From Peeling Onions in Kumamoto to Building HOPE: What I Carried With Me

I remember the first time I was short-weighed. I had just arrived in Japan, was still in language school, and my Japanese was halting. My first part-time job was peeling onions and packing them for a supermarket. I worked hard, but I did not write down how much I had done. When pay was calculated, the other side's figure was lower than mine, and I had neither the language nor the records to argue. I let it go. It was a cheap lesson compared with the ones that followed: working hard is not enough; you have to hold your own numbers.

More than ten years later, that sentence is still an operating principle at HOPE CORP. This essay is a short account of my years in Kumamoto, what each part-time job taught me, why I chose to care for health and beauty from within for Vietnamese women, who works on it with me, and what I look for in investors and partners.

The years in Kumamoto

I studied software engineering at Sojo University in Kumamoto, in the south of Japan. In the lecture hall I always put study first: I held a scholarship every year, and in my second year and my final year I received two scholarships each year. At my graduation thesis defence, the faculty had more than 150 students and I was the only Vietnamese. My presentation was graded excellent, among the top of the faculty, alongside Japanese and Chinese classmates.

Outside class I took almost every kind of job. Some days I cycled dozens of kilometres to work in sleet. One day, in the middle of a snowstorm, the sun suddenly broke through. I did not think much of it then, but I understand it now: keep going and the sun will come.

One part-time job, one principle still running today

The habits that remain in how HOPE operates:

• Onions weighed wrongly: trust only reconciled numbers. HOPE's revenue is not read from a single hand-entered source. The order ledger is parsed automatically from the order chat, checked against J&T waybills, and matched with bank statements at month end. Once, accounting software kept by manual entry lagged and missed 125 orders in a month, so it is now used only for cross-checking. A figure we cannot reconcile, we do not publish, as with 2023 to 2025.
• The 24-hour convenience store, night shift: a service standard. I worked the night shift and rested only one hour all night. There, a careless attitude that a customer complained about went straight onto a formal record. I learned that service has no "good enough" when a customer needs you. Today we measure it with real messages: median customer response time is 1 minute, and 80% of messages are answered within 15 minutes (30 days to 10/10/2026).
• The auto parts factory: quality and process. Everything there had to be exact, to standard, in the Japanese industrial manner. Today anything going out to customers passes a single filter and a person approves it, and every important AI agent has an automated test set that runs each Sunday.
• McDonald's: speed and coordination. Today this shows up in how we route customers and follow up: whoever owns the customer looks after them, nobody grabs another's, and we measure it with real messages rather than button clicks.
• Thai and Japanese restaurants: working every station. I was a cook at a Thai restaurant; at a Japanese one I waited tables, took orders, carried plates, handled the till and washed dishes. Because of that, when I design a process for staff or for machines, I think from the place of the person who has to do it, and I understand how hard each position is.
• Teaching Vietnamese, interpreting: being a bridge. Once my Japanese was firmer, I taught Vietnamese to Japanese learners, interpreted, and took part in exchanges with other international students. That was the first step of a bridging career.

I also met many good people who lifted me up, and some who were hard to read. Both taught me something no textbook does: how to read people.

From BrSE to a system of AI agents

After university I spent more than seven years as a BrSE, a bridge systems engineer between the Japanese side and the development team. The work taught me two things: say enough for both sides to understand the same thing, and think in systems, where every link has an input, an output and someone responsible. I then returned to Vietnam as a business manager, and from there started a company. Alongside running HOPE, I am currently studying for a Master's degree in Economic Law, because a health business that wants to last needs a founder who understands the rules from the ground up.

I started later than a close Japanese friend who had been building startups since university. But I believe everyone has a time zone of their own.

That habit has become a system of many AI agents running 24/7: parsing orders, routing leads, drafting replies for staff to approve, drafting content behind a banned-claims filter, calculating monthly payroll, and reporting daily with recommendations. I hold two principles. First, AI reads broadly, writes narrowly: AI has no permission to move money or delete data, and ad autopilot is off by default, capped at VND 1 million per day. Second, failure must be loud: a data source once lost its login session and wrote a zero over a real figure of 1,481; since then, a collector that gets zero rows stops, keeps the old number and raises an alarm. Both are lessons from being short-weighed, at a different scale.

Why health and beauty from within

HOPE CORP (legal name HOPE SERVICE CORPORATION) was founded on 23 August 2023, and our product brand is IKI. The problem we chose is specific. Vietnamese women aged 28 to 45 live between two separate worlds: cosmetics promise results on the outside, while daily nutrition on the inside is guesswork, and there is no way to measure what actually suits them. Meanwhile the supplement industry competes on medical-sounding promises, a practice now being tightened that erodes trust further.

For someone who was once short-weighed, the answer came almost naturally: build a brand that sells directly to the user, measures what it says, and promises no more than is real. Our products are dietary supplements, we make no drug-like claims, and promotions are gifts.

All results we report are reconciled figures from 2026: net revenue for the first nine months is about VND 3.57 billion (about US$137K), with 1,294 paying customers, and 40.5% of customers who first bought between March and June have bought again. Paid advertising in 2026 is only about 1% of revenue, because customers come mainly from a community we own. I state the limits plainly too: plant protein is about 66% of revenue, and the company still depends heavily on its founder. We reduce that by moving knowledge into the system: AI agents for operations, written process documents and advisors who work with us every week.

The people alongside me

I did not build this company alone.

Pham Ngoc Thanh Tam is co-founder and CMO, a macrobiotic nutrition expert. She leads nutrition expertise and the community, and is responsible for marketing and customer conversion. That community today is about 240,000 followers across platforms and about 9,700 members in our Zalo group. Her part of the work is the part an engineer like me cannot replace with software. Mine is R&D, operations and fundraising, as Founder, Chairman and CEO (also COO).

Nguyen Hoang Hai is a board member and fundraising coach, former CEO of Canavi and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2017 honoree. He accompanies the company through fundraising preparation and looks at us through the eyes of someone who has walked that road.

What I look for in investors and partners

We have taken no outside capital and are raising our first round, Pre-seed: US$250,000 for 20% equity at a US$1.0 million pre-money valuation. The money goes to three things only: 40% to grow the IKI brand, 30% to new product research focused on a beauty line, and 30% to sales, including a sales team, official stores on e-commerce platforms and a repeat-customer programme.

What I look for is not only money:

• Capital: a lead investor for the Pre-seed round who understands health and direct-to-consumer brands.
• Channels and markets: e-commerce platform partners, companies that invest in employee wellbeing, and distribution partners in Japan for a B2B route.
• Capability: manufacturing and R&D partners for the beauty line, and mentors who have scaled direct-to-consumer brands.

We would most welcome help with investment readiness, investor introductions, corporate partnerships, international expansion and communications. I want these conversations to start from the numbers. We are willing to put reconciled figures on the table, including the parts that are not flattering, because that is the only way two sides come to trust each other for the long term.

The light of Mizuakari

In 2018 I went back to Kumamoto to see old friends, visit the university and thank the teacher who had helped me as a student, then travelled alone around Japan. I still keep photographs of the Mizuakari festival, where 54,000 candles are lit, taken about thirteen years ago. Looking back, I see a youth lived fully before the days wore thin.

I have also passed through dark periods with no visible way out, with things I could tell no one and had to find my own answers to. I recall Jensen Huang wishing students plenty of stumbles, because people mature most when they learn to stand up again. For me, a ball that touches the bottom bounces higher than before.

If you are an investor or partner and this way of working suits you, I would be glad to talk.