We recently connected with Siyu Wang and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Siyu thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

MyCards is a digital app that is an all-in-one place for people to scan, store, save and share their post cards. The mission behind the idea is to create an easily accessible and safe space for people to cherish their memories with their loved ones, including friends, family members, significant others, etc, and not losing track of any postcards they’ve received or sent.

This is a meaningful mission for me, as well as my cofounder Elena, because as digital nomads, we both experience the painpoints of organizing postcards in an effective way, especially after moving to a new place every few months. Existing solutions in the market include scanner app, or paper boxes that store physical postcards, but they can’t meet the need of sorting, organizing and sharing postcards digitally.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Mia, who is a ex-Management-Consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, U.S. I went to an innovative global college called Minerva, which prides itself with providing a curriculum that “nurtures critical wisdom in the 21st century” and we travel in 7 different cities throughout our 4 years of college. My cofounder, Elena, is my college roommate, and together throughout the college journey, we’ve been to so many places together, and have been used to the “digital nomad” lifestyle where we pack up our luggage and embrace a new city every 4 months. After college, she continued the digital nomad lifestyle, and became a Youtuber, providing her audience with quality UI/UX educational design content. And I have worked across U.S. and China as a Management Consultant. Our lifestyles of digital nomads continued after college, and we kept connection with each other, as best friends. Throughout our long distance friendship, we love sending postcards to each other, and that is a tradition continued from the good old days in college. However, we found a major challenge in sending and keeping postcards, which is the lack of a neat way to organize all the postcards sent and received. Paper booklets for postcards are easy to be lost when moving places, and generic document scanner apps online don’t tailor to the needs of postcards storage, since postcards are an important piece of memory, unlike any other documents. Thus, we have decided to create an app that tackles this particular problem, making it a one=stop tool for managing postcards for postcard lovers, travellers and digital nomads. I’m proud of the idea, and hope it could grow into a postcard lover community where humans form and maintain better connections.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have another side project, which is a podcast called “No Nap Seminars”. It’s a project that I started around 2 years ago, to update on a biweekly basis interesting topics of matter and stories of people who live a “nontraditional” lifestyle. For the past 2 years, I have devoted around 4-5 hours per week to it along with 2-3 friends, and published over 60 episodes. Initially it was focused on academic topics, including psychology, neuroscience, AI, UI/UX design, and gradually pivoted its focus more towards people, their stories, and their rationale behind choosing niche lifestyles, like digital nomads, gap years, bikini contestants, etc. So far we have over 1000 audience on the Wechat subscription account, which is the mainstream media platform for Chinese audience, but looking back at our journey, I had to unlearn a major lesson, and that is thinking through the strategies before execution.

My team and I are quick executioners and we often pack our schedules with tasks and to-do items, including outreach for any possible panelists in our network, editing the audio, publishing on different platforms and marketing the episodes, etc. But there was a time when we realized it’s more important to have a higher-level birds-eye view of “what” we operate, instead of “how” we operate. We were rushing to execution without thinking through the strategies and the goals, and making too many assumptions on who is our audience, what do they like and how do we reach them, without testing the market first. In this way, there is a lot of effort wasted in blindly executing. And this lesson is a hard-to-learn, since everyone on the team is a high-performer and none of them want to be seen as a “laggard”. After realizing this lesson, we quickly paused from the busy work, and spent time as a core working group to rethink what’s our strategy and our work plan. We make sure to know the end goal before executing, and test the market through A/B testing and pilots. And instead of people grabbing the tasks on a “first come first serve” basis, as the leader, I assign tasks based on team members’ expertise and passion. In this way, the team is no longer a cold machine of blind execution, but a lively family where team members support each other, work towards a common goal and shine.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Our team is completely remote, and managing a fully remote team across multiple timezones can be a challenge for many. For me, it’s no exception. Especially at the beginning of the No Nap Seminars project, the product and audience haven’t come into shape yet, and many of the core team members are part time volunteers who have other priorities in their life. The challenge I faced is how to keep a highly effective and functioning team across timezones and make sure we deliver our goals in a timely manner, while maintaining the positive and supportive bonds between each other. What made the situation harder is the hit of the pandemic, where people were stuck in one country or another, and can’t fly to meet other team members in person. The mental stress of the pandemic and the huge uncertainties during that time also exacerbated the tension.

To tackle that challenge, I streamlined our work process to reduce the workload for each team member, to ensure they have a good work life balance when working on the No Nap project and keeping other priorities in life. I also had a 1:1 with each and every one of them to understand their priorities and commitments. In addition, i hosted several teambuilding activities to strengthen the bond between team members, and also adjusted our online webinars’ cadence and format to make it more “light in operation”, to offload the stress. I emphasized the common goal for our team to achieve, and made sure people are all onboard with the goal. In this way, it’s no longer just me who keeps the team together, but a collective effort by the entire team.

Contact Info:

• Other: 
  For No Nap Seminars, the youtube link is here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRNG3QLXy-sX_Zoq9CMCKYtXG63WrmN4c&si=eXyhvK_hqp7-QuT-
  (our audience is Chinese and thus all content are in Chinese)

Image Credits

Credit: Elena Cai