Seal-Bin Han is the CEO of FitMango, which he started as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, as well as the CEO of Diamond Hook Media and a Managing Partner at the American Timber Company.
Read on to learn about Seal’s journey as an entrepreneur, his tips for success, and his unique take on student entrepreneurs: they don’t exist.
TCO: Tell us about yourself and your time at Hopkins
Seal: My name is Seal, I went to high school in Harvard, Massachusetts at the Bromfield School. Then I went to Johns Hopkins to study Electrical Engineering.
While I was a Hopkins student, I started a company called ShapeU, which was my response to being uncomfortable at the gym. I wanted to build an app which would allow me and a couple of my friends, or strangers, to be matched into a small group to work out at the gym, with or without a personal trainer. Eventually that turned into FitMango, which is what I do now.
TCO: What was your first venture?
Seal: In high school I started an organization called The World Youth Initiative. There were a lot of nonprofit organizations that interfaced with high school students, but those organizations don’t really cover all the different topics in which a student could find intellectual curiosity. What we wanted to do was build an organization that empowered high school students to start their own projects.
We ended up working with The Luce Foundation, and we raised about a quarter of a million dollars as 16 year olds, and helped dozens of students start nonprofit organizations or social enterprises.
TCO: Being so young and a first time entrepreneur, how did you know what to do to launch this venture?
Seal: I didn’t know what to do, and I think thats the fun of it. It’s like you jump off a cliff and you build the airplane on the way down. But if you fail, you’re still a high school student.
None of this stuff is life and death. That’s why I think it’s so exciting for a high school student, or college student, to be able to start these sorts of ventures.
TCO: What was it like being a student entrepreneur?
Seal: I don’t even know if “Student Entrepreneur” is a real thing. It’s tough to talk about what I view as a lifestyle, because you have to be sort of all-in in entrepreneurship.
What I encourage students to do is to work on interesting projects with really interesting people. The foundation of that, cool ideas, can turn into companies if people want the product. Which is the single most important thing when you’re selling any sort of product or service.
First it’s a side hustle. And then you know it’s not a side hustle when it’s taking up your entire life, when it’s what you think about before you go to bed, what you think about when you’re brushing your teeth, or in the shower. That’s how you know.
TCO: How did you manage the workload while building out your venture as a student?
A lot of it is understanding exactly what needs to go into getting a satisfactory level academically, and then building from that baseline. Everything you do in life you should work backwards from what you want, and if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want, then you need to spend more time focusing on how to understand that.
If you want to go be a doctor, you should focus on getting that GPA near 4.0. But if you want to go and start your own company, and school is just there to appease your parents who are immigrants and came here solely for you to get a college education from a prestigious university *laughs*, by all means, get a 3.5 and then build out everything else with whatever time you have left over.
TCO: What businesses are you currently involved in?
Seal: I own a personal training management software company called FitMango. We sell software to gyms to optimize the way they deliver personal training to their clients.
Recently that organization spun off a digital agency called Diamond Hook Media, this new-age digital agency that handles a whole plethora of services including web and mobile development, content creation, social media management, search engine optimization, and the like.
In addition to that, I’m also the Managing Partner of an organization called American Timber Company. We sell Baltimore-based, artisinal wood products on the internet.
One of my goals for 2017 was to become an Amazon e-commerce power seller. It’s interesting because arbitrage is like literally the base of mercantilism: if you can buy stuff at one price and sell it at another price, you are a true entrepreneur *laughs*
TCO: Given all of that, what does a typical day look like for you?
Seal: The best part of my day is that there’s never a “typical day”.
The time I wake up varies depending on where I am in the world. I‘m in New York like every week, either on Wednesday or Friday, and usually spend the night there. Then I’m out in L.A. at least once a month.
Assuming that we’re here in Baltimore, I get up at 7:30am, which I know is late for most entrepreneurs, but I sleep very late. Then I make my bed and take a cold shower. I meditate for 30 minutes, before anything, and my phone is always on Airplane Mode at this point. At 8:30am I’m in it, from then until 11:00am I take phone calls. From 11 onward, until evening, I’m just sort of putting out fires. *laughs*
TCO: If you could go back to being a freshman at Hopkins, what advice would you give yourself?
Seal: I did it right, actually. I did everything: I was in AKPsi, I joined the Marshall Salant Investment Team, I pledged for another fraternity, secretly. I did research at the hospital in the Department of Surgery. I did a bunch of random sh*t, and I think that’s exactly what you should be doing, unless you are laser-focused about what you want. At that point, I wasn’t sure what I wanted.
I think that more college students should take active steps to building in passive income because anybody can do it. Anybody can do this coaster business, anybody can do it.
I’m just the guy who’s doing it, and that’s the difference.
I guess the advice is be the guy who’s doing it.
-Seal-Bin Han
(P.S — Watch Seal’s TEDx talk here)
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