Offsite Two Different Approaches
Oct 22, 2025
In a thought-provoking chat, Jesse Hanley, the founder of Bento, shares his unique approach to building a multi-million dollar email marketing business as a solo operator from Fukuoka, Japan. He discusses the emotional journey of building Bento through personal grief and the strategic importance of customer support on social media. The conversation also covers living abroad, financial arbitrage, and the evolving email marketing landscape, while emphasizing the power of patience and reputation-building in entrepreneurship.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
The 2015 Integration Sweet Spot
- The 2015 era made integrations and niche app growth unusually reachable through direct founder outreach.
- Doing straightforward work then produced outsized results compared with today's noisy landscape.
Grief-Built Product That Scaled
- Jesse built Bento during a period of grief after losing a child and used work as focus and control.
- That focused year turned a few-grand project into a single-digit-million business run mostly solo.
Support Publicly To Build Reputation
- Do high-quality, public customer support to compound reputation and drive inbound over time.
- Helping low-ARPU customers often leads to referrals that attract much larger clients later.