How He Convinced 300,000 People to Work With Him, From MalaysiaAt first, no one would pay attention to this entrepreneur. Now, he has 450 staffers in 40 offices around the globe.
ByJason Feifer•
Introducing our new podcast,Problem Solvers with Jason Feifer, which features business owners and CEOs who went through a crippling business problem and came out the other side happy, wealthy, and growing. Feifer, Entrepreneur's editor in chief, spotlights these stories so other business can avoid the same hardships.Listen below orclick here to read more shownotes
几十年前,没有很多照片featuring Asian people. Consequently, advertisers and media companies in Asia were using a lot of photos of white people -- something that was in no short supply. This got a Malaysian entrepreneur named Andy Sitt thinking: What if he built an Asian stock photography marketplace? There was demand, certainly. All he needed was supply.
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So he called a ton of photographers throughout Asia. "And like 99.9 percent of all photographers would reject us," he says. Why? Because Sitt was a nobody. They'd never heard of him and his company hadn't proven itself yet, so why would they want to work with him?
Almost every entrepreneur has some version of this problem: When your company is brand new (or even when it's not), it's hard to convince other people to work with you. And yet, you need these other people. You can't survive without them. They're your future suppliers, or contractors, or partners, or sponsors. Which means you need to find some crazy way toproveto them that you're worth working with. That you're legit. That you're a bet worth taking.
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That's what this new episode ofProblem Solversis about. Over many years, and many experiments, Sitt solved this problem – and now his companyInmagine Groupis a powerhouse in Asia, with 450 staffers in 40 offices around the globe, and more than 72 million images sourced from 300,000 contributors.
How did Sitt convince people to work with his unproven company? Take a listen below. Or subscribe oniTunes,Google Playor wherever you get your podcasts.
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