The Second Act - Magazine - Page 18
IL-LUMEN-ATING
When Michael Cheng & his business
partners began their first venture,
Sniply, in 2014, their primary goal
was to run a small-scale, productfocused startup.
THE WAY
Written By
BRITTANY HAMBELTON
T
his venture relied heavily on viral growth, and they were still only a fourperson team by the time they had reached the 500,000-user mark.
After Sniply was acquired in 2019, Cheng and his partners couldn’t help but feel they
could’ve done something much bigger. This belief inspired them to start building
Lumen5, a video creation platform for corporate communications. “We decided to
build another company together because we learned so much from working on
Sniply,” says Cheng. “We couldn’t help but wonder how we could’ve done things
differently, and so we created the opportunity for ourselves with Lumen5, a second
act that allowed us to apply all of our learnings from the first.”
Unlike when they started Sniply, Cheng says the goal when founding Lumen5 was
to be much more aggressive with product development, customer acquisition, and
team expansion. Their efforts paid off, and Lumen5 is already 10 times the size of
Sniply.
Of course, with such a significant increase in size and scale, there have been
several new challenges to grapple with. While they were building Sniply,
they focused mainly on product development, but with Lumen5, they’ve
had to build out sales, marketing, HR, finance, and overall management
functions. As Cheng and his partners have constantly been expanding the
team, they’ve put much more emphasis on company culture. The inherent
differences in the products have also changed the way they operate as a
business.
“While Sniply was primarily a self-service product, Lumen5’s enterprise
customers require more attention,” says Cheng. “When a customer
purchases Lumen5, we must go through procurement, security reviews,
and contract negotiations before we can onboard a new customer.”
The team’s motivation has also shifted significantly from their Sniply days.
MICHAEL CHENG
Co-founder & CEO, Lumen5
Next 36, 2013
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