Founder Series: Jeffrey Wang
The summer after sixth grade, I became obsessed with speedsolving, the sport of solving the Rubik’s Cube as quickly as possible. Finding that no American online businesses carried the market’s flagship cubes, I was eager to monetize this gap in the market. At the same time, I was also a thirteen year old, so I really just wanted to amass the greatest Rubik’s Cube collection of all time. I decided to invest all of my life’s savings, a total of three hundred dollars in my piggy bank and embarked on my first business venture. One month later, I had bought a domain, designed the website on a random web hoster, and spent the majority of the money I had on thirty cubes for stock.
Roughly 10 years later, iCubeMart had become one of the major players in the global industry, serving as the US authorized dealer for 18 industry brands. We are the one stop shop retailer for all things related to the niche hobby of speedcubing, stocking products from the standard 3x3 all the way up to the 11x11 and then octohedron-shaped puzzles. There’s an enormous community of “speedsolvers,” who compete in huge organized competitions and even World Championships, that get incredibly into purchasing and using the right cube and gear for their setup. iCubeMart is thus somewhat like the Walmart or Amazon of Rubik’s Cubes.
One of the biggest challenges I had to overcome was actually grinding to get my first order. To promote my company and create demand for my products after finally getting the site up, I began studying my marketing options. I could advertise on Speedsolving.com, a popular forum that attracts tens of thousands of visitors a day. I could also sponsor an official speedcubing competition since these events attracted cubers en masse. However, I scarcely had any money. One advertisement on Speedsolving.com cost hundreds of dollars. Sponsoring a competition would cost even more. Having launched the site, I went two weeks without any orders, and I remember feeling extremely disappointed and frustrated that all of my efforts were going to waste. For days I racked my brain for solutions until I realized that I could sponsor YouTube cubers by providing free cubes to review and, in return, they would promote my company. This meant that I only had to incur the cost of one product and get tens of thousands of impressions using a pre-existing viewer base. This ended up being a really efficient way to blast my company through the community, and on 10/29/2010, I received my first order ever . . . from Australia!
This was a bit of a special startup because I did most of the work by myself. When orders really started piling in, and I still had to get all of my homework done and go to basketball practice, my parents started helping me out by packing orders.
Since going to college, I took a step back from running iCubeMart, but now that I’m waiting for my full-time job to start, I’ve been redesigning and rehauling our entire business strategy. By the holiday shopping season this year, we will have a completely new look and updated shopping experience, so make sure to check us out at www.icubemart.com!
