I interned at Google and Apple. Now I’m opening a candy store.

The summer after my freshman year, I interned as a software engineer at Google. My sophomore year, I interned as an innovation analyst at the Blackstone Group. Then I interned at Apple, and then at Microsoft.

I had these offers from big tech companies, and as an immigrant, we always strive for stability. My mom told me to focus on getting the money for a down payment on a house, but I always had an entrepreneurial spirit.

Instead of following the traditional path and staying at a big tech company, I decided to take a job at an e-commerce startup as a product manager. It was an incredible journey.

But for some reason, walking past this spot started the process.

I immediately started looking into what licenses I needed and how imports and customs work for food imports. All of this just happened.

I always had the idea for a candy store

I immigrated to the States when I was young, so growing up my lunchbox was always full of Korean snacks. During recess I would share Korean snacks with my classmates and they would share their American snacks or snacks from other cultures they were from.

It was an amazing way to learn about different cultures and see pure reactions to snacks you’ve grown up with your whole life. I’ve always loved those reactions and that pure joy.

As I started traveling the world, this feeling grew. I was always in candy stores and found different types of snacks and sweets. I tried every single one of them.

I bought a few of the ones I ended up liking to take to friends and family. The looks on their faces were just pure excitement and joy at trying something they had never tried before.

So I always knew deep down that I wanted to share that joy and excitement with a much larger community than my family. It had been a few years since I had the idea, but I wanted to focus on building my career in tech, so I put it on hold.

But especially now, with the Swedish sweet craze and people’s general enthusiasm for sweets, I realized that people really want to try new flavors, textures and types of sweets that they don’t normally come into contact with.

So that idea came back to the surface. My thinking about product management started the wheels turning: “Hey, there’s a market for this. There’s a need for this.”

It’s completely bootstrapped, just my husband and I. We have both brick-and-mortar and DTC e-commerce channels, and we went through the whole financial model to see if it was something we could afford. And luckily for us, we’ve both been working since we were young.

But as an immigrant, as someone who didn’t grow up with a lot of financial stability, not only is it terrifying to take a risk on something that has a lot of risk involved, but it’s also terrifying to have to take on all that financial risk.

But because it’s something I’m so passionate about, it’s not so scary either. I feel really confident in it.

Product Management Skills in the Candy Store World

Many of the skills I developed as a PM were very helpful in building my “little sweet treat.” While they are completely unrelated, many of the fundamentals of how to delight your customer and community hold true.

This is the pillar I always come back to—how do I create a great experience?

I look internally at the pain points I’m currently struggling with and what I can do to solve them. Are they not solved because there’s no innovation in that area yet, are they really expensive and don’t make business sense, or is there just no good solution that can be implemented?

A great example of the very positive feedback I have received from my TikTok community is shopping bags filled with real sweets.

There are a few different ways to make candy bags, and I felt that many of them were a little too tall and vertical—you couldn’t get to the candy you wanted to eat at a certain time. And often the bags don’t have any kind of handle.

Also, a lot of places don’t have resealable bags, and when it comes to candy, you buy a few days’ supply. When you buy that much candy, you have to transfer it from one of the bags at the candy store to another container at home. That just sounded really counterintuitive.

So I spent a lot of time designing this bag and now it has a more rectangular shape, with a handle and a zip closure.

The candy can stay fresh as long as possible in this bag and stored at home. And it’s a really great marketing tool. Every time your customer reaches for a sweet treat, they see the “lil sweet treat” branding associating that sweet treat with “lil sweet treat.”

There are many similarities that I’ve learned from product management. How do you structure a page that the user’s eye will immediately gravitate towards? How do you direct them to the products you want them to see? Where on the screen do you highlight different new announcements that you want the user to know about?

The biggest challenge is probably the fact that because I’ve never done this before, there’s so much I don’t know. And I don’t know what I don’t know until I start working with it now.

Like the garbage laws in New York City – there are a lot of different retail laws, garbage laws for retail businesses – and then think about the import laws and customs and how do you get candy from Germany to New York.

I’ve helped people break into the tech industry even if they didn’t have a solid background as a software engineer or PM. There are ways to find commonalities, whether it’s through attention to detail or the way you analyze a situation.

Now I take a similar approach to take my technical and project management skills and apply them as a business owner.