A Business Mind: Ryan Lee, co-founder of BeMei

Although still a secondary school student, Ryan Lee is a coder and entrepreneur who has joined a group of pioneers trying to open up the South Korean plastic surgery market. They want to offer safe, legal ways for Greater China clients keen to go under the knife in order to become more mei, or “beautiful”.

How did you all meet up?

Our team has three members – one from Korea, one from Hong Kong, and I am from the US. We met at the Startup Weekend held in Cyberport in April. Our Korean member, Paul Lee, came to pitch his business idea and we joined him.

We built the mock-up of our website and won the Best User Interface award. We’ve been working together ever since. Paul is doing his final year at the University of Hong Kong, our Hong Kong member has a full-time job, and when I’m not at school I’m doing the coding for BeMei.

What is your business idea?

The point of BeMei is to help Greater China customers find plastic surgery hospitals in Korea. At the moment the market is segmented and the language poses a major problem. In mainland China there are a lot of brokers, but most of them are illegal. We wanted to find a legal solution, and also gather all the best hospitals in one place, where it is easy to research and compare. It’s a plastic surgery hospital search engine, but you can contact hospitals directly through us.

How did a guy think of plastic surgery?