Moving to the US from Korea, Being a Life-Long Problem Solver, and Finding Inspiration in the Things We’re Not ‘Good At’ with Mina Kim, Co-Founder of Measured.im

Welcome back, marginal listeners. I hope everybody is doing well this time of year. It's a crazy time between personal commitments, professional commitments. Everybody's trying to cross things off their list, both their wish list and their work list in anticipation of the holidays. So just a reminder, maybe just as much for myself as it is for the rest of you to Take care.

Take care of yourself amongst all the holiday craziness because you don't want to be running on fumes this time of year because it is one of the most wonderful times of year. So let's be sure to be present for it.

This week, I'm really excited for our episode. We are sitting down with Mina Kim, who is the co founder of Measured, a tool that [00:01:00] empowers non tech product managers to track user behavior immediately without relying on engineer's help. In our episode, Mina talks about moving to the States from South Korea and the cultural differences she noticed beginning as early as high school.

She shares how these experiences taught her autonomy and the ability to problem solve as the most fluent English speaker in her family at the time. Mina also explains how her early startup experiences drove her to entrepreneurship and how she found inspiration in things she actually wasn't good at as a non technical founder.

So if you're looking for a conversation about designing from multiple perspectives or converting your weaknesses into your superpowers, this is definitely the episode for you. Thank you again, Mina, for everything you shared with us today, and I'm excited to get into it.

Abby Schommer: You're in the Bay Area, San Francisco. You live there now, but you're not from there. Where are you from? South Korea. So I'm curious where we're finding you today.

Mina: today I'm in Seoul because I wanted to like spend my last, quarter with my family, and then I'll be going back to the [00:02:00] area, , next year, , With the New Year's Eve and all that.

Abby Schommer: I love that part of entrepreneurship. I love that you can work totally remotely because it's basically you dictate where you work and, um, your co founder is in Seoul as well. Correct.

Mina: Yeah, because, we have our engineering teams here. Right now, we have two engineers working with us. , and we're talking to the third one, so it's growing,

Abby Schommer: Good signs. Good science. Okay. So it makes perfect sense for you to be in Seoul right now, around the holidays. I'm curious, what are the holidays look like for your family in Seoul?

Mina: I mean, it's, it's pretty um, especially like New York State, And North Carolina when I was in, in high school. but I feel like the holidays are longer in the States than Korea.

Abby Schommer: I feel like in America, we love to stretch the holidays too, because it's more of a corporate enterprise. Like we can just get people to spend more money. The longer the amount of time we're telling them to spend money, like Black Friday this [00:03:00] year started basically on Halloween. I'd be curious to dive a little bit more into the differences you've seen in like US culture versus, South Korean culture.

And maybe that's a good way to segue into a little bit of your background, Mina, telling our audiences. Just how you grew up and then ultimately what brought you to the United States, if we could track some of your journey.

Mina: was born in Seoul, South Korea. Like, I'm living in Gangnam area, which, most of the U. S. people would be with, because of the song. I think it was like seven or eight years old right now, and it's a pretty old song now. but I've lived in Carolina when I was in high school, and I was also an exchange student in New York State Tennessee, so when I moved to Bay Area this summer, I was really, feeling that difference. When I investigated some of the apps that we are using, the UI [00:04:00] UX is really different and software are really different because in Korea, The order of our language is pretty different with English.

and I think it's more direct than our language. I mean, English, it's, it's like always, you have to summarize your point at your first sentence, and then you have to describe it afterwards.

Abby Schommer: Okay,

Mina: in Korean, it's, it's the opposite, like we normally, place our conclusion at the end,

Abby Schommer: right.

Mina: like totally different direction.

even, like, Coltrane, ticket apps, for instance, in Korea, when we, use that ticket app, To purchase tickets for our train, we input from where to where you want to go and then like how many people you want to buy for the ticket and put those things and then we just press find your ticket and then It gives like the list of all the [00:05:00] tickets that you you can purchase But when I first got in here and then tried to Purchase the Coltrane ticket. It was totally different. left me with this one button says buy ticket

Abby Schommer: got it. Yep. You

Mina: you press that and it will ask you follow up questions

like a totally different

Abby Schommer: Yeah. It's like in the United States, we start with the call to action. Like you start with the desired output of whatever behavior you're going to be performing. And then From there, you actually start to go through the motions of doing what you need to do to get that desired output.

But yeah, it's, it is funny. Cause if you think about it, logically, if I just press a button that says buy ticket, it's like, no, no, no, I'm not ready to buy that. I haven't given you enough information to know what ticket I want to buy. of,

Mina: was like, oh my god, we need to change everything that is in our service I never thought of that way even though I was very familiar with the culture. I guess it's because they've made the [00:06:00] service very long, sophisticated in a long time wait. And that's

Abby Schommer: I was going to say, was going to say, um, Let's

Mina: for an early startup who's trying to get into the market, it wasn't a good choice, I think. So, JH and I felt like, oh, bummer.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, because you're, you're launching your app in the United States.

Mina: Mm

Abby Schommer: Correct? As well as in Korea. Yeah.

Mina: it is.

Abby Schommer: Yeah. So kind of to, to account those cultural nuances can be, I'm sure incredibly difficult. and, and it's some, it's kind of a journey you've been on since high school, right?

Cause you said in high school, you moved to North Carolina from South Korea. What was it an exchange program? Did your family move with you to to, um,

Mina: family moved with me, So it was like really special, experience for me because In South Korea, you don't, you don't get to choose subjects.

Abby Schommer: like you can't choose like what electives you want to [00:07:00] opt into and things like that in high school.

Mina: I

Abby Schommer: Yeah.

Mina: like, in, in, in American high school, you need Talk to your instructor and then like, Oh, I, I want I want English one. Like, I want, mathematics. but, in Korea, everyone is going through the same curriculum.

so it was totally, totally different. For Korean high schoolers, we don't move. We just sit down in the same classroom and then teachers move.

Abby Schommer: Oh, very interesting. Okay.

Mina: But in, in American high school, we move,

Abby Schommer: Oh, you're moving a lot.,

Mina: whole area,

Abby Schommer: Yeah. so are you for the most part, just stationary all day? And then it's just teachers cycling in and out to teach you different subjects.

Mina: like for

Abby Schommer: So another one of those nuances that you picked up on when you came to North Carolina for high school. So not only did you have to. Pick your classes. But then once you had those classes, you had to take yourself from class to [00:08:00] class, So then a quick question about language. Were you taught English growing up in South Korea such that when you got to North Carolina for high school, you already spoke English?

Mina: I did. I wouldn't say I was smart enough to understand everything, especially like when I was in history class, it was so hard for me to understand everything. But English class or just normal, coming along it was okay, but like it was really hard for me to understand like science class history

Abby Schommer: Yeah. Well, because those there's, those are where we start to get into like subject matter expertise where it's those classes also when the subject matter is so specific, it almost has a language of its own.

Mina: Yeah

Abby Schommer: just English, it's like science English. It's, and I know we've talked about this too, like business English is different from colloquial, like, yeah. Um, so I can imagine how that would be much more challenging.

Mina: it was really challenging, but I [00:09:00] think becoming a founder, I think that high school experience was very highly effective for me being a founder because you know, and inside South Korea, I wasn't allowed to pick something until college, in college, we, we move

Abby Schommer: Yeah, exactly.

Mina: there. So,

Abby Schommer: Yeah.

Mina: so, I felt like I have this, authority, Way before my peers, in South Korea, so I felt like, oh, I now have, like, choice for my life and my, like, everyday life. And also because my parents were not Korean. perfect with their English. when

Abby Schommer: Um, class. sir. So, uh, [00:10:00] I'm going to go ahead and, uh, to, to, uh, I'm going

Mina: students should sitting inside classroom, but on the other part of the world, it wasn't. So I felt like,

Abby Schommer: Um,

Mina: So those thought shifting process was going on inside when I going through this whole culture experiences, I guess.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean, most of us from a young age, we just assimilate to whatever culture we're a part of, and we're kind of told how to operate. we're not even given the breadth of experience to know that we can challenge the ways we're doing things now. But you from an early age were shown, hey, you grew up doing one thing, but here's, A completely different experience in a completely different way of going about this.

So it kind of broadens [00:11:00] your aperture of what's possible, like, what are the systems we can challenge and maybe improve? Are there different ways of doing things? You just you don't take everything as just a taken for granted assumed thing anymore. And I think as a child, You know, we try to encourage growth mindset and for, for kids to think critically, but it's really hard to encourage them to do that if they haven't had those perspective shifts, like what you're talking about and actually seeing those differences modeled for them.

So what a gift that you were able to experience that from such a young age. And then to your point too, about kind of having agency and autonomy from a young age to being shown, you can pick your classes, you can pick your Communicate with people you were empowered and given a lot of optionality from a young age as well.

So I can totally see how maybe that laid some very important foundations for going off and challenging how the way certain products are working or having your own agency and or autonomy to build your own products. [00:12:00] Some very good like character building moments for a founder.

Mina: It was, it was, I think it's definitely affected, um, my life greatly.

Abby Schommer: Okay, perfect. So you were in North Carolina for high school. You went to college in New York.

Mina: Um, exchange student, for State University of New York.

Abby Schommer: And then after you graduated New York, did you go back to Korea?

Mina: Yeah.

Abby Schommer: And then is that where you launched into your tech career? Take us a little bit through the early days of your professional career.

Mina: I think at that moment I didn't want it to just. Go and become the part of company because I

Abby Schommer: have, I've so many things. It will be stop there. let me your thoughts. Have a good night, see Let's keep it that way. Bye, bye.

Mina: And that's when I got into, club, [00:13:00] I think, And after that, I got into like one startup in South Korea, and the startup scenes in South Korea, it was really mature at that time. So been, working for that company about 10 months, but it was really hard time for me actually, , because I didn't know anything about, um, But nobody taught me. Everybody just, like, got angry at me while I was working there, so.

Abby Schommer: yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. Nobody teaches you. I mean, the skills you're building in college are not necessarily practical and applicable to a work setting. Nobody teaches us how to do corporate or even do startups. You only learn by doing it once you're there. And I feel that probably a lot of folks can relate to that experience.

yeah, it, again, it's one of those [00:14:00] things where it makes you almost want to challenge the systems that exist, right? Like now that we know that different versions of reality are possible all over the world, what if there was a version of reality or a version of college or high school, we had some very real world understanding of what it means to work in a corporate setting before we actually go there.

Mina: I think I joined that company because I was very afraid of being founder Because I've never built zero to one businesses.

I never gotten into business situation also and I didn't have a fancy business idea like some of the other campus kids so I felt like I should Have some experience, how people think, how people work, how people value at the, their business idea. So that's why I got into, that company as a founding member.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, to kind of learn from because maybe because you said from an early age, you did have this concept of wanting to [00:15:00] build something of your own, but you felt that you needed to almost mentor under other folks who already in the process of building something to understand how to even go about that process.

That makes total sense.

Mina: it was like that. and I think that feeling, It didn't really go away. I've gone through like building zero to one businesses and multiple companies like two or three times. afterwards, when I got sick of doing that stuff, when I felt like, Oh, maybe this is my time.

Maybe this is, My time to start my own thing, even if, I don't have, a business idea right now, like, I could, dive into something and then find out which business ideas resonates with me.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, I mean, that's an incredibly relatable feeling. A lot of the founders I have on, on the show talk about, you know, a lot of us have corporate experience or experience working for someone else. It gets to a point where it's about how you spend your time. And I mean, personally, [00:16:00] speaking from my personal experience, every company I worked at, I treated every company like it was my own.

I just,

Mina: No,

Abby Schommer: And I do think maybe. We get some messaging. I've been at companies before where I've been made to feel like I was really a part of it.

And I do think it's different in your experience because you were part of the founding teams. You had equity. You did technically own parts of those companies, but it's still, you didn't get equity as founding members.

Mina: know anything

Abby Schommer: Oh, interesting. I mean, I'm not going to lie. Some of my first startups, I didn't take the equity either.

I was presented with stock options and I didn't exercise any of them. Another thing. Why aren't we told about this in high school? Right? Like, why aren't we told about comp and equity packages and things like that? Because when you're launched into a startup setting and a lot of our parents didn't work in startups, they don't [00:17:00] know.

Yeah. How to take advantage of that. but okay. So you didn't have equity. So the company really was not yours. And I do think there is, this through line of a lot of founders thinking, okay, well, I may as well now go off and build something that is truly mine.

Mina: Yeah, so, so after realizing that I, I really need to like, give it a try, to start my own business. still I didn't. know what to do because I was non technical. and I didn't have any, a lot of brilliant ideas. I felt like, only people with great philosophies became founders, but I wasn't. So I didn't know how to like find my business opportunity and should I feel confident enough to start my own business, I think. but Deciding to start measured. I tried some of the ideas, [00:18:00] thing was, Do you know the app

Abby Schommer: No, tell us about it.

Mina: you are running like a food when you are running a bakery or something like that, you would have leftover foods there. back then I was really into like sustainability, so I wanted those leftovers to be sold, in lower coast. When it gets, to the

Abby Schommer: Smart.

Mina: the shops, so I was trying to do that, in Seoul. I wasn't even thinking about global at that, that time.

Abby Schommer: I will say that is an app now in the United States. Yeah. I need to look up the, you do know the name of it?

Mina: That's TGTG.

Abby Schommer: TG. Oh, too good to go.

Mina: Yeah!

Abby Schommer: That's what we're talking about. I know. Okay. Yes. Too good to go. Absolutely. So you incepted, you ideated too good to go before it was too good to [00:19:00] go. nope.

Mina: it wasn't before I I got the idea and then I looked it up and it was there.

Abby Schommer: Oh, okay. But still.

Mina: so it was my reference.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, but still, I mean, that's good validation that you can come up with ideas that are solving a real burning problem statement. And one of the things you learn to as a business owner, is if there aren't any competitors, that's actually not a good sign.

If nobody else is trying to solve a problem that you're trying to solve, it might not be a big bull. Burning enough problem statement. there might not be enough validation or proof of concept that the market needs this solution. So if you come up with an idea and you see there's competitors, that actually could be positive signal.

And it usually is.

Mina: I totally agree. but I didn't, choose to, pursue that idea because, you know, bread is made with wheat, but South Korea does not produce wheat. it raises the coast In small bakeries to [00:20:00] make bread, so when you calculate it, in countries like United States, produces a lot of wheat, the cost for bakery is. much lower than South Korea.

Abby Schommer: yeah, we can produce in mass quantities here because it's cheaper and there's economies of scale to producing larger quantities. And then that means you also have a lot of excess and a lot of food waste, but in a country where an ingredient is so expensive, probably not the case.

Okay. So.

Mina: I left that idea. And then for sustainability issue, architecture is big chunk of it. So I had this team member as a CEO and, we wanted to like, empower builders to choose greener materials for buildings.

the industry was so slow. And I didn't [00:21:00] know that like the speed that I could gain from my business also very important for me. I mean, I couldn't really like, resonate with the target users, I think, when I was doing that,

Abby Schommer: hmm. hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. hmm.

Mina: that, because I mean, I've spent my 10 years in tech industry, which people are very open minded, but it was really different.

in that industry. So

Abby Schommer: able to empathize with the customer because that's the best way to know that you're building something that meets their needs. And if you really can't empathize with, you know, it's one thing for a decision cycle to take a long time, but if you can't empathize with why that's the case, it can be very frustrating, right?

As a founder. So that makes a ton of sense.

Mina: So that's how I learned, what business should I choose as I'm going through those process [00:22:00] and it's really interesting because I think I became a founder inspired by things. I wasn't good at because right now I'm, building measured, which is a no code event tracker for product analytics tools so that I could empower product managers or marketer to be able to track any data. for their app or lab, of, asking for help to their engineers, that wasn't possible for me, when I was working in tech, companies, and I wasn't Very talented, data savvy product manager, myself, because, I feel like I'm more, talented with qualitative datas. better than like quantitative data. But I felt like Oh, if I could do it, then maybe I could like help other people, going through that process, I'm building Measured. And [00:23:00] I could like help them catch, things, that they should be looking for when they, trying to grow their business.

And certain things are really, really frustrating because You know what to measure, but you can't really measure the thing that you want by yourself. You need to like really persuade the person and you need to like keep pushing them to set my as their high

Abby Schommer: And you're talking about working with the engineers, like convincing the engineers to put the tracking mechanisms in place so you can get the product data. Yep.

Mina: And also, you have to sync your mindset with them so that they are on the same page with me, in terms of, letting them know what I want to analyze.

Abby Schommer: and I think too, it's also going back to this notion of being autonomous. Like you from a very early age realized, okay, I, there are situations in which I can have agency and autonomy. And as a product manager, who's relying on an engineer for this data, you're [00:24:00] not autonomous. You're not able to get.

The information you need you're relying on someone else and that's kind of a it's a bottleneck in the process right it slows everything down and i'm sure it can be very frustrating as someone who wants to action quickly off this data right because. in startups. You want to move back, move fast, right?

Like you want to gather that signal and then iterate in accordance with that product signal. And if there's this barrier to entry of you needing to compel your engineers again, to put those tracking mechanisms in place in the first place, and then give you the data, it can just slow everything down.

Mina: That's, that's totally, right. when I was. Talking to my co founder, J H, who is doing all the engineering when we started talking about this idea, I kind of realized how I can't use

Abby Schommer: You can't use Zapier.

Mina: It is really hard because it's actually coding by thinking,

Abby Schommer: Because Zapier is supposed to be a no code tool, but you still have to almost like think in code to be able to use [00:25:00] it.

Mina: to have some of the knowledge so that you can input the right thing. it's really interesting because, this is like everyday, working situation for JH and, and me. every time some, feature comes up and we want to Try to build that feature for our customers. think that they can do it. And I think, I think, no, we can't do it.

Abby Schommer: Right. You're literally the voice of the customer. He so sometimes he might overestimate the competencies of, and, and not in like a diminutive way, but he, he literally doesn't know what it means to not be a programmer.

Mina: Uh huh.

Abby Schommer: that's almost your superpower as somebody who does not have that technical background.

You can be the voice in the room that is an accurate representation of what non technical product managers can and cannot do.

Mina: Also, I was telling you how different, the thought process of South Korean and, uh, Americans are different. how the order of the thinking is different. [00:26:00] I think what engineers and non tech, people, professionals are totally different in that way. Because, if you ask, a non technical people, like, what do you want to analyze?

They think of the result of analysis. not the progress of it, not what element that you want to track. they ultimately think of the results.

Abby Schommer: Yep,

Mina: it was really interesting because I've been doing like, experiments on this and I kind of like laid out the graph, that they could do with measured like retention graphs, any funnel analysis, segmentation for the pages that you want to, compare you lay out those, graphs for them. can easily, distinguish which analysis that they want to do. They can

Abby Schommer: mm hmm,

Mina: but when you just ask them, Oh, what do you want to track? What do you want to, like, measure? They have no idea.

Abby Schommer: right, [00:27:00]

Mina: really interesting that, I have to like always flip all the orders that I think when I'm doing sales, I have to flip it over into point right away so that people could get it.

And then I should explain it afterwards.

Abby Schommer: right,

Mina: also within the product, I have to do it like in the reverse way. I have to reverse GH thinking.

Abby Schommer: mm hmm.

And again, it's more of that outcome focus is what you're saying. Like and it is, it is funny because a lot of times you can ask people what they want and they don't even know what they want, but they can point to what they want or when they see it, they know what they want. focusing on that by now, even though people haven't even gone through the motions of telling you what they want to buy.

that kind of just that. flipping it on its head is it must be, is it something that's come easier to you with time or is it a little bit mentally exhausting to have to go and kind of start to think through things in a different manner? Is it, is it something that's like pretty mentally taxing on you or, or a little more [00:28:00] second nature by this?

Mina: part that I'm love about my product. I chose measure because of that. I think I gradually realized that I fascinated that I view this product and build this product like with. consideration of multiple, I think.

Abby Schommer: gonna go ahead and do that. And I'm gonna go slide. Um, you

Mina: I was fascinated by philosophy actually, I got to like, a lot of different perspective and how logically they are different and how logically they're similar kind of thing. So while I'm doing measured, I could kind of deal with those situations and make that into very thoughtful process of people dealing with their data and start, analyzing their data their product.

that's the part I think I love about my [00:29:00] product.

Abby Schommer: Yeah, it's one of the coolest things about building a product to you get to decide what perspectives you account for. Right. And there's certain technologies that are accessible to people with different learning profiles, right? Like that's something that, even we're trying to achieve, like, how can we make our tool more accessible to folks who think this way versus this way?

or people with a different range of experience in your case, people who have a programming background versus not, are American versus South Korean. So, yeah. Technology is so powerful because the way that you build it really dictates who gets to use it. And it sounds like the way that you're building it is you want to almost democratize access to folks of varying backgrounds.

And that's, that's where I feel like technology is the most exciting and you can drive a lot of great social impact with technology by just building it in a way that it's accessible to more people who feel usually excluded from using those technologies.

Mina: Yeah, I'm, building this for people who cannot use no code tools. So,

Abby Schommer: Yeah, you're building it for [00:30:00] people like you.

Mina: I am, I think.

Abby Schommer: okay, Mina, you've shared so much great information about Measured to date. Is there anything else particularly exciting on the horizon? Any new product developments that you can share with our audience today?

Mina: we're thinking to bring this product to be, an AI product, but with the human in the loop. So

Abby Schommer: I don't know if see but I'm going to try to zoom in can see it better. Mm

Mina: And afterwards you can just, validate our process.

so that, They can just start right away. instead of, writing all the data specs and talking to engineers, all those data hassle that you are going through, we want to, like, really shorten that, using AI and by, them determine what to do.

like you said, in outcome based way of processing steps. [00:31:00] we have, ideas, laying down into our roadmap. one is because we, our SDK can capture the interactions between Your end user and your, browser or native apps, we can let you build. a no code feature, in your website, maybe like a pop up, you can change your text, you can change your image, those like almost working like a no code builder,

Abby Schommer: Yeah,

Mina: not in any other like web flow and other than

Abby Schommer: right. Okay.

Mina: only into your product. that's another thing that we are planning next year.

Abby Schommer: if folks having listened to this, if they want to get in touch, learn more about measured connect directly with you about maybe trying the tool out, what is the best way that they can go about doing that?

Mina: just reaching out to me, and LinkedIn. Or you can just go to measure. and you can book a quick call with me.

Abby Schommer: Okay, great. And we can [00:32:00] put those links in the episode show notes so folks can have ease of access to them.

Mina: Cool.

Abby Schommer: Mina, thank you so much. This has been such a fascinating conversation and I love how we've , painted these broad strokes of taking into account different perspectives and you from an early age.

Broadening your world view and then from there being able to account for that and build for people not just like yourself, but people with varying perspectives. So I love that and I totally agree. I think it's one of the most exciting things about building products and having people like you at the helm of building product.

Mina: Thank you so much, Abby,

Thank you so much for listening to the marginal. podcast. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Cal pal with music. Bye Siddhartha. If you like what you heard today, please don't forget to. To rate, review and subscribe to the podcast. So you never miss an episode. You can view full episode show notes@marginalpodcast.com and follow us at. At marginal podcast on Instagram. Thank you so much and we'll catch you next time.