[ad_1]
When we first spoke with Mona Fang in 2021, she was an undergraduate student studying aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois.
She was also building her first business, Karma Trade.
Within 24 months, Huang dropped out of school, moved across the country twice, traveled the world, and started a new business called Omniio.
So what has changed?
“It was really a torn road between going into aerospace and going into a tech startup,” Fang says. “I felt like aerospace was a safe path, but startups are riskier and I always ended up regretting not choosing.”
Over the past two years, Huang has settled in San Francisco after an entrepreneurial adventure that has taken him around the world: Illinois, Miami, Thailand, New York, and China.
Fang may be putting his nomadic rhythm on hold, but this is just the beginning of a lifelong commitment to entrepreneurship.
And it started with organizing her closet.
karma
Mr. Huang then spoke to us in September 2023. This time it was from mainland China. She was there for three weeks, working with investors. Fang had visited China before to meet her relatives, but this time it was all for work.
“every time [I visit]”There’s a huge technological leap here,” says Fang. “It was a really good experience to be able to have large groups of people transact in a very high-tech way and see new possibilities for how retail and community retail can be integrated. did.”
She goes on to explain how individual store owners in China have the same technology tools as large retailers and online stores. In the U.S., however, Huang sees a big gap in solutions for traditional mom-and-pop retailers.
In 2021, Mr. Fang called us from his brick-and-mortar warehouse in Champaign, Illinois. Although she articulates her ideas with the same intelligence and confidence she had as a student, she is calm about her position as a founder this time around.
“The best people are the ones who actually provide value, rather than just trying to sell you something,” Fang says. “And that’s really hard to achieve, especially in the technology world, where it takes two years, a year, or more to launch a product, and at the same time you wonder, should we be doing this? “time. “
“The best people are the ones who actually provide value, rather than just trying to sell you something.”
Mr. Fang speaks like a seasoned entrepreneur. Her experimentation with entrepreneurship dates back to her high school days, when she began selling clothes online to earn extra income. Because she was focused on her schoolwork and she didn’t have time for traditional in-person work for teens. That’s when she first became aware of the inefficiencies in retail, especially in the sale of second-hand goods.
“It wasn’t necessarily about building a business for me personally, but more importantly, [creating] It’s making some positive impact on the world,” Fang told us from a warehouse in 2021.
“The system is broken. Let’s fix it.”
While purchasing books for his first semester at the University of Illinois, Huang was also building Karma Trade, a digital currency business that buys and sells used clothing.
During his two years on campus, Hwang built Karma Trade into a full-fledged business, establishing a retail clothing store near campus and partnering with local stores that accept a digital currency called KARMA. .
Customers earned KARMA by donating clothes and used KARMA to get new clothes for a small fee. Karma Trade helped him recirculate 20,000 items of clothing and issue $1.7 million worth of his KARMA.
Other than raising capital, Fang’s most difficult challenge with Karma Trade was clearly articulating the business. So she added another course to her busy workload. But instead of carrying books to her classroom, she took Founder’s books. 7 digit copywriting Course taught by Arman Assadi.
“The biggest challenge for us was explaining. [the digital currency] For those who have never used it before […] Overturning the conventional concept of fashion consumption. ”
Mr. Fang told me. “We were able to paint them something more amazing than anything they had ever seen before. [the course] really helped us [explain the concept]. So it really helped get the word out to people. I was able to communicate better with people and say, “This is actually going to help.” ”
Six months after first talking to Fang about Karma Trade, she had to make a decision.
She was finishing her bachelor’s degree and running a business. However, she was given an unexpected opportunity.
And taking it away would mean giving up everything she had built.
risk and reward
In 2021, Fang said it takes a leap of faith to do something that has never been done before in the market. At the time, she was referring to her own business, her Karma Trade. Little did she know that another leap forward was coming.
During his junior year at the University of Illinois, Fang was offered a 12-week fellowship with Hacker Fellowship Zero (HF0), a training program exclusively for top technology founders.
Her choice was to take the safe route or bet on herself.
“I persuaded my parents, “How many people can get a college degree to raise venture capital?” Fang says. I took him to my side.”
“I persuaded my parents by saying, ‘How many people can get a college degree to raise venture capital?’
Fang dropped out of college, moved to Miami, and worked intensively for three months on building a digital currency modeled after KarmaTrade.
But Miami was a leap of faith that proved more enlightening than fruitful.
“I felt kind of out of place. [with Karma Trade] Because in the end we just wanted to create software, not run a physical product,” Fang says.
Although 12 Weeks didn’t create a revolutionary new blockchain currency, the intense entrepreneurial environment forced Fang to think about what to do next. He could go back to academia or go deeper down the rabbit hole of entrepreneurship.
At first she chose neither.
She flew to Thailand to practice yoga and meditation at a monastery.
“It’s very difficult to be able to create something when you’re being driven by your own conscious thoughts, but I think it’s really important when you can step back from that.” Fang says.
“It is very difficult to create something when you are driven by your own conscious thoughts.”
Stepping away from entrepreneurship, school, and expectations has given Huang time to breathe, learn more about herself, and deepen her long-standing commitment to yoga and related practices. (Mr. Phan earned a 200-hour yoga teacher certification while in high school and began teaching yoga at the age of 18.) During a month in Thailand, Mr. Phan lived a monastic life and studied Theravada Buddhism. I learned meditation techniques. She returned stateside and when she arrived in New York City, she incorporated these experiences into her new lifestyle.
Hwang’s spiritual quest also influences the way she conducts business.
“One of the biggest fundamental concepts of Buddhism is that there is nothing in this world worth pursuing, nothing in this world that will bring eternal happiness. “I have to suffer now to get this great exit, this great IPO, etc.,” is all really confusing, she says. “And what that ultimately teaches us is, if nothing satisfies us, what do we do with our time?”
serve the community
Recently, Huang has been working on a new business, Omniio. This venture was inspired in part by a quote by Steve Jobs.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect backwards. So you have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in the future.”
After moving to New York, Fang invested capital in a business idea based on his experience at Karma Trade.
“When I owned the store, we had 30,000 products and about 10 customers came in every day. So we had all the valuable stuff sitting there. And the big problem was, it was just in the back of the closet, and it needed to be seen,” Fang says.
While running the store, Fang hired people to take photos and upload the data. This process was painstakingly done by hand. Mr. Fang understood that the problem of overstocking was particularly common among craft, vintage, and upcycled retailers.
“I asked them, ‘Why do you have this?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we’re going to put this online,'” Fang said. says. “They were saying they were trying to create an online store, but they were noticing all of the X, Y, and Z problems, the same problems we were experiencing. We wanted to build a simple solution for
Fang credits her fellowship in Miami with teaching her the importance of simplicity. Store owners didn’t need blockchain currency. They needed something to solve their overstock problem.
“We realized that there are many missing pieces of the puzzle in the B2B world. [and] With SaaS, you would think all of these problems would be solved,” Fang says. “But as a store owner I felt really ignored. I felt like no one was paying attention to my problems at all and there was nothing there.”
From conversations with other retailers, Fang realized that this demographic needed a way to quickly take photos of products and upload them to a digital storefront with easily viewable data and information. She describes it as “her Snapchat for retail inventory.”
“The core of it is to support people in their own businesses and not have to rely on buying from bulk manufacturers,” says Huang. “I learned about the people in the seller community. I really want to support them.” “
“I got to know the people in the seller community and I really want to support them.”
Fang used his own funds to build Omniio into a working MVP. She then quickly receives her first round of funding and develops Omniio to link the retailer’s Shopify storefront to her storefront and upload each product by autofilling the title, price, and description. I was able to improve the speed to her 3 seconds. Omniio also allows retailers to sell products in stores and online at the same time without the need for additional hardware or technology.
leap of faith
By the fall of 2023, when we spoke with Fan remotely from China, she had completed her second round of funding and was planning a move to San Francisco. The next step is to build the team and expand her Omniio to help as many retailers as possible.
As Fang takes another leap of faith with Omnio, she says she understands more about her purpose through the connection between entrepreneurship and spirituality. The best entrepreneurs, she says, are more selfless, rather than “trying hard” and “striving” for rewards.
“They actually really enjoy what they’re doing, or they really enjoy the sensation of the impact more than what the impact is,” Fang says.
Mr. Fang is moving into an industry that resists selflessness. But even in her early 20s, she has an entrepreneurial background and is ready for whatever comes next.
“You can achieve more than you believe you can. When I was 17, I never thought anything like this was possible,” Huang said when he was 21.
“You can accomplish more if you believe you can. When I was 17 years old, I never thought this would happen.”
At the age of 23, what I can do is just the beginning.
Take the same course that helped Fang launch his business.
[ad_2]
Source link
