I wrote this in 2020, when I'd just quit and started building things alone for the first time. Everything I made back then failed. Nothing survived. Except — one of those "useless" side projects became the skeleton of what's now Soulin Social. The timing was wrong. The instinct wasn't.

My neck was stiff. Sitting under the fluorescent office lights, staring at a spreadsheet — it wasn't my eyes that gave out first. It was my neck. The physical refusal to turn my head toward the screen anymore. My body was talking. Not here.

Quitting wasn't dramatic. One morning on the subway, I didn't get off at my stop. Passed it. Deliberately. Then the next stop. And the next. Rode all the way to the end of the line. Sat on a bench at the terminal station for thirty minutes, perfectly still. Then wrote my resignation letter. In the notes app on my phone.

When you tell people you quit, they ask: did you have a plan?

No.

To be precise — I had a plan that nobody recognized as a plan. "I'm going to build things by myself" doesn't register as a plan in Korea. In 2020, it registered as something closer to delusion.

In Singapore, I'd seen them — people who lived and worked from a laptop, no office, no company. An Israeli developer, a French consultant, a Brazilian designer. These people were in their thirties, forties, still living this way. It was sustainable. That was the shock.

In coworking spaces in Bali, in cafes in Chiang Mai — I met dozens of them. And I realized this wasn't a story about special people. It was a choice. One that simply wasn't visible from inside Korea.

First side project. A digital nomad information course.

Built it in three weeks. Notion and Typeform. No code. Result: 30 paid customers, total revenue 300,000 won — about $230. Hourly rate: worse than a convenience store job.

Second project. A community website. Built with no-code tools over three months while still employed. Built at night, tested at dawn, commuted in the morning. 300 sign-ups. Active users: fewer than 30. Shut it down after three months.

Third project. Can't even remember the name. Dead in two weeks.

Fourth. Dead in a month.

The numbers I'd dreamed about and the numbers I was making were — violently different. I'd written "10 million won per month" as a goal and actually earned 300,000. The gap was so absurd it was almost funny. No time for despair. Had to build the next thing.

The cruelest thing about side projects is that failure is quieter than success.

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At a company, when you fail, someone notices. A boss points it out. A colleague offers sympathy. It shows up in your review. Building alone — nobody knows you've failed. You shut down a service, you get zero sign-ups, and the world produces no reaction whatsoever.

That non-reaction hurts worse than failure.

But something strange kept happening. Each time a project died, the next one came faster. What to build first, what to cut, how to check if anyone will actually pay — these things stopped being ideas in my head and started being knowledge in my hands. Spending 50 million won on marketing and making 150,000 in revenue — that kind of lesson etches itself into bone. Watch whether they pay. Everything else is noise.

Out of all that wreckage, something survived. The projects I run today. Soulin Social. KINS. This site.

Quitting wasn't a beginning. Quitting was a permission. The permission to build useless things, to fail where nobody would see, and to trust that something accumulates in the process.

Less than 10% of what I've built has worked. But that 10% couldn't exist without the other 90%. This isn't meant to be inspiring. It's arithmetic.

If you ask me why I quit — my neck hurt. That's all. My body knew first, and I followed my body. Whether it was the right call, I still don't know. But my neck doesn't hurt anymore.

What is your body telling you right now? Are you listening?

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