Hey, my name is Joseph Lee 👋🏼
🇨🇦🇰🇷 entrepreneur passionate about building delightful product experiences, lifelong learning, and wearing different hats across product, design, growth, and operations.
Starting with my first small business at age 14, I have been fascinated with the ability to create something from nothing (with some grit and determination).
Currently, I'm the CEO/founder at Supademo, which helps teams communicate products more effectively with beautiful, AI-powered interactive demos and guides.
I also co-founded Freshline - a B2B e-commerce platform built for food distributors. Freshline was a culmination of a pandemic pivot from Coastline, North America's first demand-driven seafood marketplace, which scaled to hundreds of restaurants and 7-figure revenues.
Our work has been featured on:
Aside from startups, I'm an amateur athlete, big sports fan, foodie, and world traveller.
More on my experience...
Here's a quick overview of my skills, experiences, and some of my guiding principles.
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- Here’s what I’m looking for in people I work with, whether they're co-founders or work partners:
- - Practices radical candor: the willingness to speak their mind and communicates clearly, with the right respect and tone;
- - Can work autonomously and can deliver results without supervision & does not micromanage;
- - Understands that outputs trump inputs/hours. We shouldn’t compete to see who got less sleep or worked more;
- - Work-life balance (while delivering results) is paramount;
- - Strong technical aptitude and (at the baseline) strong understanding of product/engineering principles, concepts, and limitations;
- - Willingness to wear many hats: focus should typically center around moving the needle forward for the company, not fixating on role boundaries or responsibilities;
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- - Product: Managing entire lifecycle from ideation/conception, discovery, validating, building, launching, and measuring;
- - Design: Sketch/Figma, UX/UI, HTML/CSS/JS;
- - Growth: Acquisition, Activation, Conversion, Monetization;
- - Eng: Collaborate with engineers - ability to code or have context behind technical feasibility, architecture, estimates based on current schema, tech debt, etc;
- Overall, I consider myself to be a generalist who can and will wear hats across all areas of the business to ensure success. My 10+ years as a founder has trained me to not be fussy!
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- Where are the big problem areas in the world? Is it huge and painful? Is it a large enough market?
- 💡 Put more effort into the problem selection than the solution. Choosing a problem that matters, even if your work is average, will generally yield a better outcome than choosing a terrible problem, even if your work is excellent.
- What personal skills, advantages or insights do you have to be able to help solve it? Why is my team uniquely qualified to solve this?
- 💡 Food, distribution, and supply chain may be areas of interest based on my expertise.
- How can you turn this into a viable business idea? What type of team is needed?
- 💡 Sometimes, nothing replaces in-person observation as a tool for figuring out go-to-market and product. Explore how you can embed yourself in real-world process.
- Once the above three questions are answered:
- 1. Do all of the product research and interviews prior to building anything. It’s tedious and less fulfilling than building, but it’s easier to change a prototype or spreadsheet vs. code.
- 2. Don’t build until you feel a real pull from the market. Make sure you try to sell a pain-killer vs. a vitamin. It’s much harder to sell a process improvement vs. solving for a dire pain point or headache.
- 3. Figure out who you can sell most easily to, then figure out market analysis afterwards.