He didn't make money for 8 years

Saeju Jeong moved from a small Korean fishing town to New York City with no local connections, building his first app out of an apartment in Harlem after years of struggling to generate revenue. After scaling an early fitness app to five million users, Jeong made the decision to shut it down to build a holistic healthcare platform centered on human behavior change. Today, Noom operates as a major consumer health platform in the United States with over $540 million in capital raised and three thousand employees. His journey illustrates how long-term perseverance, embracing vulnerability as a founder, and committing to a century-long mission can transform zero-revenue struggles into hyper-growth scale.

Hi, good to see you. I'm Saeju Jeong, co-founder and CEO at Noom. Noom is a consumer-led healthcare company that uses behavior change to help our users master four pillars, exercise, diet, stress management and sleep, to build a holistic, healthy outcome.

In 2021 we raised capital led by Silver Lake, a total of $540 million. We became the largest consumer-led digital healthcare company in the United States, and the company has been growing very fast with a lot of support from many users. We feel very thankful.

I was raised in a small fishing town called Yeosu in South Korea. My father was a medical doctor. I thought I would become a doctor as well, and instead I became an entrepreneur, because I founded my company at age 19.

In Korea, we all take an exam to enter college in one day, and based on the result we choose a path, which school or college we can enter. I failed to enter medical college, unfortunately, but I entered another school, where I studied electrical engineering. Electrical engineering was not my passion. Soon after I joined the school, I realized I was not going to finish, and I dropped out of college, because it was not my choice. I didn't have a real passion there.

My first business was a heavy metal record label, actually a distribution company first, because I love heavy metal music quite a lot. Since elementary school I only listened to heavy metal music, death metal, black metal, progressive metal. The music had to be consumed by CD, cassette or LP, so it was importing goods, and I wanted to provide a service. That was my first business.

What I learned is that I cannot build a business based on just my passion, because that is my hobby. The first business did not answer my question of why I'm here on this planet at this time. I was looking for a deeper philosophical answer that the business could not answer. Second, the market was small. The total addressable market for heavy metal listeners in South Korea is quite small. Heavy metal music is always kind of small. That's what I learned. So I needed to start a business where the problem and the opportunity are bigger.

I was trying to figure out a place where I could start again, and I figured on the United States, the land of opportunity, the richest country. I came to New York because it is internationally friendly, and also because I figured New York City is quite far from South Korea. If things were not working well, unlike in LA or Seattle or San Francisco where there is a big Korean community, I thought it would be harder to compromise and settle into the Korean community. That's why I chose New York City.

Everything was difficult, for sure. I couldn't speak English and I did not know a single person there. I remember I stayed at home one week straight without talking to any human, because nobody was calling me and I didn't have any friends.

As an immigrant I was nobody, which meant I had to be very extra nice to present myself and try to leave a good impression, because otherwise people would not give me a chance. I rebuilt my network and learned everything as an immigrant, with fresh eyes, and people tried to help me out. That is how I rebuilt my network and also built my self-confidence.

My co-founder Artem Petakov came from Ukraine when he was 13, and he went to Princeton University for a computer science and theater major. My cousin went to the same school, and my cousin had a dinner with a group of alumni in Manhattan where Artem was there. He and I clicked from the first day, and we met again 2 days later and spoke until 4 a.m.

He was a tech lead at Google Maps and he did a fantastic job on the Geosearch project. He didn't think about becoming an entrepreneur, but I think he is a wonderful entrepreneur himself. He always thinks about how to improve as a product person.

I spent 2 years constantly pitching him that he needed to get out of Google and be a founder himself, and that we could make a bigger impact in healthcare. Think about healthcare and how bad it is. Unfortunately, in the United States, 6 or 7 out of 10 people are sick. We thought that area was less touched by the Silicon Valley approach, which is a problem solving approach. Over those 2 years he got convinced, and he convinced his parents, and he got out of Google.

In the beginning we raised capital from investors who were a lot of Googlers, from Artem's friends, and from my friends in Korea. My family invested in the company. The angel investment went into a Harlem office that was not an office, it was our apartment. We stayed together and lived together there. We actually had a lot of fun there, because we were young and we were mission driven people.

We founded the company and built a lot of fitness driven products, like a stationary bike, very similar to the Peloton concept. That was our first prototype, but it took two years to build. We pitched investors, but we could not raise capital. It was not a good product-market fit in 2008 and 2009.

We had many ideas, but it was easier for us to convert a stationary bike into a smart bike. That's why we chose that path. From today's perspective, the way we figured it out and acted on it was very cute, and we don't do that anymore at Noom. We test ideas before we build.

We were very poor for years and years. We could not figure out product-market fit and we did not generate any revenue, so we were in a very difficult position where we could not raise a dollar. I put in my own personal money by asking my sisters and my friends in Korea. We ended up building an application, because we didn't have money to buy any hardware at the time, and that was a wide challenge for us, because that is how we explored the app business.

We launched our first fitness driven product, CardioTrainer, which used the smartphone's GPS and accelerometer to measure sports activities such as cycling and running, and that was a mega hit. We achieved quite good success. We became number one in the market right away and achieved 5 million users within 6 months, and we were able to raise an institutional fund. Kleiner Perkins came to us, and that is how we raised our seed round.

But we figured out that the service was not answering our promise, which is our company mission. We were looking for a more holistic outcome, and our users were looking to lose weight, not just to become fit. That is when we discovered we needed to build a service for overall health, not only fitness. So we had to sunset our product, CardioTrainer. That was a very difficult decision, but we made the right decision.

The first version of Noom only provided an AI service that guided our users on how to manage their weight. That was our very first version in 2014, but we quickly learned that a human coach providing a holistic approach would deliver a better outcome. So we relaunched the service in May 2016, the current version of Noom, which comes with a behavior change approach led by a passionate health coach and provides a service for mastering the four pillars of diet, exercise, stress and sleep management.

Noom became a household brand in the United States as a behavior change platform, and we have changed the way of healthcare. The view has been overly optimized for sick care, but we are trying to change it to a more preventative approach. We believe that we have just built the foundation of a company that can last more than a century.

My co-founder Artem Petakov is a great teacher. He gave me a book as a friend before we founded the company, Good to Great, written by Jim Collins, so we could read it together. We shared our ideas, and we both love that book, because the author researched companies that have existed more than 100 years, over a century. Isn't that amazing?

That really inspired us. We want to build a long-lasting company, over a century, not a quick success. Most importantly, we love that the company is mission driven, and that companies constantly make sure the mission driven people are on the boat. That was the great lesson we learned and applied from day one.

My version of a good company and a great company is this. A good company produces an amazing service, but a great company is a global growth company over years and years, hopefully more than a century. We hope Noom can last more than 100 years with a great brand name and reputation, and that is very difficult. That is a great company. Think about how many brands you can think of that have existed more than 100 years. Not many. A lot of companies come and go, and we don't want to see that from Noom.

Think of a lot of tech driven startups. They are very good at 0 to 1. Many companies can do that. It's still hard, but people can do 0 to 1. We did it. Now 1 to 100, that is the next level of the journey, and that is very difficult.

Everything is hard. In a startup, everything is hard. Money, motivation, direction, road map. There's no such thing as an answer to what the hardest thing is, because everything is hard, to be honest.

As an immigrant entrepreneur, one of the hardest things was self-doubt. Am I the right person? Can I do this? It's the most difficult emotional barrier. It's a demon thought that is very hard to overcome. Can I do this? No one asked, but I asked myself, and no one can actually give the right answer. I can only answer that question.

Mission driven thinking, and always reminding myself why I founded the company, the big why, is how I was able to manage, by actually working with the right people. I got a lot of support from my people, so they supported me to stick with the company mission, and I am so thankful. I also built a very healthy habit since then, waking up early to exercise and to keep thinking about the difficult parts of the questions.

I have seen a lot of early stage startup entrepreneurs who are not thinking hard. They think hard about the product, for sure, but they don't think about entrepreneurship itself, meaning their emotional roller coaster and their self-doubt. I don't think they really think hard about it and are honest about it. I recommend that you be honest with yourself and ask for help. Do not act like you're okay. Ask for help, and admit what you are not good at, so you can actually provide room for others to help you.

Don't act like you know everything. It's okay to be vulnerable. Strong, fearless leader. Wrong. That's not the right approach, because you are breakable, and that's okay, because a startup is hard. Everybody knows that it's okay to ask for help.

The company has grown so much now that we have more than 3000 full-time employees in the United States, so my role has changed. In the beginning, obviously I participated in governing everywhere, but as the company grew fast, I tried hard to delegate my work and to invite a better person, a better executive than me, with the domain expertise. I give my work to them because they are better than me, and my job is constantly sponsoring them. I remind them of our company mission, and based on the mission we align our company strategy and discuss the strategy, but it is operated by experienced, seasoned executives in every department. That has been the major change in the evolution.

We believe the timing was correct, that consumers were seeking a smart, healthy lifestyle. There is a trend, and people are seeking a service they can use by themselves, and they were looking for help.

In my case, I'm not a serial entrepreneur. I've been doing this for the last 16 years and will continue to do it. For me, entrepreneurship is the way to approach a problem of society and of the world, and to address the problem by providing a better solution. By doing so I can contribute to the community too, and help people have a better, healthier lifestyle. Noom helped as many people's lives as we can by changing behavior. Our users were seeking it, the timing was right, and that's why we were able to enter the hyper growth stage.

I think luck is a necessity of success, but I would also say that luck only arrives if you stick with one path for long enough. Basically, you are making your own luck.