Sharon He Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

Weeknd is a social app with IRL events hosted by local hobbyists. It uses TikTok style videos to showcase hobbyists who turn their passions into side hustles. We pivoted from a dating app and built a Facebook group that grew to 30K members (Bay Area 20s) while the founding team poured all of our savings to make the Weeknd app.

By luck, I was introduced to designers and fabric importers in the Los Angeles fashion district who taught me about the fate of clothing samples and flawed garments. Most fashion samples —quality handmade prototypes sent to manufacturers to produce garments and handbags—end up in the landfill or incinerator, along with many items with minor imperfections. Having learned about fashion waste and the industry’s impact on environment, I came up with a business model that purchased these samples and flawed garments at production cost and discreetly sold them through timed private sales.The business successfully acquired 3000 daily active customers and reached $1.6 million in revenue within 1.5 years. The business ended due to disagreements among co-founders shortly before Series A.

Started an online e-commerce website www.365surprise.com (no longer in operation) selling monthly gift subscription to customers. I designed a gift package consisted of unique items purchased from overseas manufacturers. Customers could send a surprise gift to a recipient each month. The business failed within months due to expensive SEO and strong competition in the e-commerce space.

I started a tutor buddy group with 4 friends in high school after going through a disappointing $2000 SAT boot camp. The “qualified instructor” did not know the test format had changed as he took it 6 years ago. Through my own group, I strived to improve the quality of lessons and made tutoring affordable. Having just studied for the classes we tutored, we incorporated first-hand class experience and taught relevant and fresh course materials to peers. Within 2 years, we attracted nearby students from Stanford and UC Berkeley, quitting minimum wage jobs at fast food chains and becoming part-time tutors. They were able to utilize their knowledge and talent to make 2-3x more with tutoring, yet our rates were still the most affordable in the area as we were not profit nor shareholder oriented. We also had retired teachers joining our team. By 2012, we grew to a team of over 20 tutors serving hundreds of students a year. It ended after I failed to convert it to an online tutoring model and I could no longer make the 4-6 hour roundtrip commute from UC Davis to Cupertino.