Simon Yu: From Starving Student to Taco Truck Owner, to Blockchain Micro-Task Revolutionary
Written by George Howard
The path that led Simon Yu to become CEO of StormX, Inc., and founder of Storm Market is one that if you didn’t know it to be true, you would find it almost impossible to believe. And yet, now looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it seems nearly inevitable that this passionate and driven entrepreneur would create a company and product so motivated by a purpose of empowering and enabling others to achieve access, success, and ultimately, economic freedom.
Turning a $100 loan into $1 million in revenue
Simon was forced to drop out of college for financial reasons. And, lacking the funds for rent or online courses, he utilized his mother’s recipe and began delivering Korean tacos to college students in his hometown of Seattle from his dorm room. As Simon described this initial entrepreneurial endeavor, it — initially, at least — followed a fairly typical origin story paradigm: “I begged my Dad to borrow $100 to start with. I blew through this in a few months.”
However, where Simon’s story does not adhere to most entrepreneurial arcs is what he did next. Learning quickly from his initial failed endeavor, Simon turned to an approach that continues to serve him well: utilizing data to optimize product-market fit. Simon leveraged Facebook’s algorithms to inform a strategy that pushed the taco delivery to virality, and turned $80 into $10,000.
Sensing a larger opportunity, and utilizing his quantitative skills, Simon next taught himself how to trade stock options and turned the $10,000 into $30,000 in order to launch a food truck.
Food trucks, of course, are far from uncommon. However, food trucks that generate a million dollars in revenue — via data optimization and strategic thinking, which optimized where and to whom they served (in this case, the plurality of local tech companies) — are not. Oh, and Simon did all this while also working a day job as a bank underwriter.
Launching BitMaker
In 2014, Simon met his cofounder who was working on an app called BitMaker in his dorm room. As Simon explains, “At this time, Bitcoin and Blockchain Tech were exciting because they allowed for the sending of money without the transaction fees. And BitMaker was experiencing user growth of 30% to 80% month-over-month based on a simple app premise.
The BitTask feature (now named Storm Task) was introduced early in 2017. This feature rewards users for trying out products like Hulu or Dollar Shave Club; essentially, users trade their time and effort trying out new products and services in order to be eventually rewarded in Bitcoin or Ether.
The product was a massive hit. By Feb 2017, the revenue was growing 56%… week-over-week!
As Simon states, “This gave us confirmation that people like the product so much because of the ability to earn easily via a digital device. But we saw that the ability to earn was limited because the earnings are capped by the number of offers that are available to you. We viewed this a problem to solve across the different sectors of the world — first side jobs and emerging economies. We realized there are really no other alternatives.”
This type of adherence to a disciplined strategy of utilizing customer data to constantly refine product-market fit is really at the core of both Simon’s and StormX’s success.
As Simon states: “We began planning the micro-task marketplace, because we saw how broken services like Mechanical Turk, Upwork, and Fiverr are because they charge such high fees and have problems with centralization. And so, if we put this product on the blockchain and used smart contracts to automate it, we could build a better decentralized product that ultimately allows the people that are hiring and the people that are willing to work to do so without a middleman. Thus fees are reduced, and we make it cheaper and make it more accessible for people who want to work.”
This last point is crucial to understanding Simon’s mission-based approach, and it ties together his early entrepreneurial experiences with his current work: “This is a passion project for me, because of the hardships that I went through at the beginning of my career. We want to create an opportunity where people are able to earn more.”
The results of this combination of a disciplined adherence to utilizing data to determine product market fit combined with a purpose-driven motivation has led to some staggering results. One of the key components of this is gamification. Simon states: “As millennials ourselves, we think of our product as making the user feel that their on a mission, and if they succeed, they get rewarded in Bitcoin.”
This all adds up to multiple engagement metrics and client retention that is off the charts: “We have massive retention rate of 70%, as compared to others like Google, and big players in the mobile ad networks space, and Facebook; all of which are in the 20–30% range,” explains Simon.
BitMaker has been generating revenue from day one. Explains Simon, “We’ve been scrappy; we have only a handful of angels. We continue to hit our KPIs and find more and more ways for users to earn.”
Storm Market and STORM Token
As all great entrepreneurs, Simon is focused on iteration, and the learnings from BitMaker and BitTask have led to Storm Market and the STORM token.
“Users liked being able to earn, but the feedback was that they wanted more opportunities to earn.” Simon explains, “People are taking short-term jobs to try products and services, but now we’re expanding to more mechanical turk like tasks — speech recognition, etc. — what we want to get to is a peer-to-peer job creation network, where users are both creating tasks and filling tasks.”
Simon continues via detailing both what he’s learned from staying close to the customers and how this has created competitive advantages with respect to the product:
“Users wanted more ways to earn. We found that it’s a broken system — most of the services out there charge as much as 20 to 40%. We are able to drastically reduce this via automation and a blockchain-based decentralized approach. We can completely reduce almost all of these intermediary fees, and get to the point where people can connect with people and use our platform to allow the power to come back to return to them — rather than a centralized company.”
To achieve this, Storm has created an impressive team. COO, Arry Yu, with her experience in not only the largest fortune 500 companies but deep operational experience with her own start ups, has shown she is able to execute and also have the vision to grow the company. She is the reason for StormX being able to scale so quickly. (Learn more about Arry here). Rui Maximo with his long background of cyber security and also his ability to grow and lead a team has demonstrated his ability to be an amazing CTO of a blockchain company. (Learn more about Rui here). As Simon says, “Some of the smartest people are on this mission with us to build this product to give people the ability to gain access to more opportunities.”
Simon concludes by clearly articulating how Storm’s approach goes far beyond solving technically difficult challenges, but rather serves a vastly greater good:
“We’re no longer bound by geography with respect to either those who are hiring or those who are seeking work. Historically, the problem has been that processing fees are too high and there are too many intermediaries, and micro transactions and micro payments have not evolved with the demand. But we believe we’ve solved this, and will allow people to have a higher quality of life, and that’s what really excites us. Our ultimate goal is to really make our current our system of finding job and being hired to be more efficient.”
