[Soup] "The secret to becoming a unicorn in the fierce US market is this"

Lee Sang-hee, CEO of Sendbird

- McKinsey Consultant (2011-2014)

- Ticket Monster Strategy Team Leader (2014-2015)

- (Current) CEO of Sendbird Korea

▶ <SendBird> pioneered the global market through messaging solutions Go to the in-depth research and analysis report

for those dreaming of another pioneer

. Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Sang-Hee Lee, and I am the CEO of Sendbird Korea.

I joined Sendbird as the first employee when the service was launched in 2015.

As I have taken on various journeys and roles with the company, from 2021, I am serving as the head of the Korean Asia Pacific corporation called Sendbird Korea.

You're almost number 1 employee?

Before Sendbird, we originally had a service called 'Smile Mom' for B2C mothers.

There were also other employees at the time.

However, when it was launched as a B2B service, it was a new start with new employees, and I joined at the very beginning at the time.

The opportunity to pioneer the market of chat API

When we started service in 2015, the concept of chat API was actually a bit unfamiliar, and there were doubts about whether this could become a market.

How did you pioneer this field?

First of all, the biggest reason we started using Smile Mom was because we needed it.

SNS services such as the original mothers service have a large community nature.

If the nature of such a community is large, you will have to think about profitability there later.

When thinking about profitability, there are two levers that normal startups routinely think about.

Either attach a commerce model or the profit.

After increasing the size of the community, attach an advertising model.

However, we thought that no matter what we did, we needed a function called chatting, and when we looked at market solutions on the market, we saw a chat-specific SDK (Software Development Kit), API (Application Programming) that helps us develop the features we want. Interface) product was not available.

It's a product that we started out of our needs, but when we showed the representative of a startup playing a game nearby, "We've developed something like this," we were also looking for an external solution with this function, but we'll give you money, so we won't sell it to us. what.

In a way, that was our company's first sales.

So, I started SendBird because a customer said that it would be worth trying if there was a need and a pay point to pay for our product even at the prototype stage.

That was 30,000 won a month.

Did you pay attention to the

In the end, when people use a service, whether it is a chatting

service, an authentication service, or a search service, it would be nice to see API economy as bringing in and using specialized external services.

Just as there was a company called Twilio that pioneered such things as the first text message API we received when we signed up for a service, and there was a company called Octa that pioneered authentication, in fact, in the United States, our open innovation, an open R&D topic, was very popular among companies. You know, there are times.

Those things have already become real areas, and in the US, they were forming the API economy.

So, if you look at Hyundai Motor Company, in fact, wheel electric field and then infotainment, etc. are all made in cooperation with partners. Just like Hyundai Motor Company does not make everything from A to Z, we are a kind of open innovation partner in a specialized area. It would be nice to see.

That's how we joined the great current called the API economy.

Believe in the possibility of the API economy and transform your business area

business has changed.

What was the most difficult?

of all, what we need in business conversion is that these consumers will eventually become buyers, not users. Understanding the different purchasing decision-making processes and behaviors between users and buyers was a challenge for us. .

And after doing sales activities for about 6 months to 1 year in the beginning, it was confirmed that the decision-making in Korea to purchase and internalize external solutions was slower than in the US. It seems to have been a step.

SI is, after all, an integrated system.

So, it was a culture that was accustomed to buying in barrels and leaving them in barrels, and not accustomed to dividing and receiving service in parts.

Yes, I think it can be explained as such.

How did SendBird, which was headquartered in the United States, penetrate the American market?

went to America and now it has become a unicorn, but Korean companies have to persuade American companies in English to make "use our parts" a success, right?

Do you think this would be very difficult?

, had difficult parts and easy parts.

Rather, let me tell you the easy part.

First of all, the way we lead buyers is the inbound way, where buyers search for us and come to us, and there is the outbound way, where we go out and do business with potentially fit buyers.

As for the inbound method itself, in the US, we did a little bit of research on how we explored and researched products like ours before purchasing them, and reversed the process, so we were able to draw inbound inquiries from many customers.

Therefore, it seems that the American method of finding services like ours through Google search rather than the domestic search result environment derived from Naver was more fair and gave many opportunities to be exposed.

But going outbound and doing business was another matter.

Because the US market is very competitive.

So, from our point of view, Y Combinator, we made the most of the bumpy hill.

And from a Korean standpoint, we had a lot of difficulties in modifying our greetings and outbound communication protocols in the American way.

To put it simply, a person who spent 30 years in Korea learned for the first time how to talk like Americans and think like Americans.

Lastly, as we enter the purchasing stage, the process of becoming a B2B startup by responding to security questions and answers requested by not only the purchasing team but also the security team was a challenge in and of itself. It seems like a journey.

, in order to actively sell business, you should have gone to a customer or potential customer and received feedback from the company from time to time and responded accordingly.

It's the same in Korea.

I think the process of finding the fit between the product and the market is the step before startups eventually apply it in common and approach it with a more scalable system.

In the process of product market fit, we also constantly visit those companies, in which environment they will use our service, why they are using our service, what alternative solution they are currently using, and what obstacles they are facing when introducing our service. We have to research things like desired features on site.

And support in the field was actually very important from our point of view, didn't we express the US market earlier by saying that the competition is fierce?

The competition is fierce, but there are not many reasons to use us in the first place.

So, from our point of view, we always respond faster than the customer expected from us, day and night, and if possible, go to a prominent site and write the code there, and try to impress a customer in this way. It was the opportunity to create .

External solution capable of handling the highest volume in the world

It's probably a part that naturally connects to what you just said, but in fact, in the case of the chat API, technically, we don't have very original technology

In other words, it is SendBird's proprietary technology, so only we can use it.

Since this is not the case, you should be clear about the strengths of Sendbird.

of SendBird SendBird's effective differentiation strategy is that we are an external communication solution capable of handling the largest amount of traffic in the world.

In other words, if your service is a chat required for a service that is used by 30,000 or 50,000 people, there can be a lot of alternative solutions in the market.

However, if our service is a service that is used by 1 million or 360 million people, called Paytm in India, SendBird is the only solution that allows users to experience any kind of chat or voice call without interruption.

From the very beginning, we started to create services with the usability of group chatting and open chatting in mind.

In the case of North America, when it comes to use cases for chatting, dating apps or one-on-one communication between a patient and a doctor were very promising.

However, in the case of Korea, our initial customer, Nexon, wanted to use the Sendbird service while relaying Kart Rider's E-sports, so we created a chat with a large number of group users in mind from the beginning, and those While hosting customers who want group chatting, the large-capacity processing capacity itself, which is called scalability of the platform we can support, has gradually increased the gap with our competitors, along with actual examples.

So, from the point of view of Sendbird, it became a key factor for using SendBird compared to other competitors.

It would be easier to explain with a

Sang-Hee Lee, CEO of Sendbird.

Yes, people are using it a lot in community services such as Reddit and games that create network effects while people socially connect in this way.

Even if that's not the case, for example, when you did something like Sport TV, you use Sendbird a lot for services that have a very large peak connection for a specific event, such as a relay with Son Heung-min.

We have completed the actual service test so that up to 5 million concurrent users can use the Sendbird service and the smooth chatting voice service without any problems.

If you say that there are about 5 million simultaneous access, you may not have any sense, but we calculate that 2% to 5% of monthly users, which we usually call Monthly Active Users, have simultaneous access to a specific event.

Then, if you count this backwards, the fact is that when more than 250 million people chat, even if the Sendbird service is attached to them, they can use it without any difficulty.

chatting means that 5 million people are simultaneously accessing the message at the same time, rather than 5 million people simultaneously accessing the messenger without collapsing.

Anyway, the chat window will not appear in order.

Sendbird.

And even if those people chat at the same time, the speed at which the chat goes up in it is what we call throttle, and those things are also controlled by us or divided into rooms.

As for why these features are needed, it is the business people who use us.

Operators expect people to have meaningful conversations while chatting and that it will lead to business results, but if this chat suddenly flows in such a way that 1 million people suddenly cannot read anyone's chat, that is the intended result will not be

So, in this case, SendBird has special features such as B2B-specific functions that help people have meaningful conversations by adjusting the speed of chatting based on specific keywords or specific meaningful conversations, or dividing the size of the room a little. can also be called

Commonly speaking of chatting, these days, YouTube comment windows are used a lot like chatting.

What are the special differences between that function and SendBird?

of all, you can implement most of the features on YouTube.

And when a service like YouTube is used, from a business point of view, all of the user's data belongs to YouTube.

From the standpoint of Sendbird, it seems that there is an advantage in that the company can operate with users' data and then metadata related to chatting.

Then, for the platform that can be controlled, either use Sendbird's dashboard, or a company can create a dashboard and Sendbird can receive and use only API calls that can be managed. It seems that the biggest advantage is that it helps to internalize them.

YC became a partner in entering the US market

Y Combinator?

of all, there are two things. The Y Combinator graduate diploma, the brand name itself, has been a great source of strength.

When we say that a startup made up of only Koreans in Korea goes to the US and sells a product, it is not easy for B2B to break through the competition and stand out.

However, when the first entry was Sendbird, we are Y combinator Winter 2016, people turned their eyes once more.

When you sell by e-mail, you can click the delete button right away, but if you put the word Y Combinator in, you can get about 1 second more.

That 1 second makes a huge difference.

Then, if it says "We are Sendbird, we are from Y combinator Winter 2016", it reads one or two more lines below it, and if two lines below it catch your eye, it reads one more paragraph below it, leading to an opportunity to hold a meeting. .

It seems that that small difference led to a very big difference in the result.

Second, when we went beyond a start-up of 20 or so people to 60 or 200 people, the team and organization gradually became differentiated, and when we tried to make certain personnel compensation evaluations for team members in a completely American way, Our organization, led by a Korean CEO, was able to create a company in the style of an American organization because there was a mentoring program such as the yc growth program with entrepreneurs who had graduated from the Y Combinator together or with senior entrepreneurs who had gone ahead first. .

So, in a way, Sendbird is a completely American company.

So, in the US, everyone is hiring local people, and the branding is very much like an American company.

In this way, it seems that the connection with Y Combinator played a very large role in making not only global sales or sales, but also the company's culture and the DNA of a certain member in an American way.

What is the most important strategy for targeting Silicon Valley in the US?

So our product is, for example, an item that measures the 52-hour work system in Korea. In that case, you don't have to go to the United States.

However, in a situation where there is little cultural dependence on whether it is Korea, the United States, or Israel, it is probably an early start-up technology, so we need people who can use these things without hesitation and move on to purchase. It's like.

If the question about a certain customer and market is resolved, I would like to give you a bit of dumb advice to overcome your fear from then on.

For example, do not go for the purpose of the CEO going on a business trip once a quarter, rent an Airbnb and stay in the area for at least 3 months, and then do not visit only acquaintances who give me comfort, and send 1000 outbound emails. , Send 10,000 like this and get rejected, and no matter how famous a mid-size or large company is in Korea, if it's not as good as Samsung in the US, it's actually the same as a startup.

That's why we don't think of references or logos like that, but at first, we find startups that need to use our products, that are worth paying for, and that have real pain and problems, and collect logos that can enthusiastically use us. It seems to be very important to do.

However, all of these things are slightly different from the general thinking that people think when they say that they are going abroad in Korea.

So it seems very important to internalize without fear about the things that are out of the way.

**If the 'Go to View' button is not pressed, you can view the address by moving it to the address bar.