MANILA — PH-founded e-commerce mentorship program LaunchStrong marks its first year, having mentored over 150 first-time Filipino founders and facilitated the development of more than 100 homegrown brands at various stages to date. The milestone highlights a growing movement of aspiring Filipino entrepreneurs turning raw concepts into viable, more accessible, and market-ready consumer products.
Founded in 2025 by entrepreneur Jungie Gumiran, LaunchStrong is a five-week live mentorship program designed to help aspiring Filipino founders navigate the early stages of building an e-commerce business. The program covers mentorship on product ideation and validation, supplier sourcing, positioning, pricing, branding, launch strategy, customer acquisition, and early-stage growth.
Based on its data, about 80% of first-time founders who joined the program without an existing product or e-commerce background have successfully progressed toward launching their first online business.
The program has supported brands across categories including wellness and supplements, food and beverage, personal care, pet care, and fashion. Among the brands developed through LaunchStrong are wellness brands Eat Move Love and Pharmatrust, food brand Magic Bowl, Bathcare Tonios, Filipino clothing brand TELA Pinoy, and pet care brand NanaPro Litter.
“E-commerce in the Philippines is becoming much easier to enter, but harder to win,” said Gumiran. “Opening a marketplace store or having a good product is no longer enough. Aspiring founders can generate sales and still lose money if they don’t fully understand business economics, platform fees, logistics, inventory, and cash flow. Success, more than just the launch, is making better decisions before putting hard-earned capital at risk so the business can survive and scale.”
Gumiran’s practitioner-led approach stems from his experience scaling his own homegrown wellness brand, JUJU Lifestyle. Founded in 2021, JUJU has served more than 300,000 customers and expanded to over 20 retail partners within its first year of entering physical retail, including SouthStar Drug, HeyDay, Wellness Plus, and various specialty clinics and fitness studios. Gumiran also brings lessons from scaling digital marketing agency frameworks and experiencing major early-stage setbacks, which shaped his focus on risk mitigation and strict product validation.
Through his educational platform, AdsLevelUp, Gumiran has also coached over 30,000 CEOs, freelancers, marketers, and business owners across 200+ training sessions and workshops since 2019.
Entering its second year, LaunchStrong aims to continue supporting more aspiring and first-time Filipino founders across every stage of building a brand— from ideation, validation, supplier sourcing, positioning, pricing, branding, launch, customer acquisition, and early-stage growth.
“Our vision is to give first-time founders the practical perspective to realize that they can build a brand from scratch, regardless of where they are starting from,” Gumiran said. “In our second year, we want to equip more Filipinos with the skills, discipline, and execution capability to build sustainable consumer brands that can compete nationally and eventually scale beyond the Philippines.”
The program is set to launch its next five-week live mentorship cohort in December 2026, bringing together entrepreneurs to discuss the practical challenges of building and scaling e-commerce businesses.
