BoxHero’s CEO Hee Hong Moon: Major Korean Radio Appearance
BGPWorks' CEO, Hee Hong Moon, appeared on one of the major Korean radio stations, MBC's "Lee Jin-woo's Easy-to-Grasp Economy," in early this year (Jan 04). "Lee Jin-woo's Economy" is an MBC radio show where experts in various fields, including economics professionals and securities analysts, discuss the latest economic issues and trends as guests. Hee Hong discussed BoxHero, our inventory management solution.
Hee Hong introduced BoxHero's inventory management solution in "Lee Jin-woo's Economy," where he simplified listeners' curiosities using easy-to-understand terms. He also shared our startup behind-the-scenes story for the first time. Let’s revisit the day when BoxHero's brand story started to pique the nation’s interest.
Hee Hong Moon and the BoxHero team arrived at MBC Sangam Studio feeling nervous. Despite having stage fright, Hee Hong Moon made the decision to appear on the radio driven by a single determination to promote BoxHero to a wider audience. As they got closer to the recording studio, the nervous jitters felt by Hee Hong Moon started to permeate to the rest of the BoxHero team.
“BoxHero is a program that assists small-scale businesses in managing inventory effortlessly. It enables easy initiation of inventory management and provides support for creating and attaching barcodes to products, even if they don’t have barcodes of their own, for seamless selling.”
Journalist Lee Jin-woo, considering the unfamiliarity of inventory management solutions for the general public, posed detailed questions about BoxHero's services. Thanks to the lively and witty inquiries from the host Jin-woo Lee, Hee Hong was able to confidently explain the easy and convenient inventory management features of BoxHero, putting aside any stage fright he may have felt beforehand.
This occasion also provided an opportunity to hear the entrepreneurial story of Hee Hong Moon, the creator of BoxHero's services.
"I thought it would be convenient to have an app for finding houses, so I decided to create one myself. That's how 'Dabang' began its journey."
Hee Hong is a former developer who created the real estate app 'Dabang' as a hobby project in his mid-20s. The business, which started with a light-hearted approach, was acquired by MediaWill Group, the owner of 'Flea Market,' in 2015. After working there for about two years, Hee Hong decided to leave the company with a desire to create a service with greater value. That's how BGPWorks, the company we are today, began.
The initial venture that Hee Hong embarked upon at the new company was a perishable goods management service. Surprisingly, it all began with a personal request from Hee Hong's brother.
“During my time at Dabang, my brother, who worked at a large supermarket, personally asked me to develop an app that could help manage expiration dates. For instance, when scanning the barcode of a banana milk carton, you can see that there are around 100 in stock, but you don't know how many will expire next week or next month. Until then, people would roughly write it down on a note or manually check before leaving work.”
Hee Hong dedicated countless days and nights to developing an expiration date management app for his brother and released it on the app store. However, he later discovered that the app was also being used by other large supermarkets with a demand for expiration date management. Realizing this, he made the decision to commercialize the service, and thus, BEEP, BGPWorks' first product, was launched, inspired by the sound he heard when scanning barcodes. BEEP has now evolved into a global service used by approximately 4,000 businesses worldwide.
“The most frequent improvement request we received from BEEP customers was the ability to manage inventory quantities along with expiration dates. They wished for a service similar to BEEP that could handle inventory management, be accessible through mobile phones, support barcode scanning, and also be available on PCs. Inspired by this idea, we created BoxHero in 2018.”
Hee Hong created BoxHero as the second service, building upon the strengths of Beep and improving its shortcomings. BoxHero differentiates itself from complex and challenging ERP solutions by offering intuitive and user-friendly UX/UI for inventory management, accounting, and payments. It was designed to enable anyone to easily practice inventory management.
Since the appearance on "Lee Jinwoo’s Economics," we have witnessed a significant increase in both the keyword search volume for "BoxHero" on Naver Trends and the daily average number of service subscribers, indicating the high interest of listeners. The positive comments left by podcast listeners, such as "It warms my heart to know that someone created it because they thought it would be needed," and "I find the inventory management app useful, so I'll make a note of it," provided us with great encouragement and strength.
Upon completing the radio recording, Hee Hong conveyed his determination, stating, "We will continue to improve the BoxHero solution to innovatively simplify inventory management for small and medium-sized businesses." In order to serve the numerous individuals in need of a convenient inventory management solution, our BoxHero team will always strive to repay their trust with even better services, just as we have done until now.
