Member Spotlight: Joseph Lee

From Electronics Arbitrage to Seafood

Mike: “Hey, Joe, thank you so much. I’m super excited to hear your founder’s story. Why don’t we start from the top – you are one of the very rare founders whose story starts with a lot of seafood and fish.”

Joe: “Maybe just me and my friends up in Canada. Growing up, I’d always been very entrepreneurial – I wouldn’t say I grew up wanting to be a founder or wanting that title. I think the first ever venture I started was back when I was fourteen or fifteen. I used to buy and sell and arbitrage electronics. I would buy electronics in bulk – like five, ten, fifteen phones at a time from these discount or liquidation electronics stores.”

Mike: “How old were you?”

Joe: “Fourteen or fifteen. All the money that I would have saved up. I would buy these like HTC phones, Motorola phones, tablets. And essentially I would resell them literally on the street. I would go and meet up with people from Craigslist – adults from Craigslist – and coordinate meeting up with them at the shop.”

Mike: “Didn’t get kidnapped. You’re still alive.”

Joe: “I know. I did a lot of sketchy things. It’s funny – I even had my girlfriend at the time, my high school sweetheart, come with me into people’s homes to buy and stuff. Crazy, crazy stuff.”

Mike: “Was she your muscle?”

Joe: “She was my muscle. Yeah. God bless her. So I did that. I probably had like five, six other ventures beyond that. I did a web agency back when knowledge of HTML and CSS was a bit of a moat. I had an organic candle company – we imported organic soy candles from China, made them in our parents’ kitchens, and would go around farmers markets buying and selling. I had a clothing company that I kickstarted off as well in university. Any and every industry.”

Joe: “I guess my first real venture-funded company was one that I started when I was twenty or twenty-one. My friend from high school – my co-founder for that venture – we were talking about business ideas, startups, founders, entrepreneurship.”

Mike: “You were big fans of Dragons’ Den.”

Joe: “And he was talking about his experiences living and spending summers on the East Coast. He’s from northern New Brunswick – imagine like Boston, but remote. He was talking to lobster fishermen right on the docks.”

Mike: “This is such a Canadian story.”

Joe: “It’s very Canadian – dock to dock to dock in each small village, selling ten pounds of lobsters here, twenty pounds here, fifty pounds there before going into the main city to sell to the main broker. We started asking ourselves, why are they going through all this trouble before selling to the middlemen? Through that discovery process, we learned that the seafood industry – not just in Canada but globally – was super antiquated. A lot of middlemen, a lot of moving parts. It just hadn’t changed in decades, if not centuries. Fishermen were essentially getting pennies on the dollar as a result. So the thesis we had was, how do we democratize access to these small-scale boats and fishermen and help them sell direct to the restaurants and direct to the people that want fresher, more traceable, more sustainable ingredients, and actually put more money back into the pockets of fishermen.”

Dropping Out and Building

Mike: “And you were in university at the time?”

Joe: “I was. I was very naive thinking that me as a twenty-year-old could reinvent a thousand-year-old industry.”

Mike: “So did you drop out to do this full time?”

Joe: “Yeah. It wasn’t a one-moment thing, but it was a culmination of many different things that led us to drop out. Getting into a Canadian accelerator, then getting into Techstars, hiring a few people, raising venture capital. One thing led to the next, and we blinked.”

Mike: “What was your parents’ reaction?”

Joe: “Surprisingly, my parents are not like the East Asian tiger moms – they’re very supportive. They wanted me to just go out and do my own thing and navigate my own path. I don’t think I ever faced any resistance. I’m also the second child, so my brother got most of the lashing – he went down the traditional science, medical path. I had a little bit more leeway there.”

Mike: “So this business – was it a tech startup? Were you buying and selling fish as a broker? Help me understand what you were really building.”

Joe: “Essentially it was supposed to be a predictive marketplace connecting fishers and seafood farms directly to restaurants. Instead of people catching all they could catch and selling it to the broker, the broker selling it to the packer, the packer to the processor, the processor to the distributor – we wanted to aggregate demand. It was a predictive marketplace where we would aggregate demand from restaurants and people so that the fishermen going out to fish knew what was actually pre-bought before they went out. By having that demand-centered process, you could bypass multiple middlemen and essentially ship more direct. I would say it was more like Uber for seafood. But in reality, I hauled a lot of fish. I had a Ford F-150. I was driving around town with like ten thousand pounds of fish in the back. I was going out to the boonies in Eastern Canada, going to Asia, going across the West Coast – talking to fishermen, living on docks, going out on boats with random people.”

Lessons from a Hard Market

Mike: “Looking back – is this crazy? Was it fun? What were the big lessons from this time?”

Joe: “One of the biggest lessons I took away is: go into markets where there are headwinds. Don’t fight the market. Market always beats founder, no matter how well the founder is executing. The second time around building my venture-funded company was all about ‘how do I get into emerging markets where I can ride that momentum and ride the wave, and I don’t have to do all the heavy lifting and convince people that their problem is a problem worth solving?’ The whole painkiller versus vitamin discussion people have in startup discourse. But I’m glad I went into a really hard space because I made a shit ton of mistakes. We burned millions of dollars. I had to learn how to pitch chefs. That is probably one of the hardest things you could do because these folks don’t have phone numbers. These folks don’t have emails. You’re literally going door to door into the restaurant, pitching them on your service. It really builds up thick skin and sets you up for whatever you do next, because God knows everything you do after trying to sell to chefs is easier.”

Mike: “So you really built up resilience during that time.”

Joe: “I think so. We came in with a lot of naivety about what it meant to build a tech company. Part of that naivety was us being insistent that we had to build a tech company. We were so prescribed to that infographic of – Uber doesn’t have drivers, Airbnb doesn’t have rooms – we bought into that. So we said, we have to be a thin marketplace. There’s no way we can own warehouses or own the inventory. That’s great and that’s possible if you are at scale and you have capital, but when you’re first scaling up there are a lot of things that go wrong. In hindsight, having infrastructure or owning inventory or having warehousing initially – to have better quality assurance and better understand the inner workings of seafood companies – that doesn’t mean that has to be forever. That’s just a stepping stone towards the vision and the future. But we were very hell-bent on building things the way Airbnb and Uber were built.”

Mike: “You were trying to fit your business into a box.”

Joe: “Exactly. And that’s the only way we were like, that’s the only way we raise money and the only way investors are going to get behind what we build. Especially when you live in a more conservative country like Canada where capital isn’t as cheap. It’s harder to make those types of decisions at a younger age.”

COVID, Pivots, and a Platform

Mike: “So what ended up happening to this business?”

Joe: “There were elements of the business that were working, elements that weren’t working. Luckily I was able to get rid of the Ford F-150. We had some automations in place – a network of third-party logistics providers doing all the deliveries, all the chefs ordering off our app, parts of the supply elements being automated as well. We were able to scale that to around four million dollars in revenue per year. We were losing money, obviously, like any other startup back then – there was no notion of capital efficiency. We were gearing up for our Series A when Covid hit. Essentially every restaurant, especially in Canada – they were a little more draconian during Covid, everything shut down. Supply chains, food, seafood, high-end restaurants are probably three or four of the most impacted industries across all industries. We went from millions to near zero pretty much overnight. At that point we ended up pivoting not once, not twice, but probably three or four times. First into premium grocery delivery – like your Instacart for Hokkaido uni and Wagyu beef and all these things people typically have trouble sourcing because they’re reserved for restaurants. Until eventually we became a commerce and operations platform for the same distributors and wholesalers we were competing with. These distributors and wholesalers in meat, seafood, produce – they knew about us through the grapevine. They knew we were young, hungry, understood technology. When they also had to pivot and sell online, they realized you can’t just pull up Shopify. The way you sell meat and produce, you don’t sell it by the unit. You have variable units and catch weights – steaks can be two pounds or one point eight pounds or four pounds per unit. There’s perishability, geographical boundaries, legal legalities of going state to state for selling beef and steak and seafood. They needed a perishable-specific platform for buying, selling, and conducting business. That’s the model we pivoted into and the business is still going strong today. It’s ten years in business – I think February was our incorporation date, 2016.”

Mike: “That’s incredible. You should be proud. Why did you decide to leave?”

Joe: “Really tough scenario and circumstance. When you’ve built something for such a long period of time, the business is you, you’re the business. It’s very hard to detach your own reality.”

Mike: “Your identity. Right.”

Joe: “And self-worth. For me, I had conviction in my capabilities as a founder, in what I wanted to achieve in life and in business. Going back to that earlier point about market factors – the type of industry in motion not being conducive to winning. I felt like I had tapped out what I could do. I’d also tapped out in terms of the amount of learning I was getting on a day to day. So ultimately I told my co-founder – I gave them about a year’s worth of heads up. I said, how long do you need me to stick around? I’ll stick around and help you build this business up. And then he gave me a date. I worked together on it. So it was a very amicable departure.”

The Genesis of Supademo

Mike: “We just spent fifteen minutes and we haven’t even gotten to Supademo – that’s incredible. I love how you start by saying, hey, I never really thought I’d be a founder. And then you founded like thirteen companies before the current one. Help bridge that gap between this last business you left and today.”

Joe: “Like many other founders, whenever I have an idea or a problem that I live with, I write it down and keep it in my back pocket. I have a running list of all the different problems and things that I run into in the day to day. The problem space and the idea behind Supademo was one of them. When I was transitioning from that marketplace to a B2B startup, it no longer became a matter of how many chefs can we hit up, how many restaurants could we walk into at two or three p.m. when they’re on their break? It was how many distributors can we get on a digital demo where I’m walking people through the features, the benefits, the value of our product. We were selling in a very esoteric traditional market where people didn’t really get it. So I started experimenting with visuals – recording myself or a quick walkthrough and sending it to people to try to increase conversions.”

Joe: “First of all, creating these videos was extremely arduous. I hate recording myself. You’ve got to create the script. You probably mess up at least three, four times. You waste a lot of time. Something pops up on your screen. And when you’re a startup, your video is out of date within a day or two of you making the thing and now you’ve got to do it all over again. By the time you send it, no one wants to watch a five-minute video. Super passive. It’s not engaging. It doesn’t get people into the experience. But what I noticed is when I did more of an interactive, back-and-forth session where people got to take pauses or click around – it was more of a guided experience. That’s when these distributors and wholesalers got the light bulb moment. They’re like, holy shit, I understand what you’re trying to sell me. How do we get started? So I figured there has to be a better medium, a more engaging way to get people into your product and understanding your product – across both the creation and the delivery and the viewing sides.”

Joe: “When I wandered the wilderness, as I say, for eight months – not knowing what the hell I was doing, half of me was like, I’m unemployable, I’m screwed – I was probably exploring ten or fifteen different ideas with five different co-founders that I had run like a March Madness bracket with. Ultimately Supademo just kind of bubbled to the top. My co-founder for Supademo and I just kind of agreed, here’s a benchmark we need to hit in order to go full time and feel comfortable doing this thing. We got past it very quickly, one thing led to another, we raised money, started building, built the team. It’s been a pretty crazy journey the last three years.”

Early Days and Finding the First 100 Customers

Mike: “That’s incredible. Talk to me about the early days of Supademo. What were the first things you did? What were the biggest challenges?”

Joe: “I think the biggest thing for us was – now that we had gone from a sales-led enterprise play to more of a lightweight product-led growth motion – it was all about how do we get the initial flywheel going? It’s easier to build this type of business that is lightweight, viral, and product-led, but it’s a lot harder to build defensible momentum and distribution. Supademo in itself is a viral product – you create demos not to keep them confined to your own team, but to share out with prospects, customers, colleagues to demonstrate your product and workflow. By the time people click through and experience it, they’re like, this was really cool, how do I use it for my own use cases? So there’s a flywheel there. But there’s a lot of noise – even more noise now with AI, there’s a new tool launching every single day. For us, the problem was more about how do we get that snowball rolling down the hill, and the product will do the heavy lifting after. It was all about: let’s get to our first one hundred customers in whatever fashion we can, exhaust as many channels as we can, and do the work so that it becomes almost impossible for people to say no to our product.”

Mike: “How did you find those first one hundred customers?”

Joe: “A lot of different ways – a microcosm of a hundred different things. The biggest thing was cliche, right? Don’t do things that don’t scale. But I think a lot of people say that and still make it so hard for people to buy. So some very tacit examples: I posted on Reddit. I scoured every Reddit community, every startup community. Whenever I could mention Supademo, I would. I would even start my own threads saying, drop your product URL and I’ll go in and actually sign up for your product, learn what it does – this was pre-AI – and I will create a showcase demo for you that you can use in sales and marketing efforts, without you having to pay for anything. I would respond to people’s comments inline on Reddit so other people landing on that community could click the link and see their product demo. I would sign up for every single product update from dream customers I could find – whether it be Airtable or Linear – and respond to every single product update. Usually product updates have some text and a screenshot. I would actually respond with a click-through demo using Supademo of that feature and say, hey, you should actually embed this directly in your product update. You don’t even have to pay me – here’s the link to sign up for the free plan, click duplicate, and you already have your demo. Do that enough times and enough people are going to be like, all right, this guy is leading with value. He’s not asking for anything but he’s giving me value first. Let me just poke around and see what this is. I would also share building in public on X, on Indie Hackers, launching on Product Hunt – just being a megaphone anywhere and everywhere anyone would listen.”

Biggest Surprises and Lessons

Mike: “Joe, you’ve been on the startup merry-go-round a few times now. For Supademo, what’s been the biggest surprise? What’s been the biggest lesson?”

Joe: “One surprise is it’s been very easy. Things have really clicked this time around. I think it goes to show that if you are chasing after a really painful problem that a big enough portion of humankind faces, you’re going to be able to grow with that market and have natural pull from people looking for solutions. But the second piece is you just end up being a lot more pragmatic about how you build companies and teams. We’ve been extremely methodical this time around about who we let into our house when it comes to the team, because every person that comes in sets the tone for how quickly you move, the pace, the cultural aspects of company building.”

Mike: “Does that mean you’re approaching interviewing differently? What’s the practical application of that?”

Joe: “It’s more qualitative than quantitative. It’s almost like listening less to the quantitative signals. When you’re an early-stage founder, you can put a lot of merit into the quantitative signals – oh, this person was a director at X, or this person went to Stanford, or this person has this background. And you overindex on some of those factors even in cases where your gut is actually telling you, don’t go in that direction. So you end up trusting your gut more. And you do run a more streamlined process – what questions actually get us answers to whether they’re a good fit. Not for any company, but for our company specifically.”

How to Help Supademo

Staying Sane as a Founder

Mike: “Joe, that was all the business stuff. Let’s talk about the founder stuff. Being a founder is crazy, as you know – it’s a rocky, wild roller coaster. What do you do to stay sane?”

Joe: “I think you do have to draw boundaries. I have some pretty hard rules – I need to work out for at least an hour every single day. I’m not going to miss out on social functions because there’s always deadlines, there’s always work. Growing more mature and wise in understanding what needs to happen in terms of urgency, what needs to happen today versus what can wait till tomorrow. Learning how to delegate properly within the team, because you don’t have to shoulder all the burden yourself – that’s actually fundamentally bad for the company. If you’re stressed and don’t have balance, the company doesn’t have balance and you’re making irrational decisions, and that permeates to your mental health, to finances. I’m very much a proponent – whenever we have those New York City founder dinners, I’m like, how much do you guys pay yourselves? Founders actually take a pretty inordinate amount of risk. If able, we should all pay ourselves a good wage so that finances are not a factor when you’re making decisions. Financial well-being and physical well-being – those are two non-negotiables to me.”

What People Would Be Surprised to Learn

Mike: “What would people be surprised to learn about you?”

Joe: “I’m surprisingly a bit of an introvert. People think I’m extremely extroverted, but I actually spend most of my time by myself. I go on solo bike rides. I run by myself. I work out by myself. I go out and walk around and read by myself. I go to a bathhouse by myself for four or five hours. A lot of people think I’m going out to the club and I’m like, no, I’m not like that.”

Mike: “That is super surprising because you handle yourself so well in really overwhelming social functions.”

Joe: “I think it’s just mannerisms you pick up as a founder. You learn to become a bit of a chameleon and adapt to the environment so that you can better the business or create opportunities for yourself. It’s probably more that than me loving people and wanting to be around people at all times.”

Mike: “Or you just need to recharge, is what it sounds like.”

Joe: “Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.”

New Favorites

Mike: “Do you have a new favorite product, startup, feature, restaurant, anything? What’s your new favorite thing?”

Joe: “I mean, obviously I love Claude Code. I use the hell out of that thing. Outside of work, I have a new restaurant that I really like. It’s in Fort Greene, which is basically where I moved to. I was in Manhattan for two years and just moved out in February. There’s a restaurant called Walter’s – right across the street from Fort Greene Park. The lighting, the mood – it’s super vibey, very nice, like a casual spot. And on the back side is actually a Japanese restaurant. You can only get to the Japanese restaurant by walking through the American restaurant, Walter’s. You go through the back door and there’s a whole separate restaurant with its own bar and stuff.”

Mike: “Which of the two restaurants do you like more?”

Joe: “I actually haven’t tried the Japanese place. I only go there when the bathroom is occupied at Walter’s and I know they’ve got bathrooms back there. But beyond that, I haven’t tried it. It’s on my list.”

Why New York?

Mike: “And Joe, you were in Canada and you came all the way to New York. What brought you here and what keeps you here?”

Joe: “I like to make my life harder than it is. For me, the biggest thing was being in a higher-density area. As a founder, you’re almost doing yourself a disservice if you’re putting yourself in a place where you can’t get as lucky. New York as a city and as a magnet – you’re going to have higher surface area for meeting people, running into opportunities, running into customers, having higher ambition just through osmosis. Being around people that are like, why is it so hard to build a hundred-million-dollar company – and then you see them and you’re like, they’re no different than me. Whereas in Vancouver, people are out skiing, going to the beach, very happy with what they got. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but for me, knowing what I’m capable of, I want to maximize the potential that I have. It was a no-brainer to be in either SF or New York. I just like the vibe of New York more. SF is a bit too monoculture – too much of one thing can also be bad. I wanted more diversity of industries, people, and opinions.”

Mike: “Well, we’re glad you’re here, man.”

Joe: “Yeah, hopefully I’m here for the long term. If they approve my green card, we’ll see.”

Joseph Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Supademo, an agentic demo automation platform used by 200,000+ users and 3000 paying companies across 100+ countries. He previously founded Freshline, a Techstars-backed ecommerce platform for food distributors, and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Based in New York City, Joseph has been an active member of NYC Founders Club since 2024.