Among the first to work in the Android developing scene, Renee Wang now forges her own path with Castbox, a podcast platform with over 30 million users. As the recipient of the NUS Executive MBA (Chinese) programme’s Overseas Entrepreneur Scholarship 2022, she shares her trailblazing entrepreneurship journey.
Renee Wang is not your typical psychology graduate. While she was studying at Peking University, she self-taught herself coding and even set up a studio to develop apps. Maybe it was a sign of times to come. Android, developed by Google, was in its early years. After graduation, Renee, who also majored in statistics, became a frontend engineer at Umeng, a mobile app analytics start-up which was later acquired by Alibaba. She found entrepreneurship interesting but knew she had more to learn.
She joined Google, helping more than 4,000 developers in product development and operations, as well as monetisation in the global market. As the technology evolved, Renee also produced YouTube videos in her spare time, explaining Android development. Four years later, she felt ready to make the leap.
How Castbox was built
In 2015, Renee founded Guru, a firm targeting app growth and monetisation. Her creation of the podcast app Castbox was more fortuitous. On the last day of 2015, she was attending a lecture when her friend mentioned Apple’s native podcast app and Google Play’s lack of one. Would there be an opportunity here? Renee loves listening to podcasts while exercising or travelling. The idea could just work.
On the first day of 2016, she got down to work, finding open-source software as the basis for development. After four days, she released the first version of Castbox. Initial data looked promising, as Castbox reached one million downloads in two months. Hence, Renee halted other trial projects to focus on Castbox. The focus led to more experience in middle platform technology and operations, and the firm later added more product lines, such as games and tools.
Renee took on media interviews as Castbox founder and CEO.
Breaking into overseas markets
Entrepreneurship, for Renee, was not without difficulties. She started out by herself, had little funding and a lack of direction. But she believes that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Renee added, “Difficulties make you think and force you to get out of your comfort zone. You realise the gaps in your capability and your knowledge limits. The company still faces many difficulties and setbacks to this day, but facing them head-on and thinking more about handling these challenges are greatly helpful to one’s development in the long run.”
As the company slowly got on track, Renee could hire more people. Investors also started coming in, and the financing process became smoother.
Renee has given many talks on business and technology.
Castbox has grown globally, with offices in different countries. Renee’s advice for firms that seek to expand overseas is simple—understand your competitive advantage. “The fundamentals are important in targeting overseas markets. In addition, firms need to localise and understand users’ needs. They need to identify the target users, define the firm’s value proposition based on users’ unmet needs, or add value for certain pain points to offer goods and services that meet localised needs,” said Renee. “When firms go overseas, they need to consider the bigger picture and build the firm’s competitiveness in a global context.
Widened perspectives from the NUS EMBA (Chinese) programme
An avid learner, Renee has been taking different courses after her bachelor’s degree. In 2022, she joined the NUS EMBA (Chinese) programme.
The course “Asia and the Global Economy” had been memorable. In his witty style, Professor Fu Qiang crystallises complex economic topics and engages the students in thinking deeply from an international perspective.
Renee in a class at NUS Business School.
In Associate Professor Wu Yaozhong’s “Business Analytics and Decision Making” class, Renee learnt about the human fallacy in decision-making. Realising the fallacy allows us to understand our limitations and to stay open to others’ opinions, and an open mindset will help in obtaining more information for introspection.
“The four-day course in each learning segment is like an index of the faculty’s academic wisdom,” said Renee. “They share the scope of the field, and students can deepen their learning in areas of interest. The EMBA professors’ ideas and broad perspectives have enhanced my thinking, and I’m able to look at issues from a higher level.”
Her work as founder and CEO of Castbox continues, but Renee is confident that the future will be filled with possibilities.
Video interviews:
–Renee’s entrepreneurship journey
–Renee’s EMBA (Chinese) experience
