YouSaid · the spoken record

Spencer Jan

lines on the record: 69
first: 2023-08-14
most recent: 2023-08-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're probably not even pronouncing it right. Yeah, right. Because I think it's a French word for Bell. And I think there's like an accent on the end and we're probably saying it all wrong.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. And those were the early days of FBA fulfillment by Amazon. I had started to explore it. And so we signed up for Amazon and we would put stuff on Amazon. And we started to realize that Amazon is a huge opportunity. And we definitely leaned into that.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, we'd buy these things for 20 cents a piece and bundle them in maybe a pack of five and sell them for $15.99, $19.99 and just start selling. And we did. We sold closes. We cornered that market.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I definitely felt leaning into e-commerce was the right move. And meanwhile, Jeff, as we were both blogging at the same time, and he was learning about what I was doing with mattresses. And it was, you know, I kind of felt like, oh, I wish I could do this with Jeff, but it's such a niche market in Shanghai. I don't know what he's going to do. But my feeling was he was on the sideline saying, like, what about me? Let's do something together. Like, we can do e-commerce and let's figure something out. And I was like, yeah.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was making, yeah, the thought was not to sell tons at a very low cost. It was a very small market in Shanghai for expats, but they all have a lot of money and a lot of their relocation expenses are reimbursable by their companies.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think more so queens and kings is what I remember kings mostly. You buy for about 200 bucks and I'd sell them for about $1,000 US. Wow.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apartment in Shanghai, and so they were like 80 pounds each. And I attribute a lot of my back problems to having moved so many mattresses. The worst was when I would ask if there's an elevator or not. And sometimes some of those apartments they lived in didn't, and they were on like the fifth floor. And it was just hot and sweaty and moving those mattresses up. The strategy was to take off the cardboard box. And they were encased in this plastic casing, and the sweat of my arms I could wrap around and it wouldn't let it slide because I was so sticky that I would just get it up and then start making my way up the stairs.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the 25th floor of my high-rise apartment, I moved the sofas to the side and stuffed the entire, I mean, we had a tiny, it was like 150 square meters.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I had a day job. I was working all day long at my day job, and then at night I would turn on slumbermax, see what orders came in, deal with all the emails, customer service, and then actually physically myself, I would rent a taxi truck and that would come to my apartment, I would dolly down as many mattresses as I needed to deliver that night, put them in the back of a truck, and I would make deliveries around Shanghai.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I set it up knowing that there were little communities online for Shanghai expats. So there's expat forums that all the expats would go to, and it was very active. I also did other creative marketing tactics that didn't cost a lot. I would go talk to all the chiropractors within the city and all the ones that service the expats. I would talk to real estate companies who are dealing with the relocations of expats.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we call these projects programs a project for a US customer, a mattress company, a bedding company. He actually had retail stores in the Pacific Northwest. And he wanted us to source mattresses out of China, memory foam mattresses. And so I went out to tons of memory foam mattress suppliers and figured out how the product was made and the costing of it. And through that, I had taken the liberty of taking some of the samples and putting them in my own apartment and using them. And I loved it. I was like, these memory foam beds are great. And I was just thinking, well, what if I started another website where instead of blogging, I just sold memory foam mattresses to expats living in China who all were looking for soft beds as the Chinese locals, they actually enjoy hard beds. They think it's better for your back. And so this soft memory foam bed was a rare find in Shanghai. And so I started pedaling these mattresses, set up a website.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supplement our inc And we didn't make any money. We didn't. I mean, I think I made $75 of which like 50 never got paid out from Commission Junction because I didn't meet the threshold of the payout. You had to have like $100 to get it paid out or whatever it was. And it just didn't turn out financially for us. But I enjoyed it. I mean, I learned so much. And so I transitioned. From that, I said, well, the blog's not working, but what if I sell something and it just happened to be that there was this mattress program that we were trying to do at my day job that ended up not working out?”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I blogged. I had a, you can go back to the Wayback machine and find it. It was called China Business Traveler and had hyphens all between the words. And I was like, well, I'll blog about traveling as a business person in China, what to expect and travel and currency and culture and all of that and trying to make a few clicks off of AdSense and maybe some affiliate money off of travel websites. And we did that for a year. Jeff, he did one on personal finance. He was working. Oh.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that we could take and sign up for, and they would show you how to blog and what to do, and step by step, kind of going through the whole concept of blogging and making money off of AdSense and clicks and traffic and affiliate marketing. And it just blew my mind. And we quickly signed up to blog. And Jeff was blogging and I was blogging.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That led me down this rabbit hole of blogging and people making money by blogging, and I quickly dove into this program and showed it to Jeff and I was so excited. I was like, look, people can actually, you can write something, write blogs”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the rabbit hole that's always fun to look back on. I was there going through the rough patch in the Great Recession. I was married and had a young kid. And I got invited over to a friend's house In Shanghai, yeah, and she invited me over for dinner, and she had made these amazing cinnamon sugar donuts. And I was just blown away because in Shanghai that was a real treat. And went home that night looking online how to make donuts like that. Ended up on a blog. That was a really good donut recipe blog. And at the bottom of it, there was this video of this guy saying, learn how this blog helps me continue doing what I love doing. And he was a schoolteacher.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking at these people in the eye who I thought were my friends and peers kind of all turn against me and feel like it was my fault and everybody was blaming me. And I just, I took a big pay card and I'm really. Hunkered down with my boss at the time. And I remember telling him that I still believe in what we can do. It's just the market conditions are horrible and let them know that I want to stick with them. But hopefully I'd get some equity in the future for kind of roughing it through. And that's kind of the direction I took.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah, we held on by the skin of our teeth. We had to let go basically the entire office. So I had to go through that. That was an experience I won't forget. I was probably a year or so into my job in charge of 20 some odd people, local Chinese in my office in Shanghai. And then suddenly my boss tells me, well, you got to lay them all off, you know, have at it. And I was like, I don't like, why do I have to do that? I was young in my career and it was a horrible experience to have to do that. And I remember tearing up. When I had to tell them that here's what we can pay you if you leave now and if you decide to wait until we let you, like formally let you go, there might not be anything. And I hated how everybody rightfully so were upset at me. I just hated that feeling of”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, I guess it was about seven, almost seven years that I was in Shanghai working for that sourcing company. Boy, I ran around north-south, east, west, just going to all sorts of factories, trade shows, and it just depended on what our clients wanted and what industries we were in. Oddly enough, we were heavily in the RV niche. So recreational vehicles and campers, we did a lot of parts and products for that market sofas, recliners, tables, faucets. For RVs. For RVs, yeah, Elkhart, Indiana.”
2023-08-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT