[Soup] 'Heading barefoot' in Silicon Valley... How this content creator survives

Bank of Korea Governor Lee Chang-yong said on the 20th that the Korean economy is "on the verge of recession" next year.

This is the first time that the governor has directly voiced concerns about a 'recession'.

It is correct to continue the stance of raising interest rates in a situation of repeated high inflation, but it is interpreted to mean that it has not yet decided whether to stick to the current monetary policy direction due to the situation of economic contraction.

It's a situation where you can't do this or that, it's hard.

In times of economic downturn, investors also close their wallets.

It is difficult to guarantee investment success by increasing consumption sales.

Along with the expansion of the star YouTuber market at home and abroad, 'Sandbox', a startup that has grown rapidly, is also complaining of investment difficulties.

It is the number one industry with outstanding (?) YouTubers such as Dotty and Kwak Tube, but the situation is not so good that it has recently undergone some restructuring.

In just a few years, the trend of leaving the company and 'economic freedom', which had been blowing hotly, has also slightly shrunk.

As the asset market froze, the saying 'earned income is the best' came back to the days when it came to mind again.

Startups that were leading the industry came to the sale market one after another, and American IT companies that led the entrepreneurial fever started large-scale job cuts.

In this difficult situation, there are still startups that are starting full-fledged expansion into the global market, shouting that 'innovation', 'entrepreneurship', and 'startup' are the spirit of the times.

This is 'EO Studio', a content company that deals with the stories of domestic and foreign startup ecosystems and entrepreneurs.

Even recently, when the money line in the investment industry dried up, we succeeded in attracting a pre-A investment worth 2 billion won.

"Traffic? Not a single drop. Startups are the spirit of the times"

The name 'EO' of this YouTube channel, which is said to be 'requested' by those who are interested in starting a business, is derived from the initial consonant 'Tㅇ' of founder Kim Tae-yong's name.

It is said that it also contains the meaning of entrepreneurship and opportunity.

As of December 22, 2022, the original channel 'EO Io' has 490,000 subscribers, and the global channel launched last September has about 40,000 subscribers.

From interviews with Korean entrepreneurs who have entered Silicon Valley and are doing well, office workers who are sincere in their work, uncut IR pitching videos of startups to receive investment, and web entertainment such as startup survival auditions.

We have been planning and producing various types of contents related to innovation and work.

What is the secret of this channel, which has become known by word of mouth as a 'must-have course' for those who are about to start a business or are thinking about starting a business?

At first, it was a one-person media.

It wasn't even that I was trying to do a content business in the first place.

Since I was an undergraduate, I have been interested in various fields and started a series of businesses such as manufacturing, commerce, and community businesses.

(Doesn't it go well with our corner?) From

a one-man content creator to establishing a corporation with 21 employees.

I was curious about what kind of 'innovation theory' the 32-year-old CEO, born in 1990, had.

On a snowy day, I met CEO Kim Tae-yong at the EO studio in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

“It is true that business inquiries have decreased, but surprisingly, traffic has not decreased at all. In fact, there is something that always surprises me. Usually, around the age of 30, people engage in economic activities and start investing in stocks or financial technology. The number of subscribers to content with this demand applied is about 2.5 million. However, we couldn't have expected at all that 490,000 subscribers would gather, as it is content specialized for startups, not this type of financial technology. I think that young people take the lead in their work, create work and develop their careers, and interest in entrepreneurship and careers has grown.”

"When I first started my business, I started with 300 million won in seed money from CEO Ryu Joong-hee, CEO Shin Jae-sik, and a company called <Datable> that does influencer marketing based on data. Although there were difficult times for us as the contract broke, turning the direction of growth to the global market was effective.The global channel is also uploading content representing CEOs of startups, and almost 1,000 subscribers are increasing every day. It may not be so attractive if it was only in , but we were able to attract a 2 billion won investment at the pre-series A level recently while showing growth potential in the global market."

“I started my first business when I was an undergraduate at university. It was a business that made and sold products that received a lot of ‘likes’ with the thought ‘I want to work to help artists. Afterwards, in order to return to IT service, I ran a business that issued coupons that could be used in small business stores and sold them to college students. However, strangely, the business did not go well, and only the community where college students gathered to play was successful. As I tried to run the community, I needed content. , I came to the content business naturally.”

When challenges become a habit, fear disappears

CEO Kim Tae-yong started to be known in earnest when he left for Silicon Valley alone and interviewed Koreans struggling in foreign countries and uploaded them to the channel.

It started when I blindly visited an area where I had no connections and shamelessly(?) posted an article to the Korean community, saying, 'A young man in his 20s is going to do a project where he meets and interviews businessmen alone, so it would be nice if you could help.'

Unexpectedly, a bare ground header worked.

For 42 days, I met 40 founders, engineers, designers, marketers, etc., and captured 16 of them with stories.

In 2017, a content series called <Real Valley>, which was refined, was uploaded to 'Taeyong' YouTube and Facebook accounts.

It garnered over 4 million views in two months.

“Those who started a business will probably agree, but there are good things about running a business. Taking on challenges becomes a habit, so when you do something new, you don’t need a lot of courage and you get trained. Once you cross the barrier, the fear goes away quite a bit when you try something."

"The audience and the target audience are the most important things. Our channel tries very hard to tailor the content to the needs of these people. Even if the scale grows, I think the fact that we did not have the goal of becoming a mass media was the most effective. Everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit. It is to remove barriers that can be encountered by those who want to participate in startups or become entrepreneurs themselves. Especially at the beginning of the video, why these target audiences should believe and watch the video, Startup I have never seen before But we tried to quickly suggest why we should be interested in it, and we removed other superfluities. Even when hiring a PD, we look very much at whether or not it is possible to tell a neat story. We look at data on which regions our content is mainly viewed, and it is just Gangnam Teheran-ro, Seongnam These two regions are filmed a lot. The subscriber strategy was right, and a lot of people who actually do IT business are watching."

"Actually, with the rise of the channel, when attention was focused on me as an individual, there was some confusion. Viewers' interest in and expectations for me as an individual grew, and since I went back and forth to Silicon Valley, I always thought that I was a student studying abroad. Some people suddenly spoke in English while doing interviews. There were also times when people talked to me or thought I knew everything about blockchain and things like that, and suddenly talked about difficult things. So, during the time to create content, I was worried about whether I should study a little more, fill my head with knowledge, and match the level. So I wandered around a bit. But after struggling for a few months, I felt a bit more comfortable when I came to the conclusion that there is something that everyone is lacking in and that I just need to be good at what I am good at.”

“The ability to execute. One of my strengths is that I can act quickly enough to take action if I have to do what I thought of 5 minutes ago or even a few seconds ago. And I have big dreams and make long-term plans. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs have said that making a long-term plan with a grand goal of becoming the world's best in a certain field is more helpful than this goal of raising stock prices in a short period of time and selling at a high price to exit. The sea I felt when I met you."

The question of whether the problem must be solved through the 'market'

EO's main source of revenue is educational content sold to companies, universities, and public institutions along with branded content produced by receiving advertising revenue from companies.

The two-hour interview with entrepreneurs is reprocessed and made into a curriculum, and it is also sold as a textbook for college courses such as 'writing a business plan'.

In addition, events such as planning events for attracting startup investment are also conducted as profitable projects.

Are '

'

"Personally, I thought that 'start-ups are cool'. While running the channel, I created it with a light idea of ​​making it steadily rather than thinking about what purpose it should be successful and how much money it should earn. When I couldn't earn, I went to a friend's company for about a year in a position like the marketing team leader, worked 3 times a week and received a salary. The driving force that kept me going was the subscribers. When I opened the channel, there were about 3,000 subscribers, and from that time on The people who watched were entrepreneurs and 'true subscribers' who I wanted to meet and learn something from. That's why people who were actually subscribed from the beginning appeared a lot and grew the channel together. I think content production itself was a good class to grow a business."

“In terms of the industry, it may be a period of stagnation, but at the same time, I think startups are a movement of the times. In the past, people in their teens and 20s thought, ‘Why go to a startup, but looking at recent statistics, 7 out of 10 job seekers He replied that he wanted to go to business. In the past, it was an era where you had to build a big factory to create something, but now I think it's an era where even a minority group can solve the problem they want to solve and grow greatly. This is irreversible. It's a trend that has nothing to do with stagnation. EO's goal is to become a global 'Bloomberg in the startup era' that can be trusted and looked into when startups become mainstream culture someday."

“I think we live in a dynamic era where it is impossible to ascertain whether it is real or fake. Even if it seems innovative now, if you make a few consecutive mistakes in decision-making, you can go to hell in an instant. We basically check the company's financial status After cross-checking whether there is a problem with investors, etc., we check whether it meets two criteria: First, whether the company is solving 'meaningful problems' that many people can relate to, and whether the solution process is not just verbal, but 'actually solving, progressing' Are you doing it?"

“Innovative startups are bound to be accompanied by many failures because they have high risks and long-term goals. The most important thing to throw away is an impatient mind. “Money really follows” over and over and over and over again, and I have embodied the meaning of it. To succeed in starting a business without rushing to a short-term goal, three things are very important.”

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