Five questions with Kevin Yun — founder of GrowSurf

A Subscriber Spotlight from StartupWatching.

Andrew Askins
StartupWatching
2 min readJun 28, 2018

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Introduce yourself and tell the Startup Watching community a little bit about your background.

​Hey everyone. I’m Kevin!

​I studied finance, but always found the startup scene exciting and fun. Outside of classes, I immersed myself in design/development, and eventually started the first UX/UI design bootcamp Designation from my dorm room. A few years in, amongst burnout and other factors, I decided to focus on what I really wanted to pursue, which was SaaS.

I think of Designation as my ‘MBA experience’, having learned and experienced everything from surviving (nearing startup death multiple times), finding product/market fit, discovering the power of automated marketing (Infusionsoft was the backbone of our business), and all things related to growing an early-stage startup. Happy to share my learnings!

I’m continuing to learn/build/fail/iterate every day. I’m currently working on GrowSurf.

What’s your 140-character elevator pitch for your company? (That’s right, we’re going old school tweet!)

GrowSurf lets you get more customers and grow your business through viral refer-a-friend referral campaigns.

What’s one thing you need help with right now?

We’re not doing a great job in showing the capabilities of integrating GrowSurf.js with your own product/SaaS, so our current users/customers aren’t the ones who we think could benefit the most from using our referral platform.

I’d love to talk to you if you are a running a startup/SaaS and get your thoughts on our JS integration process. (Email me @kevin@growsurf.com)

What piece of advice would you share with other entrepreneurs who are just getting started?

Hey friend, life isn’t a journey, remember to ​enjoy it! :)

What do you like to do when you’re not working on Growsurf?

​Currently: enjoying ​Chicago summer weather​ before it gets cold again. ☀️😎

What is your most-used emoji?

🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂

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Andrew Askins
StartupWatching

Partner and CEO at Krit. My mission is to empower non-technical founders to build successful startups outside of Silicon Valley. Still a developer at heart.