Noom founder Saeju Jeong on eight years without revenue

Executive overview

Building a meaningful company takes far longer than most founders expect. Saeju Jeong co-founded Noom in 2008 and spent eight years without consistent revenue before finding product-market fit.

Self-doubt is the hardest barrier for immigrant entrepreneurs — not the market, not the product.

Luck only arrives if you stick to one path long enough — you make your own luck.

Early failures and pivots

• First business: heavy metal music distribution in Korea — failed because the market was too small
• Chose New York over LA or San Francisco deliberately to avoid settling into a Korean expat community
• Spent a week without speaking to a single person after arriving — rebuilt network from zero
• Recruited co-founder Artan Pakdal (ex-Google Maps tech lead) over two years of persistent pitching
• First product, a smart exercise bike similar to Peloton, took two years to build and failed to raise capital in 2009
• Pivoted to a mobile app (Cardio Trainer) only because they ran out of money to buy hardware

Finding product-market fit

• Cardio Trainer used GPS and accelerometers to track cycling and running — became the number-one fitness app
• Reached 5 million users in six months; raised a seed round from Kleiner Perkins
• Realised the product didn't fulfil the mission: users wanted weight loss, not just fitness tracking
• Decided to sunset Cardio Trainer — described as difficult but correct
• First version of Noom (2014): AI-only weight guidance
• Relaunched in 2016 with human coaches and a behaviour-change framework covering diet, exercise, stress, and sleep

Managing self-doubt and asking for help

• Self-doubt ("Am I the right person?") is the hardest emotional barrier — no external person can answer it
• Recommends being honest about weaknesses and asking for help rather than projecting invulnerability
• Built personal habits early: waking early, exercising, deliberately sitting with hard questions
• Most early founders think hard about product but not about their own emotional resilience
• Staying mission-driven — returning to "why" — is the core mechanism for managing uncertainty

Scaling from founder to CEO

• Noom grew to over 3,000 full-time employees in the US
• Shifted role from hands-on operator to mission sponsor and strategy setter
• Delegates domains to people with deeper expertise than himself
• Operates by aligning strategy to mission, then letting seasoned domain experts execute
• Raised $540 million led by Silver Lake in 2021; became the largest consumer-led digital health company in the US

Building for a century

• Inspired by Jim Collins's Good to Great, which studied companies lasting over 100 years
• Distinction: a good company produces great products; a great company sustains durable growth for decades
• Mission and values must be embedded from day one, not retrofitted at scale
• Zero-to-one is hard but achievable; one-to-one-hundred is the harder, longer journey