What Led Yasi Zhang to Do Marketing for Blockchain Tech Startups?

Sean: How about your podcast? Can you tell us a little bit more about your podcast? So you started it during a time when you were in a transition in your life, I’d say a major transition because you finally decided that, okay, I probably don’t need to work. What do I want to do? Right. And that’s what you mentioned earlier. So why did you start that podcast? What’s it for? What’s your main purpose and who are going to be the people who should listen to your podcast?

Yasi: Yeah, as you said at that time, I was questioning myself, what would I do if money’s not a problem? And I have all the time in the world, right? Actually, even years before, I wanted to start a YouTube channel, because when I was living, you know, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sweden, and Singapore, I find it so many different experiences. I want to record it but I will always be very camera shy. And it really took a lot of time to edit, so I never really get it started. And I’m an avid podcast listener, so I listen to a lot of podcasts. Then at that time, just what came to my mind is like, Yeah, why not start a podcast instead of a YouTube channel? I thought it was a great idea because looking back, you see a lot of things happening in my life not just one moment, like, Oh, let’s do this. It’s a lot of things that happened in the past. So the dots started to connect.

So in the past few years before COVID, I was traveling all around the world for different conferences. I met tons of people. I met hundreds of entrepreneurs, and I had great conversations with them, with them. I talked to them, I think, similar to how I interview people because I ask about their personal story, how they started with their business, you know, that I learned from them. So that’s one thing. So I can do this. I feel comfortable. I enjoy doing this. And then secondly, I read a lot of personal development books in 2016 when I was working in Singapore, I worked in the other. The office is in a factory side, it’s like almost close to Malaysia. So it took me one and a half hours every day on the road. So I was having my boss noise cancellation. I listen to audiobooks. I probably consume more than 100 books in that year. Then I thought I never had a mentor. Right? When you want to grow and learn something, you need to have a mentor in life. And it’s not so easy for everyone to find a mentor in life because you need to have this vibe, and connection with them. But I learned so much from all the books and podcasts and I thought, okay, let me create this channel to extract all the knowledge and experience from my guests and then to help my audience so that they can learn from other people’s experiences, even though they don’t have a mentor or even though they don’t know my guest in person, but they can learn from them.

So that’s the starting point of how I design this podcast interview style and focus on the topics that I am interested in. Because I thought if I’m interested in career, entrepreneurship, and money, there must be tons of people out there like I would be interested in these topics. And my initial idea is really like I create something that I enjoy doing. Then I would attract the right audience that will think of the same thing that I do. So that’s how I started this podcast this way and this format and this content.