MEET MYEY

When Myey, a Filipina-American digital nomad with a tug toward the entrepreneurial, married a fellow digital nomad from Belgium, they knew they wanted to create a business together. The only problem was that they didn’t know what it was they wanted to sell.

So before Myey even had a product in mind, she enrolled in the Start & Scale course to learn more about launching and growing a business. She says that she is passionate about learning and knows that the clearest way to success is through education. So she dove headfirst into the first two course modules.

“I spent a whole lot of time patiently really trying to develop something that I knew would connect deeply to our audience, and not just a product that could be manufactured or cheaply bought.”

As she bounced between the section on finding an idea and the section on branding, she slowly cooked up a plan. What if she meshed her husband’s Belgian roots with her roots in the Philippines?

“The mission is to bridge the best of both worlds. So we have Philippine cacao and Belgian chocolate-making expertise, and now we call it the Belgian Tableya.”

Tableya, a traditional Filipino beverage made from 100 percent cacao formed into a round disk then melted into water or milk, is bitter if eaten without adding sugar. Myey wanted to try adding the sweetness of Belgian chocolate, instead.

Using the step-by-step method she learned in Start & Scale, Myey launched her business, Theo & Brom, just three months after enrolling in the course.

Without investing in a single paid ad, the chocolate business took off through organic sharing on Facebook and through articles written about the chocolates. Myey had such success that just two weeks after launch, she started to consider shipping to North America from where she lives in the EU.

On December 26, she launched a Kickstarter to pay for the shipping licensing fees with a goal of $7,500. Two weeks later, the Kickstarter concluded with $10,000 raised.

And with the opening of a vast new market, sales continued to grow, causing the business to scale far more quickly than expected. At launch, Theo & Brom was using about 10 kilos of cacao a week to make about 200-300 of the Belgian Tableya. Before long, Myey used 100 kilos to fulfill a single order. She is even exploring wholesale opportunities for her chocolates.

She says that two main components of Start & Scale rocketed her to the success she has found: the structure and the community.

The structure reigned in her creative mind and set her on a lighted path, and the community gave her guidance when she was struggling through a problem. Today, she still reads through the new posts in the Facebook group first thing each morning.

She encourages anyone who thinks they might have a great business in them to give the course a try, even if they don’t yet know anything about business. Myey says there are only two things you need to have before the course to be successful:

“You should be passionate about learning, and you should be passionate about giving life to great ideas.”