Yong-Soo Chung from Urban EDC

Sam: Yong-Soo, welcome to the show.

Yong-Soo: Thanks so much for having me, Sam. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sam: I have to be honest, I struggled to know what to focus on for this interview. You have so much going on. You have Urban Everyday Carry, you have Spotted By Humphrey, you have GrowthJet, you have the First Class Founders podcast. You're posting daily on social media, which I want to dig into later. My question for you to start off with is: how are you managing everything?

Yong-Soo: Yeah, that's a great question, Sam. I think the key to this is building out a team that really helps you not only with your daily tasks, because I feel like a lot of solopreneurs think, "Okay, I've got to delegate the tasks." Really, that's the first step. I think the next, more advanced step is delegating decision-making. And that has really changed a lot for me because now I actually trust my team to make decisions on my behalf and for the greater good of the company.

And that has really freed up a lot of my time. I use this framework called "I, We, They." When you first start your business, it's all you. You're doing everything yourself, you're talking to potential customers, you're out there, and you're just grinding away.

Then, when you get to the "We" stage, you start bringing in people to help you, and you create the systems that you need to run the business.

After that, you go to "They," which is when you have your team essentially running most of the day-to-day operations within the business. That frees you from looking into the business every day. Now you can take a step back and either enjoy your lifestyle and your free time, or continue to build businesses like I'm doing.

So, yeah, I think the key is to systematize everything and then offload those systems and delegate decision-making. But the important thing is to never fully lose track of your business. You want to keep a pulse on it. Over time, you gain that trust with your team, and you can slowly, slowly take a step back.

Sam: Is that something you keep in mind when you are hiring, knowing, "Okay, down the line, I'm probably going to delegate decision-making to this person"? Is that something that's very top of mind for you when you're hiring?

Yong-Soo: It's really hard to do that at the very beginning stage because, with each employee that I bring in, I really think about their entire journey of being with us.

The employee we have now who is the general manager of Urban EDC came in as a customer support agent about five years ago, and now he's grown with the company.

He and I have worked together for so long now that we know what we're thinking. I'll say something, and he'll finish my sentence. We're so in sync that it just made sense that he was going to step up into that next phase of his career.

That's another thing: great employees will get bored, and they won't stay if we're only delegating tasks. They won't just do those tasks forever. They're going to get bored, and they're going to be like, "What am I doing here?"

You have to continue to develop them. Just as you think about customer experience when you're running an ecommerce shop—you want to think about your customer journey—you also need to think about your employee journey and make sure that they're getting what they want out of their employment with you.

So, to answer your question, no, we don't put it in the job description, but it evolves naturally as the company grows and the needs shift. You identify talent in certain areas, you talk to the employee, you get their buy-in, and then everything falls into place.

Sam: Speaking of employees, you have a fascinating background. I want to read a note I have here. You've gone from financial analyst to blockchain engineer to, quote, "selling knives on Instagram." How did you get started with Urban Everyday Carry?

Yong-Soo: Yeah, this is a really interesting story. I was a trader on Wall Street in 2009, and I graduated at probably one of the worst times—well, I guess COVID was probably even worse. But I graduated in 2009, during the Great Recession, and it was a really tough time to find a finance job.

I got into finance and then realized that technology was something I was more interested in. But being in New York, there was no startup community that I knew of. I realized that the first step was to surround yourself and immerse yourself in the community that you want to be a part of.

So I actually bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco. I lived with a high school friend in Berkeley for three months. I was sleeping on an air mattress, eating burritos, and after a while my back hurt.

I didn't have a place to live and didn't have a job. To be quite frank, it looked like a really dire situation for me. But I wanted to be in a place where I could network and meet people from the startup community.

Eventually, I got a job and an apartment at the same time. It's kind of like a chicken-and-egg problem: you need one to get the other. But, yeah, that happened.

Then I was at a startup for a while, and I actually got let go from that startup two years in. I went to a boot camp for software engineering, and that really changed my thinking. Now I was in the engineering space.

I was really excited to get into engineering because I had always looked at software engineers and revered them. I thought, "Wow, these guys are just crazy people who are so revered in technology."

But then, all of a sudden, I was potentially one of those people, and I had a lot of imposter syndrome, to be honest with you.

I got into a company called Ripple, which is a blockchain company, and it has done really well. I joined the company in March 2014, and I stayed there for a year and a half.

Right around that time, all this financial-regulation stuff started coming down on the industry as a whole. There was literally a time when our team was pushing forward and I was really happy with the progress, but it just stopped because we were starting to move money on the blockchain.

The leadership team literally told us, "Hey, you've got to hold off because we need to make sure the compliance is all in check."

When that happened, it was crazy because we were moving so fast and so well, but then, all of a sudden, we hit this brick wall.

I remember one Friday we all went as a team to watch a Pixar movie. I think it was Inside Out. It was so weird because we had been on a roll, and then all of a sudden we were watching a Pixar movie together as a team.

At that moment, I knew I was done because I'm someone who constantly needs to keep going and keep moving. When that happened, I started planning my next move.

This is where the story gets really interesting because, like you mentioned, why would I go from being a software engineer in crypto to selling knives online—on Instagram specifically?

Looking back on it, it does seem really crazy, and a lot of my colleagues thought I was really crazy for doing that. But I was looking at things that interested me.

I was looking at my credit card statements and seeing what I was purchasing without even thinking. I was also looking at how I was spending my time, and I realized I was on Instagram a lot, looking at this everyday-carry community and the gear. I just got really into it.

I thought, "Okay, well, this is probably not going to be a life-changing, world-defining company because I'm not working on blockchain, AI, rocket ships, or anything like that." But there was much less risk in terms of regulation and market risk.

I knew the market was probably there because people were already buying this kind of stuff. It was really about execution risk for me.

I knew that I was pretty good operationally, and I doubled down on myself: "Okay, I can do this. I have all the tools." Platforms like Shopify and all these email-marketing platforms already existed. It was all a matter of putting the pieces together and executing on it. That's something I was willing to take a risk on.

So, yeah, I left the company in September 2015 and launched Urban EDC in October 2015. I actually left a full-time job and launched the company without another job. It was never a side hustle, which is kind of crazy now that I think about it. But, yeah, that's the story.

Sam: There's so much to unpack from what you just said. But there's a word that came up a few times: community. I had a question around that because one of the first things I noticed when I went on Urban Everyday Carry's website was community.

You have this Facebook group called EDC Nation, but you also recently launched a paid membership. What was the thinking behind having a paid membership?

Yong-Soo: I think community, membership, or just the feeling of belonging to something is really the next step in ecommerce.

The reason I say that is because, back in 2015, it was all about Amazon FBA. I remember thinking, "Okay, there are all these resources, and everybody's talking about Amazon FBA."

But then I saw the trend shifting toward, "No, instead of Amazon FBA, you've got to build your own traffic, your own platform, and a brand."

People started creating their own brands on Shopify, and that was the subtle shift. I saw it happening and thought, "All right, I'm actually going to skip the Amazon thing altogether." We've actually never sold on Amazon. We started building this brand instead.

Now I feel like the market is at a point where it's pretty saturated with all the brands out there on Shopify.

I really think the next wave of ecommerce is going to be community-based. I'm not talking about the free ones. Like you mentioned, we have a Facebook group, and that's been around since the very beginning, in 2015.

Creating a Facebook group is free. People essentially get invited as part of the welcome-series email, and it has been growing naturally.

But at the end of last year, we created a paid membership. There are two tiers. One is a $9-per-month tier, and the second is a $99-per-month tier.

The $9 tier is the base level. You get access to the Discord server, and a lot of the perks include access to gear that is only available through the membership. We also have a buy-sell-trade group in there.

Because it's a paid membership, there aren't going to be as many scammers. That's pretty rampant in the community right now, especially with the free groups. Anyone can join, pretend they have an item, take someone's money, and scam them.

We're trying to create a trusted community. Free communities are great to start with because they're good for branding and getting awareness about your brand. But the Facebook group really isn't meant to be a place for deep discussions and relationship-building.

We wanted that to happen somewhere off Facebook, in something like Discord, where the communication and interactions are much livelier.

I really think the next wave of ecommerce is going to be community-based. If you're starting a brand, you want to think about how you can bring people in this interest group together—people who care about what they're doing, but who also encourage and empower each other. To me, that's the stickiest thing.

People will know your brand, and they'll come back because of the network effect of that community, not necessarily because of the item that you're selling in your shop. That's really the core essence of building that community.

Sam: One of the ways that you are promoting this community is through email. I'm on your email list, and I've really been enjoying some of the emails I've been getting lately. How are you thinking about email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy?

Yong-Soo: Email marketing is really, really important, and it's been the heartbeat of our sales engine since day one.

The entire funnel looks like this: we drive traffic to our website, and then we have a popup that's a little bit gamified. We have a spin-the-wheel type of thing, and we get the email address. Grabbing the email is really important when someone visits your website.

From then on, we have a welcome series, and the welcome series is 10 to 15 emails. We only send the welcome series until the first purchase is made.

Then we take them off the welcome series and bring them into another series, which is the first-purchase series. We really want to get that second purchase because what we've found is that once a repeat customer makes the second purchase, everything that comes after that is a lot easier.

Getting that second purchase is almost, I'd say, just as important as the first purchase. So we have an entire flow for the first purchase, trying to get them to make a second purchase.

Once they've made the second purchase, we tell them about our VIP program and our loyalty program.

From then on, we're reminding them how many points they have, that they can redeem them for a gift card or something else, and encouraging them to continue purchasing.

Those are the more automated elements. We also have abandoned-cart emails. We have emails that go out if you look at a product and don't purchase it. We also segment those into international and domestic customers.

If you're international, we tell you, "Hey, don't worry. We have really happy international customers," and things like that.

Those are the automated flows. Then there are the regular emails that we send out. On Mondays, we have—actually, I should take a step back.

The way we run our sales engine is that each Wednesday we have a gear drop. Every Wednesday, we show the latest products that we bring into the shop.

That has become the consistent heartbeat of the company for the last seven years. People expect to have a gear drop every Wednesday without fail.

We actually have people setting alarms because a lot of the stuff sells out really quickly. We've had people email us and say, "Hey, I run a law firm, and I told all four of my employees to get on the website at 12:00 p.m. Pacific and try to get this flashlight."

To be honest, they all missed out. This guy got really upset with us. He said, "Hey, did you even have any items on there?" and things like that.

But the whole point is to drive hype and essentially train customers to always come back to shop with us at that time each week. It's a pattern. It's a habit.

On Mondays, we send a preview email saying, "Hey, this is what's coming up in this week's gear-drop event." They get a little taste of it: "Oh, I really want that item. Okay, I'd better set my alarm."

Then, on Tuesday, we send an email giving early access to our VIP customers. That group is very small. We mention that we save more than 50 percent of the stock for the general public.

An item might sell out for the early-access people, but then, in the general release, we'll release the rest of it.

I should also mention that the $99 tier for the community includes three-hour early access. That's why it's $99 versus the $9 tier. I forgot to mention that when we were talking about community.

Anyway, Wednesday is the gear drop. We send an email to everybody saying, "Hey, this is the gear drop. Go get whatever you want to get."

Then we post everywhere on social media. We work with content creators, so they already have the gear that we're dropping, and they post about it to amplify our message.

On Friday, we send out another email, and that one is a little more flexible. We might do a restock, a special collection, a weekend sale, or something else. Friday is a little more flexible.

That's the entire structure of our email campaign.

Sam: That's incredible. That is a super-thorough answer. I have so many questions. I'm sitting here listening to this and thinking, "This is so well thought out," especially how all the parts move together with the upper-tier paid membership and the weekly drops.

Do you think this is something that's sustainable for brands in other industries? Could an apparel brand do something equivalent to a gear drop every Wednesday and build something that is sustainable long-term?

Yong-Soo: With the model we have, we work with a lot of different makers, so we bring in a lot of products, and they might be in lower quantities. They'll sell out really quickly.

For brands that are doing larger-quantity production runs, I would say this is definitely a little harder to do because, obviously, you're doing a production run, and it might sit there for a while.

But I think it's important to have at least some kind of event, maybe every month. It doesn't have to be based on a product. Maybe you could do a live stream each week.

There's a company that my wife really likes called Tibi. It's a clothing company, and the founder of Tibi goes live every Wednesday and talks about how to style things and why certain things go well with others.

My wife watches that religiously. It's crazy, but it really does drive that human connection because, when you go on an ecommerce website, there isn't a lot of personal touch. You're just looking at a website and a bunch of products.

But when you make that connection with the founder of the company who's showing you how to wear the products, it's different.

She does a lot of events too. I think they're based in New York, but she'll fly out to different cities and have meet-and-greets and things like that. She'll even do some of the live streams in other showrooms that carry the brand.

I think it's really important to have some kind of event that people can look forward to, and it doesn't have to be product-based. It is important to have that cadence.

It's more about training people to behave a certain way at a certain time during the week than simply trying to drive sales each time.

Sam: I couldn't agree more. I think this is a good transition because I want to talk to you about personal branding.

You and I first connected on Twitter, and what I find fascinating about you is your cadence with posting daily on social media. You have your newsletter going out and your podcast going out. I see you teasing the release each week. I think we're both fans of Justin Welsh, and I know that's something he does a lot as well.

Why did you start posting so frequently on social media?

Yong-Soo: I'll give you three reasons.

The first is personal: I've noticed that I get bored every three years or so. I started Urban EDC in 2015, then we started Spotted By Humphrey in 2018, and a few years later we started GrowthJet, which is a Climate Neutral Certified 3PL.

For some reason, every three years I get kind of bored. Part of it is that I can scale up my team to a certain extent. We talked about this earlier, but I can have someone managing more of the day-to-day, and then I want to move on to something else.

So the first reason was that I wanted to try something new that I hadn't really done.

Getting myself out there is honestly very challenging for me. I'd never done it. To be honest, I wanted to remain anonymous for the longest time, which is just the opposite of building a personal brand.

But I felt that if fear was preventing me, then I knew I was on the right track and should probably push through it, because fear should never be the reason why you don't do something.

I looked at myself and said, "This is the area that I probably need to improve most on." That was a big reason why I wanted to do this.

The second reason is that I've realized the power of a personal brand—not only for monetary reasons, but for building relationships.

You and I connected because you saw a post and commented on it. We started talking, and now here we are doing a podcast interview together.

I feel like that's so invaluable. You never know what a connection or relationship will do in the future. They're all open-ended.

Anyone you meet online might do something in the future that you can help them with, and they can also help you. It's a really interesting thing where you're leaving all these doors open and increasing your luck surface area.

That's been a really interesting thing that's happened over the last three months or so.

The last reason is for me to share everything that I'm learning. I've been heads-down building for the last seven years, and I have a lot of experience from learning through my mistakes.

I wanted to encourage everyone to start a business and, I guess, not make the mistakes that I made. If I can help just one person out there get started on something, that would make me so happy.

I truly believe having a business of your own changes the way you approach life. It's kind of like having a baby: you're responsible for it.

Now I have employees, and I'm responsible for their families and their well-being. That's a lot of added pressure on me.

Initially, it was really uncomfortable, but I've gotten over that and embraced it. Now it's empowering because I think, "Wow, look, I have other people's families relying on me." That's a really powerful feeling.

Those are the three main reasons.

Sam: I think when most people think about posting daily on social media, they're thinking about posting pictures on Instagram, and it's common for a lot of founders to do that.

But what I like about what you're doing is that you're showing up every day on Twitter and LinkedIn, which aren't commonly platforms associated with ecommerce.

If someone is listening to this right now and thinking, "Yeah, this sounds great, but how can I get started?"—what would your advice be to a busy ecommerce marketer or founder who wants to start posting on social media and sharing their journey?

Yong-Soo: This is something that I went through very recently. When you first start posting, it's going to feel really scary. You're going to get no likes and very little engagement. It's just a process that you have to go through.

I won't lie: it's really difficult in the beginning. I would spend maybe an hour, sometimes even two hours because I was so bad at it, writing a Twitter thread. Then I would be so proud to share it.

I remember once being up at 1:00 a.m. and thinking, "Oh, I'm so happy with this thread. I've been crafting this little thing."

Then I posted it, and it was a dud. Silence.

I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." I spent all that time, and literally probably no one saw it. That's a really humbling experience. It's a tough beginning.

But everything you start is difficult. It's not going to be easy in the beginning, but everything gets easier as you do more of it.

Your skills will improve. Your hooks for writing will improve. You'll build relationships. You comment on my posts, I comment on your posts, and then you get those network effects. You get their followers looking at your stuff.

It's very slow progress, but you just have to get started.

And this is important: don't worry about the results. Focus on what you are actually doing.

If you have a goal of three Twitter threads a week, always meet that goal. Measure it, and don't take it personally. Treat them as mini experiments.

After that Twitter thread bombed for me, I just analyzed it. I thought, "Why did it do so badly?"

It's all about experimentation, not taking things personally, and going through this process where you're going to be terrible for a while. That's just the truth.

But you can't get good at anything unless you keep at it daily. That's why I post daily. It's not only about wanting to get followers; it's an exercise for me.

I know I'm not the best I can be at this, but if I don't write today, then I'm not going to improve.

It's really about daily practice: going in, putting in the work, reflecting on what worked and what didn't, and then reassessing.

The results are a bonus. You should treat them as, "Oh, wow, it's finally working." But that shouldn't be your goal, because if you go in with that goal in mind, you will be very disappointed.

Focus on the things you can control.

Sam: I think that's an amazing place to end. Yong-Soo, where can our listeners learn more about you, your brands, and what you're doing? Where would you like them to go?

Yong-Soo: I've got two places.

The first is, if you have a growing ecommerce brand and you need help with fulfillment, check out growthjet.com. It's our Climate Neutral Certified 3PL.

If you want to learn more about what I'm doing and follow my journey, I have a podcast called First Class Founders, where I share all my lessons learned.

I put a lot of time and resources behind it, so you can check that out at firstclassfounders.com.

Sam: Perfect. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I've learned so much, as I knew I would. I'm looking forward to following your growth on social media, but also Urban Everyday Carry as well.

Yong-Soo: Thanks so much, Sam. I really enjoyed our conversation as well.

Sam: Thanks, Yong-Soo.

Yong-Soo: Take care.