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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Chartmetric Founder Sung Cho on Leaving Comfort, Pricing, and Patience
- Sung Cho left a comfortable, well-paid job at Oracle, giving up unvested stock options, because he wanted to build his own company and felt it was now or never.
- After quitting he dropped his early ideas and felt lost and depressed, until a friend advised him to move forward just one step per day, which he has followed for seven or eight years.
- When Chartmetric ran out of money, Cho funded it personally and introduced paid plans, and a beta user's unexpected $950 annual prepayment convinced him the product could work.
- Cho argues that competitive advantage comes from pursuing a similar vision over a long time, and says Chartmetric started by pricing at half its competitors' rates, with a pricing rule that a tool should cost about one-tenth of the value it saves.
- His long-term goal is to make Chartmetric the Bloomberg of the music industry, and he believes any such business takes at least ten years to build.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasComfort can be a reason to leave
Cho saw Oracle as mature, with innovation happening outside it, and chose to forgo stock option gains because he wanted to build something he could be proud of.
Take one step at a time
A trusted friend who had been through it told Cho to move forward only one step per day, which relieved his stress and became his working approach for years.
Running out of money forced validation
Instead of raising more funds, Cho funded the company from his own account for a couple of months and launched paid plans to prove someone would pay.
Early customers should be over-delivered to
Cho says first customers give trust and cash upfront, so he aimed to deliver ahead of schedule, using the analogy of a bakery whose bread improves at the same price.
Differentiation emerges over time
Cho says he never had a good answer to investors' questions about competitive advantage; he believes building something similar over a long period eventually makes it different, helped initially by pricing at half of competitors.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesYou're not necessarily trying to build something different. You try to build, build something quite similar or, like, sometimes even same, but if you pursue that vision over a long period, period of time, then someday your product is different.
— Unattributed
For SaaS companies, it's incredibly difficult to get those first customers because it means that you have to gain this much trust that they are willing to pay something upfront.
— Unattributed
If you think about all these products that you love, you feel like they were born overnight. You feel like, 'cause you only discovered those when they were already successful. After seven years of grinding, you discovered them.
— Unattributed
Innovations are happening outside, outside of this company, so if I stay here longer, I may have less and less chance of participating in those cool innovations.
— Unattributed
Even those spam emails, I, I felt thankful for. At least someone cares about me by something stupid.
— Unattributed
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