Clara Hong

What are you building and how did you get started?

Smore is an interactive form builder that allows brands to build branded, customized surveys, feedback forms, or quizzes to communicate with their customers.

We initially started as an interactive quiz builder and publish them. We slowly pivoted into a more comprehensive survey builder. When we started Smore, we thought one thing that we haven't tried is marketing. So we were like, let's try to come up with a creative way without having to spend money to build this interactive quiz.

So we built this quiz that was like, Oh, we'll recommend you a product you could buy based on your personality, based on your habits, based on your traits, your preferences. And that went really, really viral. We were trending number one on Twitter for three weeks, viral.

We experimented a few more times. By this time we were generating leads organically. Marketers started emailing us saying, can you build something like this for us? So we started as a boutique marketing agency, building for the biggest brands in South Korea. Brands like Nespresso reached out to us. We got to work with those agencies.

We were getting 40 to a hundred Emails a week asking for services. So we thought, okay, why don't we build a tool? When we started building a tool, we didn't even know the word SaaS, that was something that we had never even heard of. A client reached out to us and they saw the demo and they were like, can we actually buy this software like right now, like today?

That was the signal that we got. That was one client obviously. So we wanted to test it out, and we luckily had a whole database of leads that we could test this idea on. We emailed them, we called them, we interviewed them and everyone was really into the idea.  So we launched an open beta, got hundreds of companies and the biggest companies in Seoul, like sign up immediately and started using the product.

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You built a few other companies before. What were some of the key learnings and how did it help you with Smore?

Each attempt at entrepreneurship, you come out of it having learned one thing. What I had learned was that was the importance of having a really, really strong founding team.

I tried to build a founding team a couple of times. We would grow, we would downsize, it would fluctuate, but I just never had the sense of having built a solid team.

It also taught me a lot about my own value system and what I expected  from my counterparts and what I could offer. Also taught me a lot about how to interact with people in a workplace setting, making sure that we were a group that could work  with each other, no matter how big we succeed or how big we fail for at least a decade was the biggest thing that mattered to us. That was what we had to go through, even before we started brainstorming.

And then the second was,  we actually need to be able to talk to our customers, like not shy away, not be afraid, not be scared of talking to our customers and being told no. And that's why we monetized  our product really, really fast.

We had an open beta for five weeks and we were like, okay, we're launching it. We're going to put it behind a paywall because if people aren't paying for it, then it's a product that shouldn't survive. So those two philosophies sort of came out with our previous startup attempts.

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What's your strategy to build a strong founding team?

Someone really famous said you need to hire value first, aptitude second, and skills last, and that should be your hiring criteria. In a co founding relationship, you need to make sure that your values are aligned. What do you want in life? How ambitious are you? Startups take a long time to take off. Sometimes it takes a decade. Sometimes you never really make it. It's really important that your timeline is in sync. We don't want to work with an asshole or you don't want to build a company and turns out that they're malicious. So evaluate them on values. In my co founding relationship, we are in sync with each other. The priorities of our values are aligned.

And then the aptitude is potential. How much room do they have for growth? That's related to the drive that they have, and the willingness for them to admit their mistakes, admit that they're not the best, they're not perfect or complete yet, but they will always strive to be.

And then the skills, because if you're building a tech product, there are specific skills that you need from your founding team to be able to actually launch it in the market. That's the process that we went through and it worked really well.

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How do you deal with conflict within your team?

We have a lot of conflict, but healthy conflicts. Whatever this person is saying, wherever they're coming from, even if you're disagreeing and you're in conflict, I have absolute confidence that they're coming from a place where they want nothing but the best for their family, the team and the company, not just for themselves. They're not trying to just prove that they're right. They're not trying to get clout. They're not looking to look smart. They genuinely just want to be able to really achieve the best outcome for the company. That is the foundations upon we've built our culture. I don't think there's a playbook for dealing with conflict. It's more about building the trust and the stronger foundations first.

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How do you make sure to hire for values before even working with them?

I made a lot of hiring mistakes. Not that people we brought on were horrible people. It's just that the culture fit wasn't really there. I think the best you can do is have a really genuine, heartfelt, honest conversation before you jump into anything permanent. And then the second best option, might be to work with them on a part time basis. So you can get a feel of how they operate within a working environment. There are things that you can learn about another person only through direct interactions.

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How do you keep yourself and your team motivated?

The most important thing is that the founder has to believe what they're selling to the team. The founder has huge influence on the team. A lot of startups jokingly say that our product Health metric is our CEO's mood. There's a lot of truth behind it because the team is always looking at the founder and reading signals that they're emitting and trying to decipher where we are in the market and how bright our future is.
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I think it's critical that you yourself as a founder are standing on a really solid ground. If you accept the uncertainty, the doubt, the bleak future as the norm, then every small win is going to add to a huge pile of reasons for you to keep going.

And if you truly believe what you're doing is meaningful, just having that perspective is enough motivation. That inevitably and naturally gets transferred to your team's general energy level.

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When did you know you were onto something big?

When we had one customer say that they were going to pay for it, we were ecstatic, but we had to make sure that that didn't get to our heads. And the period that follows where we were talking to more customers and see if the market who wants it. We were testing out, interviewing customers and evaluating who's saying yes, who's saying no. Let's find our niche that we really truly are resonating with.

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How did you go about defining your target customer?

The criteria changes a little pre launch and post launch. Are you trying to evaluate whether you should launch your product and keep building it, or how you're going to develop and add on to your product.

It was more a process of finding the biggest group with the most number of common denominators that also responded with the strongest passion or energy level, cause you want to be able to grow at scale. So finding a segment that's really well defined, that represents the biggest market opportunity that you could target and sort of starting from there.

But if they're not responding to your product in a passionate way, that's probably because you're not really solving a problem for them. I think who you should start calling your ideal customer or ICP isn't a really neat clean template. Talking to customers and checking off criteria, it's a messy process, but also in that chaos, there's something that the founders can read.

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How should you think about investor-founder fit?

Any relationship that costs money to get out of, you should spend a lot of time thinking about who you're getting in bed with. If these partners are people that you want on your team. Early stage founders and myself included, we're just thrilled that someone's willing to write a check for just an idea that we had. And we're just so grateful. We're ecstatic. We're excited that people are paying us money.

What founders really should be aware of is that they're not paying you free money. And if this partner turns out to be someone you don't want on your team, someone who's not really aligned with your vision, they're people who still are going to have decision making power or some sort of influence about the future of your company. It's not going to be easy to get rid of them and it's going to cause you a lot of headaches, a lot of tension, a lot of money. Being aware of that in your first fundraising round is really, really crucial. And making sure that you are also evaluating your VCs, your potential investors on values first.

One thing early stage startups really need is to have a partner who has the same timeline or expectations in terms of how long this journey actually is. Partners who really believe in you because startups are always going through pivots and early stage fundraising is all about finding partners who believe in you and your founding team, give you advice, or connect you with the necessary resources to successfully pivot, makes or breaks a startup in the early stages.

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What was one unexpected challenge you faced during fundraising?

We had raised as pre seed and we were doing our seed round or like a pre A round at the peak of the SaaS hype in Korea. It was still a very new concept in the market and in the ecosystem, and all the VCs had seen the meteoric rise to success of all these gigantic B2B SaaS companies in the States. They expected the magnitude of startups in their seed round to reach the scale of B2B SaaS companies that have been around and have IPO'd.

Investors want to hear your vision. And we started painting a roadmap that will make us into a company like Salesforce, Qualtrics, et cetera. And that's 20, 30 years down the road, thousands of employees later, people so much more smarter than me are needed to get us to that point.

But that's what investors are asking. So we wasted a lot of time. What led us to lose our direction, we went through like a whole period of not really knowing where we were heading. And our growth started to stop. We need to push a reset button. And we started everything from scratch again.

You're not fundraising to please or convince investors, you're fundraising to get to a place you want to be at the velocity that you want to. And fundraising is just another way to get the resources that you need. You're not trying to impress the investors. You're not trying to build this huge vision that everyone's going to love and call you're genius. So that was a mistake that we made.

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How do you think about different markets as you prepare to launch?

Any market is going to be really different. Your market in LA is going to be drastically different to your customers in Wisconsin, for example. The difference always exists.

What founders need to drill down on is not what the differences are, but why those differences exist. We're a B2B company, the way people work is different. The workplace culture is different. The metrics they look at is different. The business climate's different. Even if we launch successfully in The West Coast of the United States, might be different going into the central or the eastern coast, or it might be a whole different story going into the Australian market or the European market.

Being familiar with the diversity of your customer's needs might be really important. You just need to be able to read the room, ask good questions to people, get the help you need and navigate through whatever lemons life throws at you.

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Any advice for any (aspiring) founders out there?

This isn't my advice, but this is advice that helped me. If you're not making a mistake a day, if you're not lying in bed thinking, I failed today, I should have done this instead of that. Or why didn't I see this before? If you're not completely immersed in that feeling every day, you wasted that day away. Time is limited for everyone, but it's even more limited for startups. You don't realize how much time you're wasting by hesitating, or not wanting to be told no, or being scared. You waste time on perfecting whatever you're building instead of showing it to a customer and being told no. So don't do that. Don't evaluate your day based on the wins you've had that day. Evaluate how well you spent that day based on how many mistakes you made.