Open Thread #107

Okay, here we go.

Someone asked a few weeks ago if anyone remembered the second floor internet café at pimatgol. I was taken there by another teacher in early 1997, but I didn’t know what the point of such a business was. When I left Canada in the summer of ’95, a book was passed around at one of my going-away parties, and everyone wrote down their mailing address, saying “Send me a postcard from Asia!” I don’t think the book had a single email address in it.

I picked up a magazine in that café on pimatgol, maybe it was “Seoul Classified”. It had a satire “Top 10 fashions around Seoul” article. Numbers 2 ~ 10 were the basic things the young women were wearing in those days, but #1 showed a picture of a middle-aged woman dressed in mustard-colored clothes, and the “Yakult ajumma” was praised as the diva of the Seoul fashion scene. I had no idea what they were talking about; I might not even have known the word ajumma then.

Visited Cyberia a few times after that (where Buddha’s Belly is now, beside Hamilton), always with a friend who wanted to ‘check their email’. I always just got a coffee and chatted with the staff.

In 2001, I wrote this (the girl is the future Mrs Linkd):

I lost my girlfriend recently. Not lost in the sense of her having terminated our relationship, but lost rather in the sense of my having been replaced in her esteem by a new companion of greater interest. She has bought a new computer, and cannot bear to be separated from it for more time in a day than is required for her to go out and earn her living, and to hunt for such victuals as she needs to sustain life and health, that she might spend more time with her true love; that is, her computer. How it is that I fit into this new arrangement, I do not yet know. I will adjust, of course. After all, what cannot adapt, dies. I’m just not sure whether my sweetheart would notice if I did.

Perhaps I should perform a test. I could pick up a bottle of Dead Boyfriend scent, maybe the Extra-Strength, Post-Advanced Decay variety, and leave it uncapped behind the sofa. Where should I set the pass-line, though? Is it enough if she just looks up and glances about her with a quizzical look, making a few diagnostic sniffs before shrugging and resuming her clacking on the keyboard? Or should I expect her to actually call my name, and even take few exploratory pokes about the apartment when I don’t answer?

But if the neighbors, after several days of stoic olfactory forbearance and hailing our apartment from the street below, have to finally resort to calling in the Auxiliary Fire Patrol to investigate the noxious scent; thereby causing much consternation to my darling angel who shall have to be roused from her lovemaking to deal with the intrusion; then, I fear, I shall have no choice but to admit romantic defeat.

In August of 2003, sitting in an apartment in downtown Montreal a few days before we began business school, Mrs Linkd logged onto the Dell website and bought me my first computer.

Marketing

My first problem was how to let my target customers know that I even existed. The website had cost me KRW 6 mil + VAT. Ouch. JD had always opposed making a website, saying it was useless, but I just couldn’t see handing out business cards with a hotmail address on them, and I had put in all the effort of creating the contents (admittedly, the contents were out-of-date almost immediately. I intended to do updates; never did). I also knew that marketing is a multi-step process, and I wanted potential clients to have something to peruse after an initial contact.

In September I got a spot at one of COEX’s major exhibitions, BIOKOREA 2006, paying about KRW 2.5mil for a 3m x 3m corner booth. My intention wasn’t to wait for business to come to me: with a strong science background I thought I had a good chance to get IR business from any of the 4 or 5 major pharmaceutical companies in Korea, who, I expected, would have English-speaking IR staff at the exhibition. I prepared powerpoint presentations for each company, along with proposals with various options for their websites, brochures, ARs, etc. Then I went to their booths, found the right person, brought them back to my booth and pitched them right there.

It was all useless. Nobody, no matter how high their rank, had any authority to make decisions, especially spending decisions. They all told me I was right, that they know about these problems, that my proposals were excellent, and that they could do nothing about it.

So I hired a spunky young woman to help out with cold-calling. I paid her W100,000 a day for two weeks. The targets were basically all of Korea’s 80 largest companies. I told her what to say to each of them, and I had a tailored follow-up package to send after the call. She made follow-up calls a couple of days later. Again, it went nowhere. She was told that repeatedly there would be no budget for that until next year.

So I moved one step down the outsourcing chain. There’s an oligopoly of only about 10 design companies that make ARs for Korea’s chaebol. I had Miss Im call them directly, asking them to outsource their translation to me. Then I waited. In December I got my first call; one of those companies had a 30-page brochure for Kumho-Asiana, super-urgent, must be done in under a week. I charged them KRW 4.2mil. I recorded KRW 7mil in total revenues for 2006.

Marketing expense assessment:
Website: 6.6 million – never to this day have I gotten a single enquiry through the website.
BioKorea exhibition: 2.5 million – nothing
Miss Im: 1.2 million for two weeks of cold-calling – 2 major design company clients.

Blogging

Sometime in late 2006, I can’t remember when exactly, a friend of Mrs Linkd’s was at our house for cocktails. She’s a techie, and I had recently heard about something called a ‘wiki’, so I asked her what a wiki is. She says it’s a website that can be continuously updated by users. So what’s a blog, I asked her. She says it’s a website that can be continuously updated by users. So what’s the difference between a wiki and a blog, I asked her.

Mrs Linkd then grabbed a baseball bat and smashed me across the skull with it. “Dammit, I’ve told you and told you that there are a hundred million blogs out there, about every subject in the world. All you have to do is TAKE A DAMN LOOK, you neanderthalic Luddite!”

Well, it wasn’t exactly like that, but I could see the rage in her eyes. I had asked her a few times before to explain what a blog was to me, and she said it was pointless – why didn’t I just look at one? I asked her to recommend one, and she mentioned the Marmot’s Hole and Metropolitician. I looked at Metro’s first, and I didn’t really get it. It’s hard to explain, but I was still thinking of the internet as a library, and I was not hip to UCC. Up on the top right of Metro’s site he had placed a few introductory essays, and I read a couple of those (well, most of them; they’re pretty long). This part made sense: a good writer puts a lot of thought into a persuasive essay on a controversial topic, and posts it on the web; much like a newspaper editorial. Making comments about those posts seemed as irrelevant to me as the comments that often end up after articles on newspaper sites – the point is to read the writer’s material, not to have virtual exchanges of trivial statements with people you don’t know.

I later looked very briefly at the Marmot’s Hole, and came away in complete bewilderment. It didn’t click. Around this time Mrs Linkd and I were going out to various chamber of commerce events, or hitting the British Pub on Friday evenings. Y’all might have noticed that I like to discuss business and finance – and I went to these events in the earnest hope of finding people to talk business with. I was almost always disappointed. It honestly amazed me how many businesspeople in Korea, both Korean and foreign, didn’t have a damn clue how their own industry operates. So one evening Mrs Linkd and I are back home after one of these events, getting out of our formals before heading to Phillie’s for a nightcap, and I guess I’m whining too much. She half rips my Luddite head off and says “That’s it! Get your ass onto a blog where you can talk about the things you want to talk about, or else stop complaining that you have no one to talk to.”

And so here I am.

Growth prospects

By the end of the first AR season in late spring of 2007 I had about 25mil in the bank, and was wondering what to do with it. My business model was pretty simple: design companies send me files full of Korean text, I send that to translators, then I rewrite the raw translation. My income was therefore limited by how many pages I myself could churn out in a given period of time. The work was also seasonal, obviously.

I had two options: I could find Korean investors to leverage up my 25mil, get a real office, hire one office girl, one designer and one marketer (minimum starting staff needed). Say 7-10mil per month in salaries, 3 million in rent, 15 million in one-off expenses for computers and office equipment…etc…and if I launched in October and marketed hard through the new year to actively chase bids on the most lucrative AR contracts (top 30 or 40 chaebol), then I’d burn through maybe 50 or 70mil before I knew if I got an AR contract by early January. At that point, if I got one contract, I’d probably close the office and complete the contract using outsourcers. If I got two, I’d keep the business open, and if I got three, I’d be profitable. Moreover, I’d be real competition against the design companies that I’d been working for, a member of the design firm oligopoly. Still, there’d be a limit to how much actual writing/editing I could do myself, and the business would depend very much on me as its main asset. Even as things stood now, with me as a sole proprietor, I had decided against another marketing drive at the rest of the design oligopoly, because I couldn’t take any more work during the busy season.

The second option was to get into some kind of import/export trade. This story is too dull to go into, but basically I put up the money to get another waeg going on a business importing flax seed (an Omega-3 well-bing product). We used my company as the legal entity, and the first profits would go to repay my investment, after which we’d split profits. The advantage here would be that income would be derived from product sales, not personal output, so growth would not be limited by my hours. The business, if it worked, could also be sold as-is, as it wouldn’t depend on any one person’s special skills. And, after my partner became an independent D8, I’d have a perpetual ownership stake in his company. This is the option I chose to go with.

I broke even on that project, and we stopped pretending it was a going concern by the second quarter of 2008. The AR/IR business, at least, was growing and doing fine.

When I said good-bye to Oh Kyung and her family on Sunday, my last words were “Thank you for bringing me to Korea. This country changed my life.”

I don’t suppose I’ve changed Korea any. In fact, a favorite conversational line that I came up with in the past year is “I hope you’re not sticking around here because you’re waiting for Korea to change.” It’s a good line, applicable in many of the standard conversations that long-term expats have with each other here. Feel free to use it.

Naturally, whenever someone joins a larger group, it’s likely that the individual will be affected by the group much more than the group will be affected by the individual. My point in describing my previous unfamiliarity with the web and Web2.0 has been to say that this blog has been the sum total my online life. Well, I guess I did spend a couple of months on facebook when it first appeared, but that wore off pretty quickly. I have rarely visited the other Korea blogs (no offense, guys), and I’ve left fewer than 10 comments in total on the whole rest of the internet.

At some point in the past couple of years, and many of you will know exactly what I’m talking about, I crossed the line from only being HERE when I was physically in front of my computer and had the browser open to rjk.com, to actually having threads running through my head when I was nowhere near a computer. I found myself out on my motorcycle, feeling mad at someone who dissed me, or feeling smug about some clever line. Sometimes, even out for dinner with my wife and daughter, Mrs Linkd was talking to me and I realized that maybe I should have explained some business or financial matter better in a Marmot’s Hole comment. et cetera. You know what I mean. And I DO NOT intend for this to sound insidious. I in fact appreciate this place very much, and appreciated being part of this community, especially after I moved away from HBC to Guui-dong (Mrs Linkd was pregnant, and we had to cut down her commute to work), thereby greatly reducing my access to my offline friends.

And with that, we come to the good-byes.

I’m afraid the rest will be somewhat more restrained.

gbnhj and granfalloon – you guys are true gentlemen and exemplary citizens. I think I was once a white hat here, too, but over time I leaned willingly to the dark side. All the best.

Eujin and wangkon – thanks for getting it. I found a couple people who were ready to talk numbers and get my geek on with me. I needed that.

hardyandtiny and the Goat – love what you guys do and how you do it.

globalvillage, someguy, aaronm, cmm – all swell people with good heads on their shoulders, interesting things to say, nice manners, and you obligingly don’t make me feel old.

sperwer – I want to be a little more like you some day. Or rather, on some days. Or maybe the first one. Whatever.

Yuna – you’re a star.

Mizar, KrZ – Oh hell, I don’t know.

abcdefg, sonagi, bum, netizen, colontos – y’all take care of each other now. We need all the love we can get.

Carr – we should have had lunch once. I’m sorry I didn’t make that happen – maybe I wanted to preserve that magical something, something that might not have survived an offline encounter. Anyway, you’re alright (PS – I hope you’re not waiting around for Korea to change).

All the posters, thanks for putting out. Robert, thanks for having me in your house. All of you, the pleasure has been mine.

OK, wjk, how about this?

You and I have both made appeals to the administrators to change the published contents of Open Threads 105 (and now 107, where you’ve put my name up again). Since you’re submitting arguments in favor of your position, I assume you think this is something that can be settled in a debate-like manner. Here’s my proposal:

Here on this thread, we each get one post to state our case. There is no restriction on the content of the post, except that you agree not to use my name anymore. These posts must be up by 11am Tuesday, Korea time (7 pm Monday in California).

Then we each get a rebuttal post, to be up by 6pm Tuesday, Korea time (2 am in California).

In between, anyone else is of course free to comment, but you and I cannot make any additional comments, whether on this thread or anywhere else. Also, after the rebuttal comments go up, you and I cannot make any more comments. Our posts can address comments made by other commenters.

Your posts must be in English only. If you want to use Korean, that’s OK, but then we do this procedure with only one post each and no rebuttal, since I don’t have the time to rebut Korean (I’m on a 5pm flight Wednesday). Please remember that if your post has more than 2 links in it, it will probably be spam-trapped, so if you want to use several links, then it might be better to split your post into sections – that’s fine, as long as it all goes up basically at once.

Marmot makes the decision and has the final say. I now declare that I have had no contact with Robert about this matter other than the two public entreaties placed on this thread and on 105, and I agree not to make any effort to contact him outside of this thread. You agree to the same. (I’m assuming Robert will agree to be arbitrator).

If Marmot decides in my favor, then both mentions of my name on this blog get deleted, and you never put it up here or anywhere else on the internet again. If Robert decides in your favor, then the two comments remain, and you accept that as sufficient victory, still agreeing not to post my name any more. This may seem too strongly binding on you, but remember that right now you enjoy the stronger position, as the status quo is in your favor and the admins, by doing nothing, would grant you a default victory.

Are you in? If so, leave a post saying you accept. If you can’t work within the deadlines I’ve proposed, then please suggest new ones.

Somewhat valid indeed. In 2006 I would have been happy for any customer at all.

A bit sloppier an exit than I had envisioned when I got started on this thread on Saturday morning, but that’s the internet for you. I thought that The Marmot’s Hole is now unLinkd was a pretty clever exeunt line.

Instead, I make a break with these surprising final words: Thanks, wjk.