[Founder Stories] Chris Choi: A Journey of Never Giving Up

We interviewed of Chris Choi of Artoh, an instant global B2B payment solution for food importers and suppliers.

Chris is an entrepreneur who kindly handed over his ARTicles newsletter, filled with the latest news in DTC e-commerce with exclusive interviews with founders to the Channel Talk team. You can subscribe here.

So for the first Channel Talk-lead newsletter, our first founder story is with Chris!

Read to hear about his entrepreneurial journey.

1. What inspired you to go from this analyst work to wanting to start your own company?

My dad is an entrepreneur who has been running his own business for years—he's around 70 years old now and still enjoys his work. He's an architect with his own company, and I always had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur myself and running my own businesses. My older brother, who majored in computer science, is also an entrepreneur and was running his own company at the time.

My brother and I talked a lot, even though he was in Korea and I was in the U.S. We had been competing with each other to lose weight, and there was this app called DietBet, where you compete against others to lose weight. There’s an entry fee, and if you lose weight within a specific time period, you get your entry fee back plus extra money from those who didn’t meet their goals.

Around that time, wearables like Fitbit and the Apple Watch were becoming popular, and we wanted to use that data to create a fitness game for people. That was the starting point, and we began developing the idea from there.

2. What were the successes and failures you experienced with SPRYFIT?

We were able to raise some money from a New York accelerator and angel investors in New York, which helped us increase our transaction volume significantly. However, we faced challenges with the business model.

The model wasn’t ideal—we were taking a cut from the pot. For example, people would pay an entry fee of $30 per game, and with 100 participants, that would be $3,000. We took a 10% cut, but another issue was that we didn’t recognize how low the retention rate was for people who failed.

While we were able to attract new customers, the retention rate was low, and people didn’t stick with the game. After about three and a half years, my brother and I decided to shut it down. That’s how it ended.

3. Can you talk about how you shifted from SPRYFIT to Artoh? What inspired the idea for Artoh?

After that, I wanted to return to financial services, but I was more interested in fintech rather than traditional finance. So, I began exploring some ideas and, by chance, founded a company in the U.S. I didn’t have a specific plan, but I founded the company and started looking for opportunities. At the time, I was working on a private blockchain project for asset securitization.

I was also dabbling in e-commerce out of curiosity. I saw a lot of Shopify influencers and dropshippers posting videos on YouTube, claiming that you could start with just $300 and make a million in six months. I watched many of these videos and kept questioning whether it really worked. To find out, I set up another company in the U.S., sourced a product from China, and started selling a hair curler. I created a nice video ad on Facebook and was able to scale the business to $300,000 in revenue within three months, which was pretty cool.

However, I found it challenging to see all my business metrics in one place. I had to check multiple platforms like Stripe and PayPal to know what was coming in tomorrow or next week. Additionally, I had liquidity problems because there was always a gap between making money from customers and actually receiving the funds—sometimes a week or two later. Meanwhile, vendors needed to be paid on time. This struggle led me to the idea of providing a one-stop shop for e-commerce finance, which I called Artoh.

4. What were your strategies for acquiring your first few customers?

I started with Facebook communities, specifically targeting groups with a lot of members involved in Shopify businesses. However, this approach wasn’t very successful. Many people in those groups were treating their Shopify businesses as side hustles, aiming to make just a few thousand dollars a month so the overall conversion rate was low.

At that point, I realized it was crucial to identify my ideal customer profile. I tried cold emailing. Although I received some replies, the response, click, and open rates were disappointing. It felt like I was just throwing emails into the trash.

So, I started thinking about what would be the best marketing strategy. To get responses, I knew I had to add value to my target customers. Simply offering a paid service wouldn’t yield high conversions. I noticed that these businesses were often seeking media exposure, so I decided to use that as a strategy. Instead of directly selling my product, I engaged them by asking about their stories—why they started their business, how they scaled, and what challenges they faced in the beginning. As an entrepreneur myself, I found it fascinating to hear their experiences, not just as a sales tactic but out of genuine interest.

This approach significantly improved my results. The open rate of my emails increased from around 10% to about 50%, and people began replying more frequently. The strategy was to offer them an interview, promising to write a well-crafted article about their story and share it with our subscribers. This approach resonated with them, leading to many interviews. Some even sent me nice coupons for their products.

So, that’s how I adjusted my approach, and it worked out well.

5. When did you realize you needed to pivot with Artoh?

I needed to identify the most critical pain point for these brands, and I discovered that cash flow was a major issue for them, similar to what I experienced when I was running my e-commerce business. I found an early product-market fit with a feature I developed—a credit card that offers a 60-day term instead of the typical 30-day term. Normally, with a credit card, you have to pay back within 30 days, but with this 60-day card, users could access cash interest-free for two months.

This was a great benefit for them, and at the same time, I could generate revenue through interchange fees, which are fees that merchants pay every time a card is swiped. However, I soon realized that our bank partners were requiring us to hold a significant amount of money in our bank account because it’s a credit product, which is similar to a lending product.

I tried to raise funds to launch that credit card, but it didn’t work out. Since I couldn’t just sit back and watch, I decided to pivot. That’s how things unfolded.

6. What direction are you headed in now? What makes you excited about this direction?

About six or seven months ago, one of my college friends, who is now the CEO of a palm oil manufacturing and exporting company in Malaysia, shared a significant pain point with me. He was having a lot of trouble getting paid by African food buyers because of a major USD shortage in Africa. It’s very difficult for them to obtain USD, and they often have to pay a premium to get it from the bank.

That’s when I thought we could do something with stablecoins. The biggest problem is the shortage of USD, and with a stablecoin, we could increase access to USD for these buyers in Africa.

One thing I find interesting about this project is that it involves global wholesale trade in food products like meat, rice, oils, seafood, and more. It’s cool to see how these global trade dynamics work.

Transactions on our platform are processed very quickly, so there’s no need to worry about transaction speed. However, the key challenges are ensuring that local banks allow these transactions and finding the right partners in each region.

7. How did you find our co-CEO Josh from Channel Talk and what made you decide to hand over this newsletter to our team?

I knew that Channel Talk was quite famous in Korea, and I happened to come across Josh’s Facebook profile. I saw a post mentioning that Channel Talk was planning to enter the U.S. market. This was around the time I was considering a pivot in my own business.

I have this newsletter that I could have sold to other e-commerce companies in the U.S., but I wanted to do something meaningful as a Korean helping another Korean. So, I decided to reach out to Josh.

We ended up having a call, and I wanted to be helpful. Since I wasn’t using the newsletter anymore, I decided to hand it over to Channel Talk to support their success in the U.S. market.

📰 This article was featured in our Channel Talk newsletter which you can read online and subscribe here to get the latest news in DTC.

And if you're an entrepreneur and want to be featured in our newsletter, email us at annasang@channel.io.