S2E9: Creating a Data Visualization Startup with Eugene Woo

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's episode, I talk with Eugene Woo. Eugene is the cofounder and CEO of Venngage, an infographic tool. In our interview, Eugene shares how he first got into the world of data visualization and how he later became a full fledged entrepreneur. Eugene shares valuable business lessons he learned along the way, and towards the end of our interview, he also gives job interview pro tips for those looking to work at a startup. Make sure you stick around for that.

If you want to start your own business or work at a startup, this interview is for you. Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy!

Hey Eugene, thanks so much for talking with me today.

Eugene:
Hey Laurence, thank you very much for having me.

Laurence:
Yeah, really excited to dig in here, but before we get started, could you just introduce yourself to the audience?

Eugene:
Sure, so my name is Eugene Woo and I am the CEO and cofounder of Venngage, an infographics tool.

Laurence:
Awesome, I'm so excited to have you on because I think you're one of the first people who I've had on the show that specializes in data and data visualization. For the listeners who don't know, it is a huge hot area right now. Anything with data.

Eugene:
Yeah, so I'm happy to share what I've done and what I've learned. As I've mentioned before, I actually didn't know a lot about data visualization or infographics when I started out, so yeah, excited to share my story.

Laurence:
Yes, great. So let's backtrack a bit here. What were you doing before you started Venngage?

Eugene:
Before I started Venngage, I was a software developer. So I was a programmer, I do have an engineering background. Then I decided to branch out as an independent consultant, initially. Part of that was trying to market myself and try to get jobs and try to get, you know, as a consultant I had to look for jobs all the time. I was having a pretty hard time doing that, to be honest, until one day I discovered this infographic resume that someone called Chris Spurlock had created and it was this beautiful infographic, I had a timeline in there. It was so different from the traditional resume that I was trying to send people to get jobs, that I instantly was drawn to it and decided that I needed to do and learn more about infographics and data visualization.

Long story short, I started a site about infographics resumes even though I didn't know a lot about it. I hired some designers, I learned, I essentially had to learn on the job, and the site became really popular. Eventually, I had a lot of demand for people who wanted infographics that weren't in resumes. They wanted to do marketing infographics, they wanted to do data visualizations for their reports for their businesses. That led me to Venngage.

Laurence:
Okay, awesome. So you had this resume infographic tool. Would a person upload a Word document and then it would take that and turn it into a nicely formatted resume?

Eugene:
It was even easier than that. You would just connect your LinkedIn profile and it would just take the data from your LinkedIn and then it would visualize your education into a timeline and your work experience into a visual timeline. Back then your skills were scored, they're not anymore on LinkedIn, so we would also visualize your skills and a bunch of other things. You could pick themes, you could customize the colors, the font, and all. The site is still up, so it's called vizualize.me, spelled with a 'z', and you can still check it out, it still works.

Laurence:
Oh wow, awesome, that's so cool. It's actually so funny you mention that because the other day or not too long ago, I was looking for something to take my LinkedIn profile and turn it into some kind of PDF or something. I was having so much trouble finding something and it sounds like this could have worked. It's called vizualize.me?

Eugene:
Yeah, vizualize.me, spelled with a viz because I couldn't buy the one with the correct spelling.

Laurence:
Oh got it, vizu. I'll definitely have to go back and check that out. How many years ago was that, when you first started that site?

Eugene:
This was five years ago, this was 2011 when I started that.

Laurence:
Wow, 2011. That was before I really began starting to code. Yeah, that's awesome though. So you had the site in 2011, it's still up today. After you had a lot of success with that and you saw a demand for other kinds of infographics, you decided to create Venngage.

Eugene:
Correct. Vizualize.me was a free site. We didn't really monetize it. I really didn't know a lot about being an entrepreneur and running a website that made money. I knew how to do consulting before. As I mentioned I had done something. I knew how to sell my services and I knew how to hire people, build a team, and build products for other people. But running a website and making money out of it was really very foreign to me, I didn't really know a lot.

To be honest, even though vizualize.me was fairly popular back then, it was featured in all the big magazines like TechCrunch and all of that. We had a lot of users, in the hundreds of thousands the first two months we launched, but I wasn't able to monetize it, and very quickly the team actually collapsed. Long story short, I had started the company with a bunch of people from a hackathon, that I met in a hackathon called Startup Weekend. They were all great people but they all had different priorities and they left the team very quickly.

Venngage was sort of my way of, "Alright, we now need to start a real business that makes money." There were enough people who had contacted me via vizualize.me asking for, "Hey we want to do something for with infographics, but not resumes, it's for our marketing campaigns." Most of them were for marketing initially. "Can you help me?" So I basically said, "Yeah, of course."

And this included a really big, I got lucky in the sense that a very big company, a very big social media company, the biggest, all of you use it. They actually contacted me. We did a small project with them for their marketing. Essentially I didn't really know what I was getting into. I basically just said yes. That was sort of like a forcing function. Because I said yes, I kind of needed to figure out how we would make this tool that their marketers could then customize to make simple infographics and put in some data and then customize it for their marketing campaigns. So we started out like that. Started out like custom contract work that eventually led to, that I kind of commercialized for everyone else.

Laurence:
Wow, that's so cool. How many years ago was this, when you sort of began Venngage?

Eugene:
It was 2012, so only about a year later Venngage, very soon after vizualize.me. So about, less than a year after vizualize.me I started Venngage.

Laurence:
That's so cool. You're based in Canada, which city?

Eugene:
Toronto, Canada.

Laurence:
Toronto, nice. That's such a neat story. You've been doing it now for about four years, Venngage? Maybe even closer to five?

Eugene:
Yeah, about four years.

Laurence:
Four years, awesome. I'm sure you must have learned so much along the way.

Eugene:
Definitely.

Laurence:
Because you said when you first got started, you didn't know a lot about entrepreneurship and business, maybe you knew a lot about consulting but not about building a product and monetizing it. I'm sure probably every month or every quarter you have a big breakthrough or something but could you maybe share a few of the bigger ones with the audience?

Eugene:
Sure. I think one of the biggest things that I learned was that it's one thing to read something and it's another thing to internalize and learn it. When we were starting Venngage, the lean startup methodology, it just kind of came up then. I think it was, the book had just come out, it was the thing that everybody was reading and following. Obviously, I did it as well. I read the book. I even was part of a local group that that's all we talked about. We would meet once a week and discuss different techniques. Different startup lean techniques. The group was called Lean Coffee, it was a great group of people.

Even though I thought I knew some of the validation and the concepts that the book taught me, when I was actually going through the process, so the early days of Venngage was very tumultuous. That's why it's four years later. The first two years were just terrible, I would say. It was because I didn't recognize, I couldn't really reconcile the knowledge I thought I knew with what was really happening in the startup.

One clear example now in hindsight I learned was, when I first started out, part of the basic lean startup was validate, charge people money, validate, see if people will pay for it, right? You ask for money up front, which we did. Part of that was, we were getting like one sign up a day and I thought it was really low. I thought, "Wow, this is terrible." One upgrade a day. I was like, "Nobody wants this tool, this is the worst idea ever." Because we were only getting one a day. We actually pivoted. So part of our four year journey was we actually pivoted away from infographics, we did something else and then pivoted back.

In hindsight, when you talk about software as a service, when you're starting out at first, one customer a day is actually not bad at all. In fact, because it scales up pretty quickly and at the end of the year you have 350 customers, which is great. I think that, I thought it was terrible. Plus the price was so low, it was only $19, so I couldn't really see, "Oh my god, we're getting $20 a day, it will take us forever to pay for all of us, and pay a measly salary for all of us." Unless we raise money, which we weren't and we couldn't do back then. So that was one of the key learnings that I learned very quickly. Like, wow, it's one thing to read the books and thing you know something. It's another thing to really go through it and internalize it and understand it.

Laurence:
Yes, oh my gosh, that's so insane. You said you pivoted away from infographics for a bit and then went back. How long did that last for? When you went away from infographics for a bit?

Eugene:
Yeah, so the other lesson here is don't chase trends. What happened was, we were doing infographics that were mainly for content marketers, it was a very defined market. Then we got lost for awhile and decided to chase after big data because back then big data was another thing that was trending. It was like, you know, everyone was talking about big data. Everywhere we went when I talked about data visualization, they were like, "Oh are you doing big data? Why don't you do something for big data?"

So we sort of got seduced by this trend and started chasing after big data. We started chasing after this trend and then we were like, "Let's do something for big data, let's do big data visualization, let's do big data analytics and visualization because the market's going to be," I don't know what it is now, a zillion dollars. That's what people were telling us, our advisors were telling us this. Some of our clients were telling us this. So we went after this market. Tried to build some analytics, data visualization tools for "big data" and then very quickly in our time, but it took us like a year and a half to realize, "Wow, we've gone down this path that is really bad because don't really have a good sense of what the product was." I was not in that, I barely knew infographics, much less big data, right?

After about a year and a half I made a call and said Let's stop doing this analytics, what we called a social analytics product, and let's flip back to what we were good at doing which was infographics, and focus back on infographics.

Laurence:
That's super interesting. So you had this social analytics product, was that more for larger companies, more like enterprise kind of companies?

Eugene:
Yeah, exactly, it was. If you remember part of it, I was disillusioned by the $19 per customer, you know, one per day, and I thought, "Oh, we can try and get these enterprise customers who will pay us thousands of dollars a month," and we only need a few of them as opposed to tens of thousands of smaller customers who would pay us $19 a month. So it was not just a product pivot, the customer had pivoted. The sales, instead of becoming a self-service tool, there was now a sales process involved so now there were sales involved. It was completely different, which obviously at that time, I didn't realize it. I thought, "Oh, we'll just charge more money and get different customers and we'll be much better. We'll be profitable a lot faster." That turned out not to be true because it took us on average six to nine months to close a customer and we were only able to close I think, five customers in a nine month period or something like that. I kind of looked at the financials and were like, "We're basically going to die very soon unless we do something else."

Laurence:
Yeah, oh my gosh. It's such an interesting story, I'm so fascinated by this. I have to admit that it's kind of, some of these questions are a little self indulgent because I somewhat recently began working at a SAS startup, I mean different from what, not an infographic tool or anything like that. However, it's been, I've learned so much just about how to market SAS products, customer acquisition, monthly recurring revenue and all these things. I'm still learning so much. It's all very interesting. So six to nine months to close these kind of bigger, enterprise level customers for this big data tool. Then you decide to go back to having more of an infographic tool and then who was your customer mostly for that? Is it like marketers and bloggers?

Eugene:
So initially, it was marketers, yeah. So marketers or any freelancer, small business owner. Who were using it, marketer or someone playing a marketer's role. Either a small business owner, a blogger who was trying to market their blogs. But the goal was essentially to create visuals or infographics for marketing purposes. That was our initial, I would say, the target market that we started out with. It's still one of our biggest markets now.

Then very quickly, I would say not that quickly, in two years, the infographics sort of matured, I want to say. And then we found everyone using infographics. They teach it in schools now, we started getting teachers from high schools and then even elementary schools saying, "Oh we're teaching infographics in grade 4 or 5," which I was shocked. I was like, "Really? Wow." That's why we have an education plan now because we have to cater to schools and there's also a fairly large amount of what I want to call professionals. These are middle managers to executives who do reports. So someone who would have to create, like a sales manager would have to create a sales report or a monthly sales report or a presentation, a strategy presentation or something like that. So they would use our tool to create these visual presentations or these infographics to visualize and to better articulate their ideas and also to turn all of their data into visuals.

Laurence:
Got it, so yeah, it definitely sounds like it runs the gamut. That's so neat that schools are teaching. I knew universities were, I've written a few articles not too long ago and I looked at some college majors and college extracurriculars and I definitely saw stuff with data visualization being offered, which I thought was really awesome as well. The fact that it's with kids that are in elementary schools, that's amazing.

Eugene:
Yeah, that definitely surprised me.

Laurence:
I'm sort of laughing because the customer is sort of like a 5th grader to a manager putting together a report.

Eugene:
Exactly. So now we run the full gamut. We've got everybody from students all the way to CEOs and executives using the tool. I would say it's interesting, it's great, but it also makes our job a lot harder. Sort of like segmenting and targeting and creating content to these segments. It's a lot harder. We only target a few. What we do now is we actually only target a few, what we call personas, a few segments, that's all we do. A lot of the others, we don't have the bandwidth to go the whole gamut.

Laurence:
Yeah for sure. Out of curiosity, how many people work at Venngage now?

Eugene:
We are close to 20, close to 20 full time.

Laurence:
Are you guys all based in Toronto?

Eugene:
No. Most of us are. About 13 are in Toronto, we've a got a few in the states and about six just all over. We've got a couple in Asia and one or two in Eastern Europe.

Laurence:
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Out of curiosity, what's kind of like the breakdown of the employees because you have this very, I don't want to say technical product, I guess it is technical, you know, software's a service, so obviously the software is really important. As far as the team goes, how many people are engineers?

Eugene:
We have a team of six engineers, let me think about this, yeah it's six. So the engineering team is six. If you add in QA and all that it's a little bigger but it's more like, so yeah, six engineers, we only have one QA, we have two full time designers, three marketers, and then the rest are either customer success and some supporting roles.

Laurence:
Okay, awesome, so as far as the technical kind of roles go, six engineers, one QA, and then you have two designers.

Eugene:
Yeah, so it's about a third engineering, almost a third marketing, and then the other third is design and customer support, customer success, yeah.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's great. So I would love to hear your opinion, obviously you're hiring people, you're the CEO of the company. For people just getting started in tech, do you have any advice if they want to work in a startup? Do you have any advice they could follow for getting a job at a startup?

Eugene:
Okay, so this one I think I'm definitely qualified to answer because we do hire a lot of people and we put a lot of thought into what kind of people we should hire. In fact, Nadia, my director of marketing, recently wrote an article on questions, 'how to hire a hustler' or something like that, questions on hot to determine a "hustler" or a player for startups so we recently talked about this. I would say the main thing we look for is essentially someone who just doesn't do their job but who really goes above and beyond. Who owns your job. I don't know if that makes sense. Someone who takes ownership of their goals and their tasks and are able to figure things out and go above and beyond of what is required.

So how do we determine that and what you can do to show proof that you can do this is, we look a lot at extracurricular activity, we look a lot at side projects, especially if it's a passion project or a side business. I am actually not averse to hiring people who have a side project. I don't require them to shut their side project down when they work with me. In fact, I am supportive of side projects and we will support you with your side project as long as when you're at work you do your work.

We understand that passionate people, people who love to do stuff, will always have their own side projects, will always do multiple things. You can't take that away from them, right? Because that's what makes them tick. So we look a lot for that kind of stuff. So if you're just someone who just went to school and work a normal job and there's nothing outside of that, to me, we might still hire you if you're really great, but it would be a lot harder vs. someone who has a ton of stuff on side projects, they have a lot of extracurricular activity. You know, they're the president of this and that and they've organized a lot of things outside of their normal schooling or normal job and that you can do right? That's what someone who wants to join a startup can do on their own time and they can show that they've done all this stuff and I think it would make that person a lot more attractive to a startup.

Laurence:
Yes, I totally agree. Again, mentioning I've been working at a SAS company recently and having to interview people and I also think, I also look at. Outside passions, things they do outside of their normal 9-5 job. As someone who does things outside her normal 9-5 job, I think it's actually better. This is something I've found, I think because I have all this other stuff going on outside of work, you know, contributing on Forbes, doing this podcast, running my blog and a bunch of other things that relate to that, it helps me not to take things so personal, I guess, at work, at my full time job. I don't know if that makes sense.

Eugene:
Yeah, definitely, we would definitely hire someone like you. 100%

Laurence:
Yeah, I was having a conversation with one of my coworkers as well who's kind of like this and does a lot of things outside of the job, outside of the 9-5 job, like a lot of other side projects that he's building. He's an engineer. And I think it just helps in so many ways. I don't know.

Eugene:
Yeah. So it helps the business because you are learning all this other stuff for your side project, for your side business, right? You're doing all this extra learning and you bring that into the company when you work for the company, that's what I've noticed too.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's a great point. The learning and also I think, it depends on what the side project is, but if it's any kind of website, app, even a free tool someone can use, the chances that person is probably also making connections, interacting with other people. That could help the company with business opportunities, but also hiring employees, future employees with good referrals.

Eugene:
Yeah, and one of the things I try and push my employees is I try to push them to be thought leaders in their field. I want them to go out to conferences and try to speak in them, write articles in publications, industry related publications. I'm trying to push everyone, the ones who want to do it, to do that. And you're right, they get connections, they learn more, obviously the more you grow, the more fulfilled you are in your job and that helps, right? That always helps.

Laurence:
Yeah, it's like very cyclical, it all kind of ties back into each other and it's this recurring effect, which is awesome. I think it's so great having a CEO that supports that. I remember I was looking a few different full time jobs several months ago now. I was thinking I just knew I wouldn't work somewhere if I had to stop doing some of these side things. Maybe if there's a direct conflict of interest, like okay, I'm not going to promote a direct competitor or something. That totally makes sense. I'm thinking of one place I was interviewing in particular. It was an online education company, not where I work now but kind of similar to where I work now, I was told I couldn't even write any kind of tutorial, like a technical tutorial, any kind, anywhere online. It wasn't like you can't write a technical tutorial for a competitor, it was like you can't publish it. You can't be putting together educational content outside of this role. I was like, "Okay, I don't know if that's going to work."

Eugene:
A lot of policies like that are sort of self defeating. I think there are definitely a lot of these weird policies where they try and make sure the employees are always only working on their own product. I don't think it works. When I was an employee I did all kinds of other stuff as well.

Laurence:
I think it would make that person kind of resentful and angry, like they wouldn't love their job as much. Okay, you're telling me I can't do this, especially if there's no valid reason. It's insane. This also reminds me of another story I heard from someone, a friend of mine, who was saying there was a company, I don't know if he works there or used to or something, but they didn't want engineers going to conferences because they didn't want them to get hired by other people.

Eugene:
Yeah, the poaching thing. That's always a constant fear. As a CEO, it is a valid fear and I have to admit that also comes to me as I push people out to be thought leaders I'm like, "Wow, people will notice them and they'll get hired by someone else who's going to pay them a lot more money." I've got to check that, right? Because that also does happen. I've had employees tell me that, "Somebody from this company met me and gave me a job offer." So it has happened. I'm obviously conscious of it and I think it would happen anyways even if they don't go.

Laurence:
Yeah, exactly. I just think if I, I don't know, I'm just imagining a situation where, "Oh we don't want you to go this conference," and that was the reason why they wouldn't want me to go, I just think, it's my personality too, I'd just be like, "Eff you, don't tell me what to do."

Eugene:
Right. Yeah, so I think if the employee wants to leave, the employee wants to leave. It's kind of silly to say you can't go to this conference. That's kind of silly.

Laurence:
Yeah, exactly. I would advise anyone listening to maybe look out for things like that in your interview. It may be hard to tell early on because that would be something that could come later. Again, when I was interviewing, I was asking some questions about, "Can I still write articles online if I work for this company," and hearing an answer like, "No you can't," kind of weighed heavy on my decision of where I ended up.

Eugene:
That's actually, we've been doing interviews because we're trying to hire, we have two positions open right now. We always turn the tables and say, "Hey do you have any questions for us?" You'd be surprised the amount of candidates who don't come up with questions I think you should ask from a potential employer, like the ones you did, right? Once in awhile we'll get someone asking us some good questions like that. Those are usually the people you end up hiring. Because they're thinking about all those things. They're thinking about, "will I grow, will I be restricted here, what is your company doing to make sure I have a growth path are you just going to trap me in here and work me in the boiler room until I'm done?"

Laurence:
Yeah, that's super. I would love to hear some examples if you could think of any of good questions you've been asked during interviews. I'm sure the audience would benefit from that too.

Eugene:
One of the most basic questions is, "What is the company's main mission?" Number one, especially if you're talking to CEOs. I still interview every single candidate, so especially if you're talking to the CEO, you want to find out what this guy, you have a chance to talk to the CEO, you want to find out what his vision is. I would definitely do that. And then you want to find out what their core values are. Most companies I would say have some core values. Then you want to find out what kind of stuff, you want to ask questions like whether they encourage learning and growing within the company and there's several questions you can ask.

Number one you can say, "Hey do I get to go to conferences to get to learn more, what if I want to learn and grown, what kinds of things do you do in your company to encourage personal growth and career growth?" So stuff like that you can ask and if it's the company that actually has something in plan, they'll say it, right? Our company does. It's actually one of our core values, is to keep learning and to keep improving. We actually a yearly allowance that you can spend on learning. So you can buy books, you can go to a conference, you can buy an online course, and you can do whatever you want with that allowance. So we actually have some of that stuff. Even if the company doesn't have something like that, they can say, "Oh yeah, you can do whatever you want." At least they'll say that. Or they'll say, "No you can't do any of that," and then you'll know to run, right?

Laurence:
Yeah, those are all such awesome questions to ask, and I tell people this. When you're interviewing for a job, I feel like sometimes people get so stuck on, 'they're interviewing me,' and they don't even think about themselves. Not only is the company interviewing you, you're also interviewing the company and seeing if it's going to be a good fit, right?

Eugene:
Right, 100% agreed.

Laurence:
Which is exactly why asking these questions, or whatever matters to the individual because of course everyone's different and has different values, but asking those questions could give you a really good sense of whether or not it will be a really good fit in the long run.

Eugene:
Absolutely.

Laurence:
Yes, so thank you so much Eugene for chatting today. This conversation definitely took a little bit of a different turn than I thought, but I know, the Learn to Code With Me audience, a large portion is learning to code because they want a career change, they want to get ahead in their career. So I know talking about interviewing and job stuff is always super valuable. So lastly, where can people find you online?

Eugene:
They can go to venngage.com and they can send me an email so I'm just eugene@venngage.com. I do answer all my emails. So it's eugene@venngage.com.

Laurence:
Amazing. Thank you so much for talking.

Eugene:
Thank you very much, really had a good time.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you're listening to this episode in the future, simply click the search icon in the upper navigation of the page and type in Eugene's name.

If you enjoyed this episode, do me a huge favor and leave a rating and review for the show on whichever podcast platform you're tuning in on. So iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and so forth. It would mean so much to me. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm your host, Laurence Bradford, and I'll see you next week.

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