Made in China Podcast

This episode is an appearance of Rico on the Day in the Life Podcast with the Owner of LabHand Engineering — James Davis. James takes notes from Rico on Prototyping, Product Development, Crowdfunding and much more.

Episode notes:

• Rico on ODM and OEM, Average Life Cycle of Products when people come to Source Find Asia

• How people underestimate the process of developing products, Rico’s “Survival Chinese”

• The range that an entrepreneur could cost for product manufacturing, process and cost of prototyping

• The Graphite Wallet story, How crowdfunding works, Nalin of Crush Crowdfunding

• Engineering, Sourcing and Manufacturing is often not a known industry, Seeing people of color as entrepreneurs

• Marketing Strategies before launching your crowdfunding campaign, buffering timelines to support your backers

• Getting designers involved as early as possible, Starting without a bare minimum design

• Difference between doing business in China and the US

EP 157 - Rico on Global From Asia - Running a Chinese Import/Export Company Outside China

In today’s episode, we have Rico Ngoma appeared again at Global from Asia Podcast with Michael Michelini. Here he talked about running his sourcing business outside of China. He shares his insights, how he did it, his strategy – sort of a follow up how he did the transition.

Episode Notes:

- Spending time out of China - made him realize he couldn’t go back

- Incentivizing his General Manager

- Financial Tools Used

- Management tools Used For the Team

- Future Plans - Philippines, then where?

Rico interviews Arjun Rai of HelloWoofy and talks about helping the small businesses he refers to as ‘underdogs.’ They have a good exchange about what it’s like to be an Immigrant in another country and moving from state to state so much.

Topics include:

- Helping “Underdogs” in Business using Data Science, Solving the Problem for Creatives in Collaboration

- Taking advantage of Instagram before Facebook acquired it, Starting small when reaching your audience thru social media

- Misconceptions of using Emojis (and Hashtags) on your Emails and Social Media Marketing

- Raising capital even during the pandemic, Be an early adapter of Crowd Funding

- Arjun getting rejected and getting another shot, overcoming struggles in order to grow

- Going all in and betting on the product, and getting clients moving forward

- Having the right mindset and surrounding yourself with people who pick you up, getting a day job to support your hustle

- Using history as basis to your day-to-day or big decisions, Visual Language in ancient history to Emojis in our phones

- Setting remote teams and managing them like a portfolio in a hedge fund