Datahunt is where the challenge lies.

This year, Datahunt is experiencing higher revenue growth than ever before. Although we entered the industry as a fast follower, in the first half of this year alone, our revenue growth was 15 times that of last year, with a CAGR of 357%. The company's self-developed deep learning model for AI data processing, which dramatically reduces the time and cost of data labeling, has been well received by customers.

While our developers and researchers have been working tirelessly to improve our services, our account managers, who run barefoot and communicate directly with our clients, have also played a role in our rapid growth. Today, we interviewed Byoungjoon Min, account manager at Datahunt, who is responsible for data quality at Datahunt.

Q1 Hello, Mr. Min. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

A: Hello. I'm Byoungjoon Min, a Biz Team Lead. I am in charge of Lead of Account Managers, B2B/B2G sales, project operations at DataHunt. I've been with DataHunt for almost a year and a half now.

Q2 What exactly does an account manager do at DataHunt?

Our team is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. From proposing and selling our services to clients, to gathering client requirements and planning the overall project, to running the project that you have designed and won, to delivering high-quality AI datasets to our clients.

To put it more simply, I'm responsible for the A to Z process of identifying exactly what the client wants, suggesting the best way to accomplish this task, and ensuring that it is completed to a high standard.

I know a lot of companies in our industry have separate sales and operations groups, but at Datahunt, we follow through on the projects we contact and propose. I think it's very easy to get burnt out if you're in a single role, whether it's sales or operations, but at DataHunt, I'm responsible for the clients I've taken on, so it's a lot of responsibility, but it's also a lot of fulfillment.

The way we work is that once we receive a client's requirements, we go through a thorough process of checking the requirements. Once the client accepts our proposal, a contract is signed, and from then on, a lot of things happen in parallel to ensure that we meet the deadlines agreed upon with the client. In the case of a data processing project, for example, we source data labelers (we call them"data hunters") from within our pool of workers, create a project guide, and then receive the raw data from the client and upload it to our platform.

Our data hunters then start processing the data, while I check in with the client to make sure everything is running smoothly, to see if there are any additional requests that come up in the course of the actual work, and to communicate with the client about the pace and duration of the work. At the end of the job, I deliver the resulting data to the client, which is similar to production management in manufacturing. After that, I take care of invoicing.

Recently, I've been paying a lot of attention to retention. There are a lot of competitors, butDataHunt is trying to instill the perception that we are a reliable partner in terms of accuracy and speed, and we are constantly providing updates on our services so that companies that have worked with us even once will remember us and come back to us.

Q3 Can I ask what you were doing before joining DataHunt?

I started my career in B2B sales in the manufacturing industry. My first company was a vendor doing custom OEMs for global fashion companies. It was a good company with a global presence, a blue-chip company with trillion-dollar revenues.

I spent five and a half years learning the ropes and getting my feet wet at a stable company, butI always knew I wanted to work at a startup where I could experience more dramatic growth. So I moved to my second company, a fashion AI company, where I could leverage my existing experience.

Although I was an experienced employee, I was new to the IT field, especially AI, so I think I worked like a new employee again. I worked passionately at the second company for nearly two years, and I was able to get a taste of the growing industry, and I was able to grow myself along with it.

With my interest inAI growing day by day, I realized that I wanted to experience various AI industries other than fashion, so I moved to Datahunt to experience more domains.  

Q4 It's been quite a journey, what made you decide to move to Datahunt out of all the companies?

During the first round of interviews, the CEO came in. Usually, they ask candidates to introduce themselves first, but he introduced DataHunt as a company first, which warmed up the atmosphere and made me feel that he was a very caring person.

After the first interview with the CEO, I honestly had a lot of worries. I wondered if I should do something more in the situation before I left and seriously consider my career, or if I should change jobs again too soon. He seemed to understand my feelings and organized a coffee chat with the current employees. It was like meeting and talking to the people I'd be working with a little bit early on, and it gave me a chance to hear a little bit more about the culture and environment at DataHunt, so I was able to take the next step.

I didn't necessarily have to be in charge of marketing, but as Datahunt became more and more of a centerpiece, I started to think that maybe we shouldn't just be in a situation where we're getting projects through people's networks. I suggested that we should be a little bit more proactive in terms of marketing, getting inbound contacts, getting in front of prospects, and that's what I did. We have a culture where we give a lot of opportunities to people who feel the need and make suggestions to do it themselves. It's hard not to feel responsible when you're in charge of something, and I think it's very satisfying.

Q5 Do you have any memorable clients or projects you've worked on?

Every single one of them is memorable, but if I had to pick one, I would say NHN, the first clientI worked on after joining the company. It's also the client with the best retention, and we continue to work with them on various projects every year, including fashion AI, OCR, and government projects. My team and I do our best to make sure we don't lose that trust.

The next most memorable client is Mobiltech, with whom we built our first autonomous drivingAI data project. At that time, autonomous driving data was a new field for me, so I tried various experimental methods to stabilize the operation, and fortunately, we were able to keep the project well organized for over five months.During that time, I was able to grow myself, and fortunately, the results turned out well, and the client was very satisfied.

Both clients have left us with very precious memories. Thanks to them, I've been able to build autonomous driving data, advance fashion AI, and other areas that I'm most confident in at DataHunt, and the fact that we've been working with them for so long makes my job rewarding.

Q6 The last time I was here for an interview, you were having a small event, and everyone seemed to be having a great time. What was it like?

At DataHunt, we call it a "town hall meeting" because once a month, all employees get together to share company achievements and other news. The sales team and developers come together for a quick meeting.

I think it's really important for employees to stay motivated, and I've been in that position myself, and I think there's nothing like seeing the specifics of a growing company to keep you motivated, so I think sharing numbers is one of the most meaningful things we do at our town hall meetings, because engineers don't really have access to things like operating income and revenue, but I think it's really motivating to see how well everything they've built is working in this market, and I felt like we needed to have a place where we could talk about where we're doing well and how we're doing well.

Who doesn't want to know how their company is doing? It's just that the company doesn't share that information, and we have a president who cares about it and is willing to share it to keep people motivated.

Q7 DataHunt has a great atmosphere, can you tell us a bit more about the company culture?

People are very friendly, and when you meet people in society, there is a general atmosphere of standing up for yourself, and individualism is strong, but I think that at Datahunt, there is a strong bond between members.

We don't say no to each other. In a development team, where you're working together and you're bound to bump into each other, you're going to get a lot of requests for this and that, and you're going to have things that you want to do, but you're also going to have important things that you need to do right now, and you're going to have a lot of things that are going to take up your time without you even realizing it, but we don't cut things off at the knees, and there's definitely an atmosphere where we're trying to figure out how to solve things together, rather than just saying, "We can't do this," we're trying to figure out a good direction, we're trying it, we're trying it, and it's not working.

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