Womenpreneur Asia

Cultural authenticity. Helping brands talk to niche audiences respectfully and authentically.

Today’s episode is with Afshan Nasseri, the Founder and CEO of Aam Creative is a dynamic digital marketing agency comprising a diverse team of 15 talented women of color, scattered across the globe.

Afshan embarked on her entrepreneurial journey at the young age of 24, achieving remarkable success within just her second year of business, generating a six-figure revenue in US dollars and building a client portfolio of over 45 esteemed brands. 

While initially operating as a comprehensive 360 agency, Aam Creative is now embracing specialization, and in our conversation today, Afshan delves into the common entrepreneurial dilemma of maintaining creative excellence while navigating the path toward engaging with larger players in the industry.

Afshan recognized a crucial gap in the Western marketing world—the absence of cultural perspectives.

The creative space was in dire need of individuals who genuinely lived and breathed the Asian cultural experience, encompassing both the Muslim and South Asian viewpoints from the lens of Generation Z and millennials.

Today's episode is brought to you by Redbox Studio.

For the full show notes, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com

Today’s episode is with Nancy Tran, Co-founder and CEO of Medifood.io, Vietnam.

Medifood started by supplying organic vegetables on a subscription basis but now produces healthy rice crispy snacks that are sold via subscription boxes. 

Besides producing for Vietnam, her rice crispy snacks are now available in North America.

Prior to founding the business, Nancy was as market analyst at VNDIRECT Securities and marketing team lead at VEAS Exhibition & Advertising Services with focus on developing markets such as Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam in the agriculture sector. 

Nancy started Medifood in 2016 because she was passionate about healthy eating and helping Vietnamese farmers earn a better living except that she didn’t know a thing about agriculture and organic farming.

In today’s episode, she talks about the struggles of farming and why farmers ate chemical-free vegetables while they supplied chemical-laden vegetables to the market.

She talks about the separate plot of land that farmers kept to grow their own organic vegetables for their family’s needs. She started by buying these organic produce and selling them to the city. 

While she grew a community of enthusiastic believers in organic farming from buyers to farmers, she couldn’t make the business work. She was underpricing her vegetables and the work was tough. In the end, she decided to pivot from her original idea to manufacturing food products using organic ingredients grown by the local farmers. 

Today, Medifood is a platform where you buy tasty and nutritious snacks and still help local farmers sustain themselves through organic and natural farming.

For the full show notes and links, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com

This episode is brought to you by Redbox Studio.

Today’s episode is with a Singaporean freelance copywriter, Grace Goh.

Grace has always loved travelling and she decided that a freelance writing and communications business suited her lifestyle most as she went all over the world.

Grace was a digital nomad long before the term became trendy!

A couple of years later, she even partnered up with a fellow Singaporean to establish a business to teach English abroad in countries such as Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar.  

While everyone was worried for their jobs during the pandemic lockdown, Grace said she hit one of her best months as a freelancer.

And yet she is taking a career in reverse by going from freelancing to full-time employment.

She calls it the Great Rejoining. 

In this episode we dig into her reasons for wanting to rejoin the corporate workforce again, why she decided to close her English teaching business and how the freelance world differs from the full-time and why she chooses the latter.

We also talk about starting companies as revenge (yes, that is a story that you need to hear) and the lessons learned from partnering up with others in a business.

Today’s conversation is unusual but at Womenpreneur Asia, I want to show you the realities, emotions and experiences of entrepreneurship - these are what I call the gritty realities of entrepreneurship.

I never shy away from the strange or unusual. In my conversation with Grace, she was initially unsure if her story could fit what I had in mind. I said that it would be helpful to share her story if only to enable us to reflect on what it means to be in business and to understand that entrepreneurship comes in all experiences, emotions and colours.

For the full show notes, go to WomenpreneurAsia.com

Today's episode is brought to you by Redbox Studio.

Today’s episode is with Yolanda Lee who is the founder and CEO of Uncommon, a private network for female leaders headquartered in Singapore. 

It is a private, vetted space where women from different fields and backgrounds can unite and it is also a private, group coaching community aimed to help female leaders transform the future of work. 

Yolanda says that being a woman in leadership roles in fast-growing tech companies was great but it came to a point where “ all of a sudden all the women disappear and it's incredibly lonely.” 

She had so many questions that her peers couldn’t answer. “And I started Uncommon organically out of a need. I felt as a female leader I wanted to connect with women who are really in that same boat and write the playbook for how we get ahead and what it actually means to get ahead.” 

Yolanda bootstrapped and launched Uncommon in December 2020 and today, it has hundreds of members from different fields and backgrounds with a growing waiting list. 

For the full show notes, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com

This episode is sponsored by Redbox Studio.

Today’s episode is with Soline Linh Le from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

I’ve met many entrepreneurs who wear many hats but Soline takes the cake.

She is an entrepreneur, a university lecturer, a woman leader, a community developer and a gender equality advocate. Most of all, she is an ecosystem developer and her story will explain how she did it. 

She first had the idea to start her business, Vietnam Dental Tourism when foreign friends commented positively about visiting Vietnam for dental treatments. 

Paying attention to this, she realized that dentistry could be a way to grow tourism, a sector she was deeply familiar with. She brought together dentistry players and tour operators in Vietnam to create a medical tourism business to attract foreign tourists and American Vietnamese.

But that’s not all. The dental industry creates waste and she wanted to tackle the waste issue. Dental businesses were slow to adopt technology and she wanted to help them speed up their digital adoption. 

So it was not just about entrepreneurship but building a sustainable ecosystem with the right players while adding sustainability, digital adoption and gender equality to the mix.

We also spoke about her passion for paying it forward through her community involvement for Vietnamese women and her 3Es concept, her studies in Switzerland and the ecotourism role she took up in Uganda and why despite it all, Soline chose to return to Vietnam. Her story is fascinating as well as compelling. 

For the full show notes, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com

This episode is sponsored by Redbox Studio.

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Today’s episode is with a New Zealand-born Samoan entrepreneur, Nora Swann. 

As the Director for Nora Swann LTD, Nora started many fashion initiatives from founding the largest high-end fashion show for the Pacific people in New Zealand (Pacific Fusion Fashion Show) to leading New Zealand’s first Pasifika modelling agency, Swann Modelling Agency. 

She started a wellness programme, Dressed In Confidence supported by New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development and Ministry for Pacific Peoples to empower Pasifika people to learn about positive body image, professional styling and self-confidence.

In other words, she is helping to keep the Pacific fashion story alive. 

In today’s episode, she talks about being a minority in the fashion industry as fashion was never a path for the Pasifika people.

She has had a big year in business. 

In January, she was recognized by the New York City Journal as a ‘top personality disrupting the fashion industry in 2022’.

In March, she was featured in the International Entrepreneurs Herald followed by another feature story in Forbes Monaco in August

Nora was also a successful applicant for the East-West Centre’s 2022 Changing Faces Women's Leadership Seminar in Oahu Hawaii and received a partial scholarship to represent New Zealand along with 12 other women from USA, Asia and the Pacific.

She also won the Kanumea Afine Loto Toa -Pacific Woman in Business – Pacific Business Trust.

To get the full show notes, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com

Today's episode is sponsored by Redbox Studio.

Please rate and review the Womenpreneur Asia podcast if you have enjoyed today's episode.

Today’s episode is with a Vietnamese entrepreneur, Milena Nguyen. She s a conscious business coach at Soulforest Education.

Milena’s story is about tasting failure at a young age when her yoga studio closed after 2 years.

You will love today’s interview as we discuss entrepreneurship from the perspective of inner and outer journeys.

We spoke about permission and transitions and that entrepreneurship is learnable and why women should own their own brilliance. 

Her story began with a successful stint in Europe, working for AIESEC, the world’s largest organization for youth leadership development, overseeing 127 countries. 

Right after leaving AIESEC and coming back to Hanoi, Milena was buoyed by a desire to live her passion. In her early 20s, she decided she didn’t want to get a job. She loved yoga and at 24, decided to open her yoga studio in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

She believed she was a great yoga teacher and in many ways she was but she wasn’t a great yoga business owner.

Milena says that two years into her studio, she closed it because “we were barely getting by. I told everybody the reason for closing was that I wanted location freedom, which was true, but it wasn't the full truth.The other reason for closing was that we were struggling so much financially.”  

Milena took that lesson of failure and decided to bet on herself a second time.

Today she is in a very different place and a much smarter and successful entrepreneur because she says finally she has created a business that serves her best. 

Listen to the episode for the story of how she pulled herself out of feeling like a failure and the mindset reset that she had to undergo with the help of her coach.

This episode is sponsored by Redbox Studio.

Get the full show notes and more at WomenpreneurAsia.com

Like this episode? Check out the other seasons and other Asian women entrepreneur stories on the website.

Today’s episode is with a Malaysian entrepreneur, Eleen Chan.

Eleen is the managing director of Lifestyle Ventures Sdn. Bhd whose principal business is in supplying chili paste to businesses.

When the business started in 2003, they supplied fresh chillis to customers but over time, ventured into processing chili.

Her story truly has humble beginnings because she and her late husband started the business from home. Thanks to a benefactor who supported them, they grew the business into a factory with 30 employees. 

Eleen was contented with her Business-to-Business (B2B) business for many years until the pandemic struck.

When the pandemic hit, her revenue fell by half and she had to figure out how to sustain her factory and continue employing her employees.

She didn’t want to retrench her employees and decided that she had to create retail products for the mass market if she wanted to continue being in business. 

Under these trying circumstances, Eleen founded a Malaysian brand of ready-to-eat Nyonya chili condiments and pastes and named the brand Man Fook (which interestingly, has its own story so listen to the episode for more).

This episode is brought to you by Redbox Studio.

For the full show notes and links, visit WomenpreneurAsia.com

If you have enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the podcast.

Today’s episode is with a Filipina entrepreneur, Anna Melissa Nava.

Anna or better known as Mel is the co-founder and CEO of 1Export whose tagline is “helping businesses go global”. 

She was a fun and energetic person to talk to and didn’t shy away from recounting the early days of her business when she took on a ghostwriting job to produce the Philippine export guidebook so that she could make some money and keep her business running. 

Today she has a team of 55 people located in 2 countries, the Phillippines and Indonesia and it is a far cry from the days when she used to scout for free co-working spaces to work in! 

We debunked the myths of exporting, how she came into this business, how she is growing right now with her team of 55 in two locations in Asia and what drives her.

We also talked about the early days of her business and how the greatest lesson she has learned came from her customers.

She thought it was all about the technology until she met a customer who said outright that he didn’t need the technology, he needed to solve his problems with exporting. 

This episode is sponsored by Redbox Studio.

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More show notes and links at WomenpreneurAsia.com

This is episode 2 of a special two-part episode with Maaike Doyer of Epic Angels, a Singapore-based angel network in conjunction with International Women’s Day.

Epic Angels comprise female executives and operators who want to give women the confidence to invest, by learning about the investment process, and understanding how other women invest.

They focus on early-stage startups in Asia across all verticals and invest in pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds.

In our previous episode, we talked about getting funded if you’re a female startup founder in Asia. 

In this episode, we continue the conversation about the other side of the coin - what does it take to become an angel investor?

Get the show notes at WomenpreneurAsia.com

This episode is sponsored by Redbox Studio.