Jashin Lin, the founder of Growbie, spoke at Startup Boston Week 2024, sharing her expertise and knowledge on finding and retaining new customers (you can watch her SBW session “Email Apocalypse: The Future of Reaching Prospects” here)
Recently, she spoke with Startup Boston about why international students need to learn how to network, the challenges she had to overcome as a founder of Growbie, and how she reached out to new prospects to grow her business.
Why is it important for international students to master networking skills to boost their net worth and find new career opportunities?
Networking is extremely important in everything, but let's start with the job search. 85% of the jobs in the US are landed through networking. This is research done by LinkedIn and CNBC.
As an international student, who was studying in the US, I did not know that. My dream company I wanted to work for after I graduated was Goldman Sachs, but they were not at my school’s career fair. I thought that was not a problem, so I applied online. I thought if I am good, they will pick up my resume. Except I did not hear back from them or the 50 other companies I applied to.
This is not how job searching is done in China.
In China, jobs are found through references, so someone you know must introduce you to the person or company you want to work for. If no one is going to provide you with an introduction, then you are out of luck.
In the United States, you can cold email a stranger, and they might respond to help you out. If you reach out to people you like or alumni from your university, then tell them what you are here for is learning, they might give you a chance. That type of networking culture, the culture of giving it forward — and that's what I'm doing today.
It has been one year since you founded Growbie. What were the biggest challenges you overcame?
What is the biggest challenge? Customer acquisition.
One of my favorite professors is Christina Wallace at Harvard Business School. She was saying that for B2C business, it's like you're constantly experimenting. You might feel like this channel is working. It's like drilling oil until you exhaust your supply. Oh, shoot. It didn't work. Let's go to the next one.
The one thing that we were able to kind of nail down in the past year is the process of starting with double funnel discovery. That means asking the question, “How do people discover Growbie?” “How do we engage them in our pipeline from putting them on a sales call to closing the deal?”
It took us a while to nail it, but now we have a framework. We have a system that helps us understand we need this many people to hit this much to reach our sales goal. We are able to predict our sales, so that is beautiful for us to scale for the next step.
This year you spoke at an SBW2024 session, “Email Apocalypse: How to reach prospects beyond email?” Is there anything you would like to add here?
Content marketing is key. It is a part of our strategy.
What is our content? Everything about networking is targeted at international students. We create posts and videos that speak to their pain points.
Growbie uses social media, like Little Red Book (the Chinese equivalent of Instagram), to create engaging content that speaks to our audience so that they will seek us out.
Additionally, we have live-streamed on Little Red Book to have more face-to-face engagement with our fans to answer questions.
A second note I want to make is the importance of strategic partnerships with influencers and universities. We want to meet where our customers are at. Where are they in school? Who do they listen to? International students listen to their advisors at their school’s career center. They also seek information online and from their Chinese student association. And so we partner with those influencers.
You teach “Career Toolkit” at Boston University. Also, your students rated you very highly as a professor. How do you go about teaching your students?
The “Career Toolkit” is a three-credit seminar required for all BU undergraduate students. I have been ranked number one top instructor consistently in the past four semesters during my time teaching. The other day, my supervisor wrote me an email congratulating me on the positive course evaluations. I have read through them and found keywords, like “energy,” “positive,” and “helpful."
The second thing students have found me to be helpful is that I am not here to BS everything I talk about. What I teach is something I personally experienced that worked well for me. I went to Boston University as an undergrad 10 years ago. Now, I am here as an instructor and used to sit in one of those seats.
What advice would you give to other founders?
Always focus on demand generation. Often founders spend a lot of time building, building, and building. [They would say,] “Let me build this product, and it is done”. That does not matter because what if the market does not buy it? You wasted your time. You want to spend your time earning the highest ROI.
I set up a bare minimum for success for our first bootcamp. If I did not meet that minimum, then I would cancel. This prevents me from wasting time on something that will not provide much of a return. Also, canceling the boot camp allowed me to rewrite my value proposition and change the way I marketed the boot camp.
Lastly, when marketing the bootcamp, we focused on market demand. Were people looking up our landing page or clicking on the social media ads? Are people signing up and being put on the waitlist? Seeing people who want your stuff indicates whether people are interested in what you are saying and doing.
Nicholas Ewing is a graduate of UMass Lowell in Business Administration: International Business this year. You can connect with him here.
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