I’m Jeroen from Salesflare and this is Founder Coffee.
Every two weeks, I have coffee with a different founder. We discuss our lives, our passions, what we’ve learned, … in an intimate interview, to get to know the person behind the company.
For this nineteenth episode, I spoke with John Kim of SendBird, the user-to-user messaging backend that powers chat on websites and apps like Reddit.
Convinced that starting a company armenia phone number data was the only way to do what he loved, John launched one of the first Korean startups, raised money in an environment that had never heard of it, and then was one of the first to sell his startup to a company outside of Korea.
After that, John started a community for moms, raised money for it, pivoted (before that was even a word) to a messaging backend company, and got accepted to Y Combinator. Today, he’s the head of one of the hottest messaging companies around.
We talk about his extremely classical usability has to do rational way of making decisions, the Korean ecosystem and work ethic, the intrinsic motivation framework, and once again, the regret minimization framework.
Welcome to Founder Coffee.
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Jeroen: Hello, John. It’s a pleasure bz lists to have you on Founder Coffee.
John: Hey, man. How’s it going?
Jeroen: Everything is fine, thank you.
Jeroen: You are the founder of SendBird. For those who don’t know yet, what does SendBird do?
John: SendBird is a chat API. We basically power user-to-user messaging within mobile applications and websites. You can think of it as a use case in market places where a lot of sellers talk to buyers. Or consumer products like online communities like Reddit, or gaming, or dating, as well as some live video streaming , where you chat with other audiences as well.
Jeroen: Companies like Reddit use your software to create a chat so they don’t have to do it themselves. Is that true?
John: Exactly. Reddit is one of our most fantastic clients. They’re one of the three largest websites in the US, and they use us for their direct user-to-user messaging as well as their Subreddit chat.
Jeroen: Cool. How did you come up with the idea to start a chat backend company? How did it come about? You thought, “A chat backend company, that would be a great company to start.”
John: Yeah. Well, nothing is that easy. When we started our journey in 2013, we started as a B2C company trying to build a community for moms, where you can find other moms in your area with kids of the same age. Basically, to organize playdates, buy and sell used baby products, and so on.
When we were trying to create this community for mothers, it was the exact year that, you know, Mary Meeker published a report called “Hey, like messaging is overtaking the world.”
: I think it was around 2014-2015 when WhatsApp, Telegram, those kinds of apps became the most used in the world. So everyone in the industry was trying to see what kind of chat experience they could implement in their own app.
We also wanted to add chat, and we looked around, tried a few different open source solutions, but they didn’t really work the way we wanted, so we also built on top of things like Firebase. That also didn’t have the flexibility and features that we wanted. So we ended up ripping all of that out and building everything ourselves from the ground up.
