

And it's a community thing, for sure.

[Cody McGuffey]

Totally.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay. So you. You get a bunch of backers for, like, 100, 150,000.

[Sean Kim]

I think it ended up being, like, 110,000, something like that.

[Cody McGuffey]

It's a good amount of money. You're in Argentina at the time?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, I was in Mexico City at that time.

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, but still.

[Cody McGuffey]

So you're in business at this point?

[Sean Kim]

We're in business now, but there's a little bit of pressure now.

[Cody McGuffey]

Sure.

[Sean Kim]

Right.

[Cody McGuffey]

What's the pressure coming from, you think?

[Sean Kim]

Well, we have backers now. We have people that I feel responsible for, people that put real money in, that want a product that's. That's good. You know, they backed it for a reason, Especially for a software product. It's not very popular. Like, for a physical product, you can have pictures. People really. They can see the tangible good of it. How do you really display software on a video without having them actually, you know, touch it, feel it, play around with it? Really? They're backing the concept, so I felt a lot of pressure just to be able to deliver that. So, yeah. Yeah, we got to work pretty much.

[Cody McGuffey]

How long did it take for you to build? The first version took about a year.

[Sean Kim]

After that, it took about a year.

[Cody McGuffey]

How did you expect it to be built? Like, how long you expect?

[Sean Kim]

Dude, I expected it to be built, like, in three months, because it was really the first. I would say it's like the real, like, software that I actually built from this from scratch.

[Cody McGuffey]

Gotcha.

[Sean Kim]

Like, custom code, Custom code. Like, everything. Like, I had to think about all the design. I designed the whole app So I really, really dig in, dug into it and it just as you know, just one obstacle after another. So it took a lot of work.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah. And appreciate you sharing that too. Because a lot of people listening to this, they're not super familiar with like how software works works and there's a million ways you can go with this stuff. But really there's two categories in my, my mind and it's more like you can start with like the low code or the no code software. Nowadays like bubble is a, is a popular one.

[Sean Kim]

Sure.

[Cody McGuffey]

Great, great, great, great for something. If you want to like get something off the ground, you can kind of like you still have to be fairly technical to kind of get it to work, but you can get up and up and running pretty quickly. But you're always gonna be limited on what you can do because it's not your code.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Um, and then you'll have like custom code, which is kind of what you're talking about here is like it is your creation, your vision. You literally have to build everything from scratch.

[Sean Kim]

Yep.

[Cody McGuffey]

And same thing with ever be, it was custom. Everything's custom. Right. So there wasn't like, there's maybe ways you can kind of like hack together parts of what we do with a no code or low code solution. But like what the vision was not possible to do with no code or low code.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

So you have to build it custom and it always takes longer to build things custom.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Custom house, custom car, custom boots, like take longer.

[Sean Kim]

Yes. This is my whole thing about like people are so afraid of that with AI coming in that is just going to disrupt every single product that's out there. The reality is like it'll, it'll knock out a lot of the, the B players, people that are not building great software and that are not building great products because it's becomes this commoditized thing just like you know, no code bubble, all these platforms did. But to be able to compete with someone that is putting their heart energy, their taste, their, their style from, from, from the ground up and working on it every single day, like that is still going to rise above any sort of AI based code that's going to be built out. Right. So I believe that and I think that's still going to be the case where the A players will still continue to rise and that'll, that will be differentiated constantly and you'll have a lot of B players that are just going to get knocked out totally.

[Cody McGuffey]

Which makes it probably better for the market anyway. Probably right. Because the best products should win.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. And they'll win big. They'll continue to win big.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yep. I agree with this. I want to talk about jump. Speak about like what it does first. So everyone can have kind of have context.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And then also then jump in maybe to the business side of things. Of like we talked a little bit about the business, but maybe kind of two separate compartmentalized conversations on that. So what is Jumpspeak? What's the main thing it does?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, so Jumpspeak is what Ripe was supposed to be doing. We know from the immersion focus aspect, but it's in an Apple form, so it's allows it to be even more accessible, even more affordable for the mass where we bring immersion focused language learning in your pocket.

[Cody McGuffey]

Beautiful. So what would you compare it to? So is there a comparison like on the market that's useful for someone if they haven't heard of Jumpspeak?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, it's hard to compare because I think when most people think about learning through an app, they think about Duolingo, which is the free version of it. And it's a great app for people that are starting. It's a gamified version. You learn the basic vocabulary, basic grammar, but it's not going to get you to be conversation fluent. It's not going to get you to that level after you reach a certain level of basics. So the way I think about it is like it's Duolingo and a human tutor combined.

[Cody McGuffey]

Oh, cool.

[Sean Kim]

And that's really what we bring in terms of an experience for you.

[Cody McGuffey]

So if, if is it built for somebody like me, for example, who I speak one language, English, and I've learned Spanish because I grew up in San Diego, California. I've learned like that, that a little bit. And I can have a conversation probably in Spanish, not a very good one, but I could have, I could definitely work my Mexico.

[Sean Kim]

Okay.

[Cody McGuffey]

Guaranteed.

[Sean Kim]

How about Espanol?

[Cody McGuffey]

And is that for me if I wanted to like improve my Spanish and if I wanted to also maybe pick up another language or is this too advanced for me?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. So if you already have the basics for, for Spanish, you're like the perfect customer for that. Right. You'll still want to complement it perhaps with learning some grammar, some vocabulary. Because the kind of the sweet spot of what we provide is to help you feel more confident in real life situations. So you're role playing different scenarios that you would encounter if you were in Mexico, if you were in Spain, ordering coffee at a restaurant, at the beach, at the Uber Cool. And you're simulating Those situations just like real life. Real life, if you're trying to be a pilot, you don't just go into a plane right away. The way you actually become a pilot is you, you go into a simulation room, you practice exactly what it's going to be like. And that way when you're actually in the real life situation, you're able to mentally, you know, compare, compartmentalize that. Right. What happens is a lot of people learn the basics of vocabulary and grammar on an app like Duolingo and then as soon as they get into real life conversation, what happens?

[Cody McGuffey]

It frees up.

[Sean Kim]

It completely frees up.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah.

[Sean Kim]

This is so common for myself, for pretty much anyone that's learning a language can relate to this. And we just kind of took it to first principles, like how do you actually become a confident speaker when you're in a real life situation? In a foreign language, you simulate a situation and you allow yourself to practice that. And then we used AI on top of that to give you personalized feedback on your grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, conversation skills so that you're not just practicing speaking, but you're able to get personalized feedback on top of that.

[Cody McGuffey]

So. And what if I wanted to now learn French and I have zero French experience. Right. Zero French knowledge.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Is it the best tool for that?

[Sean Kim]

For me, I would say you want to get the basics in first. We are working on a series of different products that, you know, that are coming up, that can't announce just yet.

[Cody McGuffey]

Cool.

[Sean Kim]

But that with that program we're going to be guiding you from all the way from a beginner to, to helping you.

[Cody McGuffey]

So you're filling that gap. So you've started with this main big problem that yes, you guys can serve, which is like the simulation learning. Yeah. And then now you're kind of working backwards, like solve these other low hanging fruit. Like, okay, let's teach people from beginning to totally.

[Sean Kim]

And this is, this is, this is classic blue ocean strategy. Right. Blue ocean versus red ocean.

[Cody McGuffey]

Let's talk about that. A lot of people haven't heard of this. Right. In this conversation.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. So blue ocean. It just means that I think the reference was that if you're in a red ocean, this is where all the sharks are. So where all the blood is. And the blue ocean is supposed to be this clear space that feels a little bit safer within the big ocean that you're currently swimming in. And the whole idea of that is when you're entering a market and most people are going to be entering a market that already exists, that's probably a little bit competitive with other players in the market. You want to find a niche that not a lot of people are targeting. And that niche doesn't have to be big initially. The whole idea is that it's so noisy in the world of business and in the market that you're in is you have to be able to stand out somehow. And people are always going to ask you how are you different from whatever the biggest competitor is. So for us, anytime we, even now, when we speak to customers or people that haven't heard about us, how are you different to Duolingo? And I knew that coming in that we had to position ourselves as the other side of the market which is a complete focus on immersion. And we weren't even targeting beginners at that time, not a big market at that time, but it was so untapped that if we were able to dominate that, if we were able to really tap into that, that'll be a hundred million dollar business alone. And I think people have to think about that differentiation aspect. Don't try to be better, try to be different. That's the first mentality that I think people should always focus on. And then from there you can expand into what other people are doing into the bigger market. But at least you have this differentiation of how people think about you as a Positioning is really one of the most important aspects. I think if you're entering into a business today and it's going to get even more competitive. So I think this is going to be increasingly more important is like how do you position yourself to be different? Because language learning is incredibly competitive market even today. So imagine if we were just trying to be a Duolingo competitor. We wouldn't win. We wouldn't have won.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah. It's basically like David and Goliath, right? It's like David and Goliath. You have this story of a giant versus a normal boy, right? And I'll probably butcher the story, but the point was, is like if you have this giant Goliath and you have David, this little tiny boy, if David tries to go head to head with Goliath at playing Goliath's game, if he tries to use his strengths and try to wrestle Goliath and maybe tries to like punch Goliath and, and tries to like even sword fight Goliath, yeah, he's going to get squashed. So therefore he decides to like take a step back. What are my unique differentiators? What are my strengths that Goliath does not have? Got it. Space is my Strength.

[Sean Kim]

Yep.

[Cody McGuffey]

Strength is. Strength is not my strength. Like literal muscle speed is probably on my, on my side.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And sure enough, I have this tool in my pocket called a sling and that helps me utilize my space. And he puts the rock inside the stone inside of his sling and he whips this thing around. He's freaking expert at using the sling. And he whips Goliath in his head. The big giant, big giant falls.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

In one, in one stone. This Goliath is this, this figure of like Duolingo for you in this case.

[Sean Kim]

Right.

[Cody McGuffey]

And maybe you don't kill Duolingo. It's not your, that's not your mission.

[Sean Kim]

No.

[Cody McGuffey]

But the point is, is like you're trying to carve out your space.

[Sean Kim]

Yes. You have to send out and they.

[Cody McGuffey]

Don'T have to die for you to, for you to live. That's the beautiful thing about business, capitalism and entrepreneurship. It, it's a. There's abundance, success.

[Sean Kim]

In fact, they fuel us. Like the reason why we even exist today is because of how big Duolingo got. Right. Because they're feeding us customers in, in a lot of ways.

[Cody McGuffey]

Absolutely. But you, you, you had to use it from like, you had to use your unique differentiators.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Which was your slang of like. Okay, got it. We're going to, we're going to use this and we're going to lean into this and be the best at this.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And that's why you've won so far one in your definition. And now you're going to step. You're going to get stronger in other ways too.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. And I think that's, that's a great point. I think people have to think about what they're uniquely positioned to build that's going to provide them some sort of a competitive advantage. Like if they're just chasing trends because this is what everybody else is doing, but they don't have the experience, the skill sets to be able to actually provide something unique to the market, something uniquely valuable to the market. They're not going to win in the long run. Right. So I heard this great analogy from Scott Adams, who's the co founder of. He's the creator of Dilbert. I don't know if you heard of him.

[Cody McGuffey]

I haven't, no.

[Sean Kim]

So he has this analogy where he talks about there's two ways to be great in this world. You could be the 0.1% and be great at one thing. So you have the Warren Buffetts of the world, who's the top investor. You have the LeBron James of the world or the Kobe Bryant who can become the best basketball player, but that's like 0.0001%. Or you can combine two or three things that you can be the top 10% in the world, which is a lot easier based on your unique experience, unique skills. And the things that you're willing to learn doesn't have to be the skills you have today. And combine those things where if you were trying to imagine a Venn diagram of three things or four things, that middle ground where you're combining all of those three things is your unique advantage. So for example, like for me it was, I was uniquely positioned to start a language lab business because there's not a lot of people that were living in Argentina that had access to tutors like I had. So I had a uniquely positioned advantage.

[Cody McGuffey]

And you experienced a problem in multiple cultures, multiple different regions. Like you understood this problem.

[Sean Kim]

Yep, I had the customer side, which is people that were willing to and had the money to pay for it. They didn't have access to cheap Spanish tutors in Argentina unless they lived there, which is very few people. So I had access to the supply side as well. I had an interest in learning languages just based on my background of learning English at that time, learning French, learning Spanish when I lived there. So I was like deep into what people wanted. And I also had a startup background. I had the marketing expertise to be able to actually get customers at scale and be dangerous enough where I can, I can play around. I wasn't software knowledgeable, but I had enough skills to be able there. So I had those three things combined and there think about like how many people actually have that versus if I was trying to be the top 0.1% at a specific field. It's just, it's much harder for what I had to do at that time and the skill sets that I had.

[Cody McGuffey]

What I hear mostly here is your resourcefulness. Like you're using your resources, like your experiences are your resources. You have this experience over here, here, here, and pretty soon you like this individual resource over here. Of problem with language learning. Language is probably useless by itself. The tech is fairly useful, but it's like kind of like not that useful, you know, by itself. And then where you live, your location, your marketing experience is useful, but not like super useful by itself. But then as soon as you like put all these recipes together.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Or these ingredients together into a recipe and all of a sudden you have this thing. And what I'm hearing is like a resourceful entrepreneur that you've always been. And that's the story. I think that's the truth of it is you just. You can be thrown into whatever and you're gonna like, find resources around you to use them.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And you're gonna turn like, make some lemonade out of lemons. Right?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, you have to.

[Cody McGuffey]

Right.

[Sean Kim]

You know this as a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

[Cody McGuffey]

Totally. And it's very similar for. For. For us with Everbee. Is. Is like I just pulled from a bunch of different experiences and pulled them into one. Like, I had the real estate experience, which is not directly tied to it, but I underwrote. And I underwrote probably a thousand, 1500 deals, you know, on a spreadsheet. So I'm like, okay, I could figure out how to put a business model together.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

So I understood the numbers of like, okay, what's margins? And like, how all this stuff. So, like, I pulled from that. And then like, I worked at Qualcomm and Sprinkler, which is the software companies, tech companies. So, like, I had that. Like, I could pull from that. Oh, I also handled the hiring, hired like a thousand people at the companies. Okay, got it. I can like, pull from that. And like you and then a marketing. I kind of like, had these side hustles in E commerce, so I get to pull from that. And so like, mixed it all together. You have a data research company. Yeah, at first.

[Sean Kim]

Right.

[Cody McGuffey]

And. And it'll continue to expand. It'll continue to use our resources just like you're going to continue to use your resources. And my point with that sharing that is for anyone listening to this, you may not know what you are uniquely positioned for and in your market or in your world yet. But it is a skill and a practice, a thing that you practice and to look around, what are you kind of good at? What are you gifted at? What do people tell you you're good at? Kind of. Or maybe even better question is, what do people ask you for advice on? Often for me, it was like, advice was how to. How do you build a business? How do you do a marketing funnel? How do you stay positive? Like, there's. We all have these little things that we're being asked for from advice from our friends. I'm curious, what do you think about that?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great. I think, like, what. What are the people that people come to your advice for? For me also, it's what comes easy to you that's hard for others. What's like, effortless for you? What. What gives you energy where for others it might suck up energy. Right. I think we talk a little bit about like, kind of like personal branding, podcasting, stuff like that. For some people, it. It kind of like, it's not like the people's favorite things to do. Whereas for me, it's like, I love it. I love, I love being able to like, you know, meet interesting people. All that stuff that gives me energy. For some people, like, marketing is just like, oh, like they can't, they don't know how to start. They feel like they don't know really how to present their message. They don't think about the psychological aspects of it just wasn't their interest. Whereas some people that, they love talking about that. I hate spreadsheet stuff. But, you know, now we have someone that in our team that just does that all day. They, that gives them energy to think about like what comes effortless to you that you're good at also. So combining those two things that people may come to advice for, that's just a hassle for most people. Just that alone, that's your competitive advantage. Because in order to win in anything, you have to run a marathon. So if something comes effortless to you, that means you can do it in a sustainable long term and most people are going to stop. Think about the number of podcasts. I think the average podcast per show is like three episodes wild. It's crazy.

[Cody McGuffey]

Like, so as long as you suggest.

[Sean Kim]

A four, if you just, you're already winning, so that's like what you're competing against. And I think the same thing goes for business. I think the same thing goes for personal branding or money. Like, it's, it's whatever you can do and that gives you energy over a long term. And I think that's really important for people to think about.

[Cody McGuffey]

I completely agree and it's interesting. It's. It's contrary to what I probably believed at the beginning. We. Everybody wants to get rich quick. I mean, if we had a choice between like taking longer to get rich and then go shorter to get rich, like you're going to kind of by default, you're going to choose like, well, what's the fastest path to like, whatever that goal is, you know, and that's human nature. It's a mirage. It's a mirage. And usually the ones, I love how you said this, but basically the, the ones who just stick with it for a longer period of time, you're gonna. By default, just because you exist, you're going, you're probably going to win.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Like, just because you're in business. And that's why I remember getting this great advice. It wasn't even to me. I think I watched a video of this years ago and I still think about it and the guy was like talking to some kids and she's like, dude, sometimes the kid, the goal is just like, just stay in business. Just stay in business. Like, don't have to grow, just don't die. And by, by default, everyone else is going to kind of filter out and kind of like slowly give up around you.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And you'll just be the one just still standing.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And by, just by default, you'll, you'll have a chance to win.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. I mean, I mean, we would talk about valuations and talk about exit strategy as well. Right. If you think about, if you were to sell a company in terms of what private equity or your acquirers are looking for, just the fact that you stayed in business, your business doesn't have to have grown. Maybe it's grown like 1% or even it stayed flat. But if you have a consistent history, let's say two, three, five years of that, that's going to give you a higher valuation, right? Yeah, Just, just, just the fact that you stayed in business, people like to see the consistency of that. So that'll give you a higher valuation just for time alone.

[Cody McGuffey]

No way.

[Sean Kim]

Right. So, I mean, makes sense.

[Cody McGuffey]

Of course, if I'm buying a business, like, I want some time proven.

[Sean Kim]

Right. Because they're going to do, you know, discounted cash flow valuation and they're going to see how long has that been generating cash for whatever it might be. So they're going to be able to see from that there's a history of predictable cash flow or profits in the business and that will give them the confidence to pay a higher multiple in your business. So, yeah, just like that alone, that actually just translates to exit value of your business. If you can do that.

[Cody McGuffey]

Totally. And people listen to this too. It's like it doesn't always have to be your same business. I mean, ideally it should be like you work on the same thing for 10 years, for example, with you as ripe. But sometimes you have to make a move and pivot and like, that's where you have to use your best judgment of like, pivot into another business. But even the same principle still applies. Just don't give up the idea. Like, yeah, keep going, launch another business and then get quicker at it. But eventually you want to get into the same business for like 10 years.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Build something that's meaningful. Would you agree with that for sure.

[Sean Kim]

Dude, I had doubts all the time. I was like, is this the best business that I should be in? Should I be building a SaaS business? Should I be building this business? You know that that's, that's a whole parallel universe that I'll. I won't cross right now, right at this time of my life. So I decided to just focus on, on one thing. And there was a period of time because of the fact that I was being distracted so much. I had four businesses going on at one time. I had a E Commerce business. Same a blue light blocking glass business. I had a business where we're trying to do book summaries. And I had ripe. And then I was starting jumpspeak all at the same time.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah.

[Sean Kim]

And I was doing like consulting, all that stuff as well. So maybe like five hustles. None of them were generating revenue.

[Cody McGuffey]

Is that funny, man?

[Sean Kim]

They were all like either decreasing in revenue. They weren't, they weren't really. They were all just time suckers. Dude. It was the worst.

[Cody McGuffey]

Dude, that is so funny because I, my wife is probably like laughing, listening to this too, because there was a time where I was like, babe, let's just start this business. Yeah. She's like, you already have two. I'm like, I know, but like, who cares? I could do everything.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Like this 10x thinking of like, I can do everything. But it's, it's beautiful. But there's downsides. And how did it make you feel when you had those businesses? I know that you, in hindsight, I understand how, what the trade off was, but how did it make you feel at the time? Did make you feel important or did it make you feel successful?

[Sean Kim]

None of those. What it really. If I think about what I was going through psychologically at that time, it was because of fear.

[Cody McGuffey]

Oh.

[Sean Kim]

Because I had doubts that the business that I was currently in, the main business that I wanted to build, wasn't going to succeed and that I wasn't the type of person that could build a big business. And I still kind of go through that right now.

[Cody McGuffey]

Sure we do.

[Sean Kim]

Right. There's different levels to it. And this was my safety haven psychologically and financially to try to diversify my bets so that if this business fails, then, oh, at least I have two or three to rely on. And that's really what it was. It was me being afraid that I might fail and I had a safety net to go back to. And in the end, none of them worked because of the fact that I had that it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's not the same thing as investing. Because when you're investing, it makes sense to diversify your bets because it's a passive thing. It's not going to be something where you have to trade your time to multiply your money. But when you're building a business and you don't have $60 million of funding and it's just bootstrapped, and it's mostly you and your co founder, even if you're not spending time on it, it's being. Your mental energy is being occupied by that and you're not giving every single thing to this main business. And that's really what the downfall was.

[Cody McGuffey]

It's beautiful.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

I couldn't agree with you more. I almost wonder if it's a rite of passage for everyone to kind of go through this, to like, have multiple businesses and multiple products and multiple things, multiple focuses before they actually realize this. I. I try to talk to people in a way that's like, don't do that. But I almost wonder if, like, everyone just has to go through that as fast as possible.

[Sean Kim]

They might, man. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you're always going to wonder.

[Cody McGuffey]

Shiny things syndrome is a real thing. Yep. And as soon as you can get the discipline to actually put your blinders on. On one thing, that's where the breakthroughs start to happen.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And when with. For us, it was like, my, My wife and I, we had again, like three. Three businesses, I think, at one time that were all shitty businesses, you know, but we looked kind of legit and we felt maybe a little jet once in a while. Like, sure, three businesses. But like, all of them were like nothing.

[Sean Kim]

Now. Where, where was that? So for me, it was fear. It was fear failing in the main business. So I had a backup. What was the psychological trigger for you of starting multiple businesses?

[Cody McGuffey]

It was this, this idea, this concept of the average millionaire has seven sources of income. It's a bad advice.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, it's bad advice. Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

I understand where it comes from, but it's. It's poor advice for 95, 98, 99 of the world. Yeah. And so it was that mixed with fear. Certainly you hit on that. I didn't think about that, but it's certainly a lot of fear of just like, well, this way, if this one is not successful, then this one will be.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And I didn't put. I didn't give enough respect to the amount of energy.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

That it takes to actually build a meaningful business.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And so then as soon as I started to realize, oh, the power of focus and manifestation and, and where focus goes, energy flows, that's when the breakthrough started to happen. And I'm talking breakthroughs like. Right. We're talking millions of just that. That's the difference.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

Was focus compounding on the same thing over and over and over again. And I got so obsessed with this idea that like I'm like we need to sell everything. I'm talking how like we sell our house. Yeah. We need to go rent, take all that cash. Let's, let's put into the double down.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Oh, we have rental property. Sell it. Oh, we have this other house, this other land over here. That's like generating some passive income. Sell it. Like if it takes one hour of my mental energy a week, month, it's one hour that I didn't have that one breakthrough idea in the main business that has is going to do the huge exponential quantum leap growth. And that is a next level confidence. I think that I had to go through all of those things in order to reach that point though. But it was a big breakthrough because it was contrary to like, like what do you mean you're selling your house? What do you mean you're selling this passive income? Oh, you have another passive income property. That's a dream.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

No. Sell everything.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

If it's not contributing to this one goal, it needs to be cut out. And that's where meaning meaningful things are built, I believe.

[Sean Kim]

Totally. Yeah, I can totally relate to that. And I think it's easier when you don't have a main business that's generating a lot of revenue or successful to be looking over your shoulders and trying to think about other businesses. Because if you're doing, let's say a million dollar business and you grow that by 50%, you know, with that scale it's, it's, it's possible. Right. 20%, let's say. So you're generating 200,000 to 500,000 just by focusing on that business. If you were to try to generate 200,000 or 500,000 in a new business and the amount that it takes, it's pretty fucking hard. Right. Versus just staying on the current business. But if you have a business that's only generating $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month and all of a sudden this starting new business seems pretty attractive because even if you focus on this current business and you grow it by 50%, you're not really going to generate more money versus starting a new one that Could. So you always have this optimism, grass is greener effect always when you're first starting out. So I totally relate to that for anyone that feels that way, because that's pretty much how I felt. The business wasn't generating revenue, so I was like, why don't I try to generate money with this revenue? Now we're getting to the scale where, like, every incremental improvements that we make in the business of our current business based on its size will have an enormous effect versus trying to spend my energy and time into starting a new business. So, yeah, I think it gets hopefully easier for some people as a scale. So I think that's good for people to know that in stage two or three, that becomes easier because, you know, you can just scale that. But in the beginning, it's very tough.

[Cody McGuffey]

What is Jump speaks. Whatever you're willing to share. What is the revenue of jumpspeak today?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, so we're. We're in the eight figures. We're in the eight figures. Um, yeah, we won't say specific numbers, but we're. We're in the eight figures.

[Cody McGuffey]

And for anyone that doesn't is doing the zeros right now math. That means It's a 10 million plus.

[Sean Kim]

10 million plus.

[Cody McGuffey]

And would you consider annual recurring revenue or what does it look like for Jim Speak? Okay, yeah.

[Sean Kim]

Annual recurring revenue.

[Cody McGuffey]

Annual recurring revenue.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. And a lot of that is recent. A lot of that is not. I mean, think about when we launched was three and a half, four years ago. So, yeah, we. We've kind of scaled that pretty quickly from where we were. And I think a lot of that was the accumulation of the experience and the knowledge that I had in terms of how to scale the business. But yeah, regardless, it, it is pretty crazy what, what you can do when you just focus on one thing in a vehicle that compounds, that has the scalability aspect. And we could talk about the forms of leverage that exist in the modern economy and the modern entrepreneurship today. But if you can get there and you can find a business that can scale and you focus on it, there's no limits you can con. You can continuously compound that and scale that.

[Cody McGuffey]

How much do you think about net worth or valuation of your business and businesses?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, this, this ebbs and flows, honestly. So we have spoken with investment bankers and we're in constant conversations with potential acquirers that are interested in the business and some sales.

[Cody McGuffey]

Maybe in your future.

[Sean Kim]

We'll see. We'll see. Like, I, I love what we're doing now. I love what we're building and, and I feel for us, we're, we're playing in a 50 billion dollar marketplace and it's only going to continue to grow as the shift from offline. A lot of that is offline learning. Right. So as, as people shift from offline learning into online learning, the online learning app market is only going to skyrocket even if the market stays the same. So there's so much room for us to grow. And I think we're in this interesting time where we're riding this wave of AI that we're now starting to play with some pretty crazy stuff where the idea of the original vision that I had of making immersion learning accessible is going to come to fruition to a scale that didn't even exist two years ago.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah, you have like AI people you can literally have conversations with about any subject. It's, it's going to be really special.

[Sean Kim]

It's wild. Right. And this is like a, for the particular niche of language learning especially. It's just such a good fit for using and leveraging AI, for, for good, for education, for connecting people. And yeah, it's an, it's, it's a.

[Cody McGuffey]

Really interesting place in your conversations that you've had with investment bankers. You get to learn a lot in these conversations. Yeah. Particularly about multiples and valuations of companies.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

What is the valuation multiple on a company like Jump Speak, Duolingo, these, these companies that are like that, like for listeners, the multiple is like there's different multiples depending on the business. Sometimes it's an EBITDA multiple. Yeah. On profit, like what is the multiple? Like that's the, you know, time make a hundred thousand dollars in profit times 3x of, of that profit is a $300,000 valuation of the business. You could sell that company for three business 300,000. For apps and software, typically the multiple is different and it's usually based on annual recurring revenue and it's usually a higher multiple and that depends on the revenue scalability and the size. What is your, what have you been seeing or what do you talk about with these bankers?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, so there's different answers to that. There's a public valuation of, let's say a company like Duolingo and then there is private valuations that you would get from strategic acquirers or private equity. So generally a public company like Duolingo, they'll get a higher valuation. So I don't like to use public companies as a reference point.

[Cody McGuffey]

What do they get public? Right.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, they would probably get like 8-10x revenue.

[Cody McGuffey]

Cool.

[Sean Kim]

For that size. Right. For private companies, I would usually use public data of other companies that have been bought. So for example, I think one of our competitors, they were bought by a big strategic company. They were doing about 10, 11 million and I think they were bought by 120 million. So it's about a 10x revenue. 10x revenue. So there's multiple companies that I think can. You can use to reference that point.

[Cody McGuffey]

That checks out everything that I've read. Like as soon as you. Yeah. In software or recurring revenue plays, particularly tech enabled is like up to. So it's 0 to 10 million ARR. Annual recurring revenue. You're typically valued at like a 5x to 7x multiple.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

So that that company, as soon as you flip that to the 10 million ARR, it kind of starts to turning into 10x multiple. Is that kind of what you've seen also?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. So I think B2B SaaS also is a little bit different than B2C or B2C SaaS.

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay.

[Sean Kim]

We're kind of in between because we're B2C SaaS.

[Cody McGuffey]

But for, let's say a better way or worse way.

[Sean Kim]

Worse way. Yeah. Because B2B has stickier generally retention. It makes sense for B2C, let's say E commerce stores or people that are selling digital courses, whatever it might be. Generally it's going to be based on ebitda. It's not going to be based on recurring revenue because sometimes they don't have recurring revenue. So that's a good kind of distinguishing point that for people to know. The interesting thing is as you get into higher multiples of ebitda. Sorry, higher millions of ebitda, you're going to have a higher multiple. So it's kind of the opposite of what most people think about when they buy wholesale. So if you're trying to buy a bunch of toothpaste or toilet paper, you're going to get a discount because you're going to buy a bunch of stuff. In the world of buying or selling your business, the bigger you are, the bigger the multiple that you get. Why is that? Well, it's because generally the bigger company will have a team of people that are in high leadership positions so that it's not necessarily reliant on you. It's been established there's a product market fit, there's customers that want it. So the risk for someone to be able to get their money back is a lot lower. So they're willing to justify paying a higher multiple for that. So usually from a multiple perspective if you hit around 5 million or higher, you. Sorry, it's initially, it's around 2 million or 3 million, you attract a new pool of buyers. If you are 5 million EBITDA or higher, you attract even a bigger pool. This is really when private equity starts.

[Cody McGuffey]

To come talking about here, not. Not revenue, ebitda.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. You could also use that for SAS as well. But maybe for SAS it's going to be around 10 million AR. That's when you can start to attract private equity players. And that's really where the multiples get even higher. You could probably put a 20 to 50% bump on the multiple that you would get because, number one, you attract a higher pool of hires and that would create a competitive bidding process and people will start to bid up.

[Cody McGuffey]

So are you guys mostly being. Do you think that your. Most of your valuation will come from EBITDA or it'll come from recurring?

[Sean Kim]

It's hard to say, man. The way it would likely work when we were. When we're gonna sell a business is we would put our numbers up and we wouldn't put a price on it. So the way we would go into market when we're working with investment bankers is we would put together our whole numbers, our business, our strategy, our growth, and we would allow people to bid for whatever the bit. Whatever they think the business is worth. And that's kind of a negotiation plan in general. We have not done that yet.

[Cody McGuffey]

What do you see? And I kind of want to like, put a bow on this thing for, for anyone wondering this, if you're. So you talked about like the physical product business, the course creator business, it's based on ebitda. Software traditionally is based on revenue because there's more margin and stuff. You can pull levers, you can pull after they acquire the business and they can make it profitable quickly. So that's why it's not really fair to do it off profit necessarily always in SaaS, like they can use a combination of things.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

But I mean, if we're talking eight figures, I think it's comfortable to say that it's eight figures. Times eight to ten is the valuation of, of what you've built. And that's a special thing, man. And just to be really clear on this, you we just said that you had 10 million in AR plus plus of revenue, just to be very clear, times 8 or 10, whatever it is, we're talking 80 to $100 million of, of a enterprise value of something that you built in four years.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, I don't really think about it, to be honest with you.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Sean Kim]

I don't really think about it.

[Cody McGuffey]

Now you're, now you're thinking about it? Yeah. How does it make you feel now?

[Sean Kim]

Now we're thinking about it. To be honest, I feel the same. I don't really overthink about it unless, until, until if something was to happen.

[Cody McGuffey]

Because it's real. It's not real. Yeah, it's on paper. And this is paper money.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, this is, this is paper money. But also I think part of it is I'm the same person, you know what I mean? And I'm kind of just, just the fact that all of a sudden if I have 80 to 100 million, I don't think I'm going to really feel that much different about myself because I'm already good with who I am and I think a lot of it is just kind of betting on yourself. So if we did have an exit, like that would definitely be life changing for me.

[Cody McGuffey]

No question.

[Sean Kim]

For sure.

[Cody McGuffey]

And also everybody around you.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, exactly. And I think the idea of calling yourself a hundred million dollars CEO, all that stuff is great for credibility, but I'm just every day still working, man. It's, it's, it's.

[Cody McGuffey]

Yeah. No matter what you're.

[Sean Kim]

If we were to sell the company, I would be back to work the next day building something new or whatever it might be. So, yeah, do I want to sell the company? Perhaps, Perhaps one day. But I'm not really thinking about it too much. I guess it's interesting that you brought that up because I really haven't thought about like. Yeah, like what it would be because even if we were to go to the market, I, I didn't want to set the expectation only to have it lowered, perhaps if, if we were to sell the company. So I, I just thought about what's actually a business that's potentially sellable or that's a great business and if we go to market, you know, that's, that's what it is.

[Cody McGuffey]

I think it's, it's, it's an important conversation to have even if, because you're such a humble person and you answered that exactly how I'd expect you to answer, which is like, I'm still the same person. I'm a human being and I'm not going to change a whole lot just because I'm worth, or not worth liquid 80 million to $100 million. Probably more than that, by the way, because you said plus eight figures. But the truth is, you're such a good person and when you. When good people have more resources, they tend to be better people, even better people. And it's a special thing. And people listening to this. Right now, we're talking about building businesses and creating a life of freedom and financial freedom, Location, freedom, time, freedom, all these things.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

And when they hear that, that of like, wow, I didn't realize it was an option, and I didn't know that was an opportunity to build a business from four years and be worth 80 to 200 million dollars. And if it keeps growing like, it'll be. This is how companies are built. This is how, like, life change, generational wealth is built through one, one business. And I think it's important to almost not be so humble in situations like this sometimes, too, and be like, dude, you guys can do this.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

It's hard work. We're not talking about you doing easy things here. No one said anything about easy. But it could be really worth it.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah.

[Cody McGuffey]

To really get good at something like this.

[Sean Kim]

Yes. Agreed. Yeah. Especially if you're playing in a world where you have infinite scalability. I think, like, leverage is something worth talking about. Like the. I think Noel Ravican talks about this, where you have kind of the. The bottom layers of leverage, which is trading your time for money without any tools. And then you have tools that allows you to do that in a more efficient manner. That's one level up. And then from there, you're managing labor, which is kind of the oldest form of leverage that we had. The next level up from that is you're managing capital, which is also kind of old. You have still venture capitalists. You have people that were investing money, and money can compound. And then you have the newest form of leverage, which is probably one of the best ones that you can get, which is code and media. So that's what we're doing, Right. We have social media, podcasting, YouTube. That's infinite scalability, zero cost of reproduction, and you can reach a global audience. Same thing with code. One person can write a great piece of code, and they can reach millions and people, billions of people, without needing to trade your time for money.

[Cody McGuffey]

And the cost of goods sold is.

[Sean Kim]

Cost of goods sold. And it's especially powerful if you can combine those two forms of leverage that we have today and combine that with capital and combine that with leverage. So I think people listening, I think the first basis is that you have to get into a business that has a lot of leverage, so that you have the motivation that when you go all in on that business, that can skyrocket from zero to a million, to 10 million to 100 million. And you don't have to be tempted to look across because that one business, as long as it's a scalable form of business, can. Can scale to the moon. Same thing with podcasts. Right. Like, in general, I don't like to get into mediums that doesn't have infinite scalability. So the only two things that I'm really working on are software businesses, infinite scalability mixed with content, and my podcast, which is also infinitely scalable. And I think if people can just focus on that first and figure out what that is, that'll also give them the motivation to. To go all in.

[Cody McGuffey]

Really cool.

[Sean Kim]

Knowing that there's no glass ceiling, you.

[Cody McGuffey]

Can start thinking about 10 years out, 20 years out, 30 years out.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Like, how do I make my first $10,000 online?

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

Which is both. Problems need to be solved. But it's more like. Yeah, I get that. And fortunately, a lot of people listen to this. They sell print on demand products. Like, they're getting into the print on demand business, or maybe they already are in the print on demand. Pretty scalable. There's. There's a next level. There's next level. Layers above that.

[Sean Kim]

Yep.

[Cody McGuffey]

Digital products, selling templates, things. Okay, that's. That's. That's great. That's great leverage. But there is another one. It's a recurring aspect of digital product selling. That's next level.

[Sean Kim]

Yes.

[Cody McGuffey]

And then you. If you layer on this media aspect of leverage, it can really start to fuel everything.

[Sean Kim]

Totally.

[Cody McGuffey]

And, you know, it's interesting, we haven't talked about your podcast at all, and I'm disappointed in that. Not just because we're running out of time, but I do want to get into the rapid fire, and hopefully we can kind of touch on it a little bit.

[Sean Kim]

There's a rapid fire.

[Cody McGuffey]

Okay, There is, yeah. And we're not gonna get through all of them, so I'll. I'll kind of jump to the main ones that I really want to ask about.

[Sean Kim]

Cool.

[Cody McGuffey]

If your family and your friends and your co workers and your team and just people that care about you, if they all had to get into a room without you and their task was to write a book or a blog article or some big piece of content characterizing your true traits from their perspective, what do you think they'd say these.

[Sean Kim]

Are personality traits or just overall, like.

[Cody McGuffey]

How would they describe you?

[Sean Kim]

My mom would probably describe me as a black sheep, the family. Someone that's always been creating his own path and doing something that's not conventionally normal and willing to have the courage to do that. And I think a lot of my friends would say that as well. Someone that has. This is weird, like talking about myself, if I'm being honest with you.

[Cody McGuffey]

This must be weird.

[Sean Kim]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess someone that is trying to provide value in every interaction. Someone that's willing to listen. Someone that's willing to. Yeah, provide. Provide value at the end of the day.

[Cody McGuffey]

Any negatives?

[Sean Kim]

Where do we start? I think probably that I can be in my own world a lot of the times, you know, and. And that comes with sometimes not being as responsive when it comes to texting or staying in touch. I'm kind of focusing on my own world and I generally have a brick wall that I put up for most people, unless you're in the circle. And from there I can be a lot more vulnerable. But most people that don't really know me will kind of think that I'm kind of putting this distance from me to them. It served me, but it's also not served me in some ways.

[Cody McGuffey]

Thank you for that. How would you define a creator?

[Sean Kim]

A creator for me is someone who has the freedom to express their unique value and expression and put it to something that's tangible, Whether that's an art piece, whether that is a conversation, whether that is a media, whether that's a piece of software, something that allows you to be uniquely human, uniquely yourself, and put that into something that's tangible for the world.

[Cody McGuffey]

Do you think everyone should be a business owner?

[Sean Kim]

No. No, I don't think so. I think we talked a lot about the positive sides of being a business owner. But I think if you're wondering whether you should be a business owner or whether you should start being an entrepreneur, it's already a hard path for you. Because even if you're craving and dying to create something new and this is like the only thing you can ever think about doing in your life, it's already so hard. And if you already have doubts, if you already have thoughts about your safety net, about how you're going to think about the risks, it's, it's. It's hard. And I think for. For certain people, it's. It's great to have a 9 to 5 job. I don't think we can be business owners if we didn't have people that were comfortable with nine to five jobs. I just don't think people have the same mindset. I think entrepreneurs are a little bit crazy. Like every successful entrepreneur that I know is a little Bit weird. It has a little bit of that X factor to them.

[Cody McGuffey]

Not delusional.

[Sean Kim]

A little bit delusional. Right. Like Steve Jobs talked about, like, how he would have never started Apple if he wasn't so delusional, how he wasn't so naive. When most people think about the business that they start and how hard it is, they wouldn't have been so keen of starting if they thought about all the lawsuits that they were going to get, the software projects that were going to go down, the. The employees that were going to, you know, betray you. It's. It's a warfield out there, man. And you're taking all of the risks if you're an entrepreneur. So if you're not willing to do that and put all of your eggs back, eggs into one basket, it may not be for you. And that's just blunt advice.

[Cody McGuffey]

We didn't talk about your podcast that you are doing literally incredible work with, with the people that you bring on, the experts that you bring onto your podcast called Growth Minds. Where can people find that, find you, learn more about you, follow your journey, all that good stuff?

[Sean Kim]

Yeah, yeah, they can just search up Growth minds on Spotify, YouTube, they can search my name, Sean Kim, on YouTube. And yeah, listen to a few of the episodes there. It's. It's about health, wealth and love. And I bring on experts on a weekly basis, whether it's authors, entrepreneurs, investors, thought leaders that can help you in one of those fields. And the reason why I chose this fields were I think these are really the three core pillars of what makes a great life. But none of these were taught in school, in the traditional education. None of us were taught how to eat properly, how to eat well, that gives you energy. None of us really taught how to make money and be entrepreneurs and create value. And none of us were really taught how to maintain relationships, how to communicate with your partner, how to, how to love yourself. And that's been a journey that I go through from the beginning. So this is almost a selfish thing that I do where I can talk to people, but also provide value by sharing that knowledge to everyone else.

[Cody McGuffey]

Sean, thank you for coming on, man.

[Sean Kim]

Appreciate you, man.

[Cody McGuffey]

Your friendship, man.

[Sean Kim]

Thank you, my brother.