I wrote this in 2020, while I was still employed and building a service called NomadInSeoul on the side. That service no longer exists. Four more projects died after it. What I learned from all five deaths became the skeleton of Soulin Social and KINS. Building alone without funding is still lonely. But now I know the weight of that loneliness.

My hands remember first. Before I touch the keyboard — my heart rate picks up slightly. That feeling right before you build something from nothing. The tremor of starting something nobody asked for, in a place nobody is watching, at an hour nobody is paying you for.

NomadInSeoul started as a blog. Not even a proper blog — a place to put words when the rest of my life was falling apart.

I had dropped out of university. My businesses had failed. The companies I'd joined with hope had let me go without ceremony. My life, by any reasonable metric, had hit the floor.

I'd come back to Korea from Singapore — where I'd been living happily as a nomad — because I thought I was supposed to. Come home, be realistic, get a job, grow up. A psychiatrist told me the overseas life was a fantasy and I should wake up from it. Settle into reality.

In that season, when nobody was on my side, I desperately needed people who understood. The first essay I published — about dropping out of Yonsei — came from that desperation. Ironically, it's still the most popular thing I've ever written.

That one essay changed the trajectory. It pulled me out of the narrow vision of the few people around me. It gave me the courage to take one more step forward.

Stage 1: The group chat.

I created a KakaoTalk group — Korea's messaging app — with no plan whatsoever. I ran it anonymously because putting my name on anything online felt terrifying, and because doing anything outside your day job in Korea is considered slightly transgressive. Honest communication required anonymity.

The group grew slowly. I liked that. Previous communities I'd built, I'd forced growth — dragging people in from everywhere, optimizing for numbers. This one I kept hidden, almost selfishly. Good people showed up. Warm conversations happened. It was healing for me, personally, before it was anything resembling a business.

I ran surveys. Started small offline meetups. I was curious — what were people actually thinking? The group chat spawned a radio show with thirty listeners, then a few small gatherings. People kept saying the same thing: "I thought I was the only person who thought this way."

Maybe there were more people thinking the same things and not saying them out loud. That was the first real signal.

Stage 2: Testing without a website.

Notion, oopy.io, Typeform. No-code tools stitched together with spit and stubbornness.

Hypothesis: "There's demand for talks on the digital nomad lifestyle."
Build time: 3 weeks (while employed full-time).
Result: 67 signups, 30 paid, 300,000 won revenue.

When I test a service, I follow one rule: check if people pay. Not sign up. Not follow. Not fill out a survey. Pay. I'd learned this the expensive way — a previous business where I spent 50 million won on a pop-up store and influencer marketing and grew an Instagram to a thousand followers and made 150,000 won in online sales over three months. After that kind of education, you understand: the only signal that matters is the transaction.

Stage 3: The beta.

No-code tools. Login, database, payments, authentication — all built without writing a line of code. Three months. While employed full-time.

Soulin members get the full essay library, private group chat, the Soulin OS e-book, and every tool — all for $10/mo. Join Soulin →

Full essay library · Private group chat · Soulin OS e-book · Every tool · $10/mo

Result: 300 signups, 30 paying users, 1.2 million won revenue.

I launched four courses. The results: 20, 3, 3, 0. Brutal clarity. Even the course with 20 signups only retained 6 to the end. The course with zero signups had taken the most preparation — which tells you something about the relationship between effort and market demand, which is: there isn't one.

Kill what doesn't work. Double down on what does. This became the principle I carried into everything I built afterward.

Traffic was a problem too. Three months of operation and nobody was finding me through search. The only visitors came when I published content. No content, no visitors. I was the engine and the fuel.

Looking back.

This isn't a success story. NomadInSeoul died. Four projects after it died too. Five graves in four years.

But something strange happened as the failures accumulated. I got faster. What to test, what to cut, what to build first — my body started knowing before my mind did. The hands developed their own intelligence. A new project: muscle memory would kick in. Don't build that feature yet. Test the payment first. Don't write the landing page — write the email. Don't hire the designer — ship it ugly.

Stripping away what doesn't matter — in projects, like in life — reveals what does. Five dead projects taught me what one living one needs. That living one became Soulin. And KINS.

No funding. No team. Still alone.

Building alone is lonely. I work European hours and build at night. Coffee in the afternoon, one feature per day, or one piece of content. That's my speed. It isn't fast. But it doesn't stop either. There's something to be said for a pace you can sustain indefinitely — not the sprint-and-crash cycle that killed my earlier projects, but the steady, unglamorous rhythm of someone who's learned that the race is longer than she thought and the only competitor is the version of herself that gives up.

What do you want to build? And why haven't you started?

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I write about freedom, healing, and building alone. The full archive is at soulin.co.