P6:[{"_10":11,"_12":13,"_1439":1440,"_1441":101},"success",true,"result",[14,85,168,193,218,242,266,348,373,456,492,517,541,565,644,668,748,775,799,823,847,871,895,919,946,973,997,1021,1045,1069,1096,1120,1147,1189,1217,1365],{"_15":16,"_17":18,"_19":20,"_21":22,"_23":24,"_25":26,"_27":28,"_29":30,"_46":47,"_48":49,"_50":51,"_75":76,"_77":78,"_42":84,"_44":45},"id",39,"title","What If You Could Cut Outsourced Development 90× Faster and 15× Cheaper?","subTitle","Notes from running a software agency","readingTime","4","slug","one-shot-software-factory","isFavourite",false,"description","

I decided to start a business in Bangladesh back when news of soaring developer salaries was everywhere. My hypothesis was this: Korea’s population decline will only deepen, and once the 2023 fertility rate of 0.6 works its way into the hiring market about 20 years out, companies will find it far harder to hire developers. Build a company with a large dev team ahead of that wave, I thought, and it becomes a very attractive asset.

Why Bangladesh?

Studying how IT-outsourcing industries have evolved, I noticed two interesting patterns. First: when IT outsourcing matures in a country, local developer pay rises and the work migrates to a cheaper one. Second: IT outsourcing tends to take off a few years after a textile industry does — China, India(?), Vietnam. Textiles and IT outsourcing are both labor-intensive, and both thrive where there’s a large, young population and high unemployment. Watching the work move from China and India to Vietnam, I figured Vietnam too would eventually get expensive — so the real game was guessing which country comes next. I bet on Bangladesh: 1) large population, 2) high unemployment, 3) young demographics, and 4) the world’s #2 textile industry. My model was Youngone Corporation, which moved into Bangladesh back in 1990.

A company that grew fast — and its side effects

The company grew fast. But there were side effects. Running an agency firsthand, I came to understand its limits: 1) quality drops as the company scales, 2) one person’s unpredictable behavior becomes an enormous risk at scale, and 3) hidden costs rise. With no systems yet in place, past a certain threshold, situations we couldn’t predict kept appearing. While I was flailing for months, I met Claude Code. A chill ran down my spine — our industry might disappear — and at the same moment I saw the opportunity. I decided to shut down the traditional software agency. (The shell may still look like a traditional agency, but the inside has been completely rebuilt.)

If we’re going to be replaced, let’s be the ones who replace

The ultimate goal of the AI-native software agency I’m building is a one-shot software factory. Say “build me Uber, Karrot, Soomgo” and out should come Uber, Karrot, and Soomgo in a single shot. Because it’s a factory, quality has to be uniform and there can be zero bugs. But LLMs are probabilistic, which makes them hard to run like a factory. Ask Lovable — one of the best in this space — to “build a gym PT-booking app,” and it still comes back with plenty of bugs. Since January, I’ve spent most of my time building the one-shot software-factory pipeline.

\"A — Lovable’s output for “build a gym PT-booking app.”

V1 – V147 (13,600 total hours of experiments)

Early on it was a mess. The design was ugly, the LLM would arbitrarily delete requested features, and the pipeline crashed constantly. Each run I’d add a new hypothesis and test it, improving bit by bit. A single run took 12 hours in the early days — and nothing was more deflating than finding the pipeline stalled on a trivial error. But I kept at it stubbornly. The most effective strategies were Scaffolding and Hard/Soft Gates. By late May, past v130, it started to get usable — for the first time it scored above 80% in final testing. We used it on a real contracted project and finished in about two weeks what used to take three months. (And even that was mostly comms and account setup; the actual code/design pipeline ran for about two days.) But past 80%, progress slowed. More experiments meant burning a lot of tokens, so the whole company applied to the Xiaomi MiMo program and pooled every token we could. Past V140 we began running two pipelines in parallel — feeding two PRDs through the same pipeline, or the same PRD through different models.

In the AI era, a developer feels less like an engineer and more like a scientist — constantly forming hypotheses, controlling variables, running experiments, and pulling lessons from the results.

If even a small operator like us has come this far, surely somewhere in the world a company already owns and runs a one-shot software factory. If every piece of software could be made in a day or two, like a t-shirt, what happens to this industry?

Potential — a global-expansion dev partner for founders going West.

","media",{"_15":31,"_32":33,"_17":34,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":43,"_44":45},742,"url","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/ecee058e-3b5c-4c95-867a-d5ced5eb0104-software-factory-cover.png","software-factory-cover-14506","caption","atlText","content","mediaLink","thumbnailUrl","firstFrameImageUrl","tsFirstSegmentUrls","lastChangedDateTime","2026-06-17T09:35:18.909Z","createdBy",44,"categories",[],"relatedBlogs",[],"author",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":58,"_63":64},1,"name","Lukas","Dad of 2 Kids\n","designation","Founder",{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},281,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/db95f4e8-7c9e-4d64-849d-487de47b85aa-Lukas.png","Lukas-38389","2025-07-30T09:02:00.385Z","otherLink",[65,69,72],{"_66":67,"_32":68},"label","facebook","https://www.facebook.com/shin.dongsub.7",{"_66":70,"_32":71},"linkedIn","https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-shin-98689a285/",{"_66":73,"_32":74},"instagram","https://www.instagram.com/potentialai_official/","sections",[],"metaSection",{"_15":79,"_17":80,"_27":81,"_82":83,"_42":84,"_44":45},49,"Cutting Outsourced Dev 90× Faster, 15× Cheaper — Building a One-Shot Software Factory | Potential","From a Bangladesh agency to Claude Code: rebuilding into an AI-native software factory. V1–V147, 13,600 hours of experiments, and a 3-month project shipped in about two days.","keywords","AI-native software agency, one-shot software factory, Claude Code, outsourced development, agentic development pipeline, software factory, Potential","2026-06-17T09:36:54.339Z",{"_15":86,"_17":87,"_19":88,"_21":89,"_23":90,"_25":11,"_27":91,"_29":92,"_46":98,"_48":99,"_50":154,"_75":160,"_77":161,"_42":167,"_44":52},8,"We Paused Every Project for Two Months to Bet the Agency on AI Native Software Agency, Part 1","What ₩100M and a company-wide reset taught us about AI transformation — part 1","6 min","agency-all-in-claude-code","

We Paused Every Project for Two Months to Bet the Agency on Agentic AI

In January 2026 we stopped taking on client work. Not slowed down — stopped. For two months, every person at Potential drew their salary to do one thing: learn to build with agentic AI. We walked away from two months of revenue and spent the better part of ₩100 million (~$70K) to do it.

This is part one of what that cost us, and what it taught us about AI transformation inside a real agency — not the LinkedIn-thread version, the actual one.

First, the context: a good year that made us a little arrogant

2025 was the best year we'd had. The pipeline never went dry, and we shipped:

Four \"best project\" features on Behance (Adobe's global design community)
Client work won from companies in Hong Kong, London, Dubai, Tokyo, and the US

We poured every won we earned back into the team. We grew fast — 20, 30, 40, 50 people — to the point where I could no longer tell you exactly what each person did day to day. I went from doing the work to managing managers, a job I'd never done before.

And I made every classic mistake of a 0-to-1 builder-founder who suddenly has to lead:

\"Why delegate a one-hour task when I can do it in ten minutes myself?\"
Spending my hours on low-leverage work
Confusing the work I liked with the work I needed to do
Still resenting money spent to buy back time (yes, even cab fare)

Running a Korea-plus-Bangladesh delivery team selling into Korea and abroad — probably the only agency in Korea structured that way — gave us higher operating margins than typical SI shops. Stable, profitable, growing. Which is exactly when you stop reading, stop asking better operators for advice, and get quietly overconfident. That was me from late 2025 into early 2026.

$\"\"$

Then January 2026: I met Claude Code

The day I installed Claude Code on my laptop, I used it around the clock. I was genuinely afraid of what it would do to my industry — and genuinely thrilled by what it could do for us. We had a not-yet-100-day-old second daughter at the time, and I took the night feeds. Every three to four hours I was up anyway, so I'd check on what Claude Code had done, ship a little more, and go back to the bottle. Win for my wife's scorecard, win for my agentic-AI reps.

Then, at our first all-hands, I announced it:

\n
Potential is stopping all projects in January and February. That means we are giving up two months of revenue. For two months you will be paid to learn a new craft — and you have to learn it. We are putting the entire team into agentic AI development methodology.
\n

My reasoning to the team was blunt:

A large share of software developers are going to disappear. And developers in emerging markets, with less access to frontier AI, are the most exposed.
Don't learn this for the company. Learn it for yourself and your family. The only way not to be replaced by this technology is to use it better than the developer next to you.
I'll go first. I'll learn it and share everything. Let's do this together.

That's how \"We go all-in on Claude Code\" started.

What going all-in actually looked like

We ran sessions every other day on the fundamentals. I built demo projects live, in front of the team, to show — not tell — what the next few years would look like. The energy was real; it felt like we were all facing the same direction.

The first surprise: I expected developers to take to it fastest. Instead our PM, Jayden, climbed quickest — probably the thrill of finally holding the steering wheel after years of waiting on developer confirmations and Slack replies.

$\"\"$

The second surprise was harder. Going from directing managers to leading the charge myself, I could suddenly see every issue up close. My dev team could follow a known-answer path well enough — but when nobody had the answer yet, when the job was to design a workflow and share it across teams, they looked like amateurs. Even with a CTO in place, progress stalled. So I started designing every workflow myself. (I believe one day in 2026 is worth a month in 2036.) January was sleepless and relentless. Between Claude Code Max accounts, the projects we walked away from, and two months of payroll, we spent a lot — but it was money that had to be spent.

The result that stopped me cold

At the end of January I sat down one-on-one with everyone to gauge how well they'd absorbed it. These were people younger than me, without kids, in exactly the developer roles most exposed to AI — I assumed they'd be flying.

They couldn't grasp the most basic concepts of working with Claude Code. And it wasn't one or two people. The same gap showed up across the team, again and again.

So I ruled out the easy explanations:

Not enough training? No — sessions every other day, with workflows pre-designed and handed to them.
Not enough time? No — all client work was paused; there was literally nothing to do but practice.
Not enough motivation? No — the news told them daily that AI was coming for developer jobs.

None of it explained the gap. So I made a drastic call: everyone, from me to the most junior hire, would make their AI usage fully transparent — prompts, token counts, all of it. That day we wrote the scripts and built a company-wide dashboard (\"CC Analytics\") and shared everything.

That's where part one ends — and where the real lesson begins. Continued in part two.

Potential (포텐셜) — the global-expansion development agency. The Korean agency that teams in Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Tokyo call when they're going to market. → potentialai.com

Read next: [정말 잘하는 글로벌 CEO들] · [10개월만의 방글라데시 두번째 출장] (internal-link to the cluster posts on publish)

",{"_15":93,"_32":94,"_17":95,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":96,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":97,"_44":52},560,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/92a720de-7f21-46be-b832-1e81b2264d5b-agency-all-in-claude-code-naver.png","agency-all-in-claude-code-naver-85648","Original Naver image - agency-all-in-claude-code","2026-06-04T01:31:44.172Z",[],[100,114,128,141],{"_15":101,"_17":102,"_19":103,"_21":104,"_23":105,"_25":11,"_27":106,"_42":107,"_44":45,"_29":108},36,"I Flew to LA to Be an FDE: 72 Hours Inside a US Client","Self-funded, fevered, embedded in a US client for 72 hours — AX Part 3","9 min","fde-seoul-to-california","

Series — Burning ₩100M on AX (table of contents)

Why We Started a Dev Agency in Bangladesh
An English-Phobic Founder's First Global Hire
Looking Back on Year One
My First Layoff, and a New Team
18 Hours in Dhaka
Earning Our First Dollars in America
Why Am I So Bad at This?
The Struggle to Earn More Dollars
From 1 to 20, From Zero to US Revenue
A ₩30M Team Retreat in Bangladesh
What the Best Global Founders Do
Our First Hell Gate
Looking for Potential Abroad
Networking in Vietnam From Zero
The Painful AX Lessons That Cost ₩100M (Part 1)
Firing Half the Team (Part 2)
Running FDE Myself (this post)

Continued from Part 2: Firing Half the Team.

So I got on the plane to LA. My body was wrecked the whole flight — the fever kept spiking, and my bold plan to read the PRD in the air fell apart. Whenever I was lucid I read what I could, and resolved to finish the rest at the hotel.

(A quick aside.) Why fly from Seoul to California on my own dime to sit inside a client's office? To test one hypothesis. There's a development model getting hot in the US right now (honestly, hot for a few months already) called FDE — a Forward Deployed Engineer. Loosely it rhymes with a \"dispatched developer,\" but the role is different. Instead of passively taking tickets, an FDE embeds inside the client as an insider, watches closely, then proposes a fix for the inefficiencies they spot — and builds the demo right there, on the spot. It needs not just engineering but observation, empathy, and business sense. (Which is why it's expensive.)

Back to the story: the California weather when I stepped out of LAX was unreal. The client picked me up and we had a great dinner. In Korea I'd been a wreck from the fever and cold — but watching that sunset, the exhaustion melted away.

Back at the hotel, every kind of fatigue hit at once. Jet lag, a fever that wouldn't break, a throat shredded by coughing — my worst condition, and the work was still ahead. This trip only happened thanks to a lot of people (my wife, my mother-in-law, the sitter, the client), so I had to deliver peak performance across the remaining 72 hours. The pressure kept me up, and in between I filmed a few clips. (Something told me they'd be a memory someday.)

Day 1 (D-48 hours)

The big day. Sleeping in a real bed helped; I woke clear-headed. I'll call the client \"Matthew\" (alias). Matthew picked me up at the hotel and I met the teammates I'd only known online. My first impression of a US company? Honestly, people working anywhere look about the same. For the first few hours I just walked the floor and watched how the team worked, asking and listening:

How do you work? Why that way? Where do you spend the most time but feel least productive? Who owns this?

I listened, took notes, asked again — then re-explained their workflow back in my own words. (Did I get this right?) The morning flew by. I had the information; now it was my turn to show a result.

$\"\"$

Afternoon. There was a Zoom scheduled with a SaaS vendor the client was considering adopting. I kept firing questions:

Why do you want to use them? Mind if I join this meeting? I think I might be able to help.

Sitting in on that vendor call, I understood what the client was struggling with and why they were considering it. I watched the product closely the whole meeting, and the moment it ended I told Matthew:

Lukas: \"From what I can see, you really need this. Give me 3 hours? I'll build it and wire it into your ERP.\"
Matthew: \"Lukas, is that even possible? Would be great if so.\"
Lukas: \"Yeah — just give me 3 hours.\"

I built it right there next to Matthew. After months of building, breaking, and sharpening my harness, I was confident. In 3 hours I built it on the spot and showed him — and Matthew was floored. That was the moment FDE proved itself. That alone made the whole trip worth it, and I understood far better the leverage FDE has over the traditional software-outsourcing model.

There were many more stories, but they're confidential, so I'll stop there for now.

Day 2 (D-24 hours)

My 48 hours were almost up. Day 2 looked similar: roaming the floor, finding inefficiencies, fixing them on the spot. No PRD, no outdated design/requirements meetings. Problem → Build, Problem → Build, over and over. It made me wonder: would this FDE experience work in the Korean market too? For small startups and SMBs, probably — but beyond that, I'm not sure. And above all, developers with real problem-solving instinct are genuinely rare in this world.

As I wrapped up, I got two wonderful gifts.

$\"\"$

Trader Joe's bags

While working, I'd casually mentioned to the client that Trader Joe's bags are a craze in Korea. Somehow Matthew, J (alias), and Matthew's wife took that to heart and did an early-morning open run to buy a whole assortment for me. (I definitely took a photo — no idea where it went.)

The potential of FDE

This trip wasn't requested by the client — I prepared it voluntarily, just to test FDE. I covered the flights and costs and offered to come first. Maybe I did it all to ask one question. On our last drive home, I asked Matthew two things:

Lukas: \"Matthew, how's our Bangladesh team? Don't spare my feelings — be honest.\"
Matthew: \"In Korea I couldn't say, but in the US there are tons of agencies like yours — India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, they all reach out. The reason we work with you is you, Lukas — not your team.\"

Lukas: \"Then how was working with you these past few days? This is what FDE is — talking, meeting, and building together inside your office, like we just did.\"
Matthew: \"Honestly? This is incredible. A lot of companies would want it. But… wouldn't your wife hate it? ㅎㅎ\"

Heading home

Son, daughter — when you grow up and read this blog someday: I was doing my best to earn your formula money. Ha.

Potential — the global-expansion development agency. The Korean agency that teams in Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Tokyo call when they're going to market. → potentialai.com

","2026-06-15T07:27:24.180Z",{"_15":109,"_32":110,"_17":111,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":112,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":113,"_44":52},738,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/f38c39c2-397d-4ad8-8307-38bda664e206-fde-img0.png","fde-img0-85836","FDE img0","2026-06-10T05:33:48.159Z",{"_15":115,"_17":116,"_19":117,"_21":118,"_23":119,"_25":26,"_27":120,"_42":121,"_44":52,"_29":122},35,"Betting the Agency on Agentic AI, Part 2: Firing Half the Team, and a 39°C Flight to a Client","What CC-analytics revealed, the two lessons that cost half the team, and an unpaid 72-hour FDE trip","8 min","agency-all-in-claude-code-part-2","

Continued from Part 1: We Paused Every Project for Two Months to Bet the Agency on Agentic AI.

\n\n

The shock of actually looking at the team's Claude Code usage

In January I finally looked at everyone's CC-analytics — and couldn't hide my shock. It also explained why individual engineers' grasp of Claude Code was so shallow. The average teammate was running fewer than 20 Claude Code prompts a day. Over a ~9-hour workday, that's 2-3 prompts an hour. I genuinely couldn't understand it. On our team, someone who actually catches the bug — who really gets the tool's potential — usually runs 150 to 300 prompts a day. Yet about 90% of the team sat under 20.

$\"\"$

(There's a lot to say about which metrics matter when you're building an AI-native software team, but that's its own post. My biased answer: prompt count, the share of prompts that are questions, and how often the phrase \"root cause\" shows up.)

\n\n

I tried everything to push usage up

To lift that sub-20 daily usage, I tried just about everything:

Bonuses for the top of the CC-analytics leaderboard
Company-wide per-team .claude setups to force usage
Constant shout-outs for cases where manual work was turned into an automated skill
Weekly live runs of real projects to demo how to use it well

$\"\"$

I tried a lot, and the team barely moved. The 1:1s made no sense to me — every single one went, \"I really do think AI will change this industry. And Lukas, your sessions help a lot. I'll work hard at it.\" I spent two genuinely painful months in that unbelievable gap. I'd done everything I could: as the founder I used it more than anyone, I personally rebuilt my own manual work into skills and workflows, and I gave the team plenty of time and material.

\n\n

Two lessons from two painful months

A handful of teammates believed in the direction and followed like cavalry — but only about 10%. Two lessons from all of it have stayed with me:

You cannot teach motivation.
Don't trust words — trust actions.

Everyone talked as if they were all-in on agentic development, but only a few actually acted on it. (Those few are still the best users six months later.) For a long time I wavered between \"if I can't change their behavior, we get left behind and die\" and \"their behavior isn't changing.\" I have an American friend, George, I turn to in hard moments, and he was blunt: \"Cut them.\" His advice — from someone with 20+ more years of experience than me — boiled down to: \"There are things in people you can change and things you can't, and this is one you can't.\" So I let go of 50% of the team.

\n\n

A DM from a US client — and an \"FDE\" pitch

Then one day a DM came in from a US client: \"Lukas, how are you? I know you've got your hands full with your second baby, but I'd love for you to take a look at our project. We've got this issue in our operations. Look at it when you get a chance.\"

Briefly: this is a company we've worked with for over two years, running a service that makes serious revenue — so any issue hits hard, and it's a high-difficulty project. Our team got it this far, but I didn't think we'd be working the traditional way ten years from now. So I wrote back:

\"Hey XXX — doing well? Have you heard of Claude Code? I've been going deep on it, and I have a proposal. What if I fly to your office, watch exactly how you work, and code right there beside you to fix or build what you need? Palantir and Silicon Valley companies call it an FDE — Forward Deployed Engineer — and they actually do it. There are obstacles, ha — I have to convince my wife and find a babysitter to cover the trip. I'll let you know if I make progress.\" (XXX is around my age with two kids, so we have a lot in common.)

$\"\"$

\n\n

Leaving a 100-day-old baby to get on a plane

As expected, my wife was furious — how could I travel and leave a 100-day-old baby? Honestly, that may have been the hardest part of the whole trip. I called my mother-in-law to cover one day, then my youngest brother for two more. Only then did my wife give the OK. If Potential ever succeeds, a huge share of the credit goes to my mother-in-law.

\n\n

A 39°C fever and a thick stack of PRD

To make matters worse, the night before departure my fever spiked to 39°C. My wife told me not to go, but I bought the most expensive travel insurance I could and headed to Incheon airport. I billed the client nothing — not the flight, not the trip; it was entirely my own call. I had about 72 hours. It was the moment to put the Claude Code workflow I'd been sharpening in front of the market.

There were still plenty of obstacles. I mostly do sales and management now; I haven't shipped hands-on in a long time, so I didn't know this client's project well. Before leaving I built a PRD and printed it — and it was this thick. (A PRD is a document that describes a software project in as much detail as possible.)

I filmed a little documentary-style clip at the LA hotel thinking it'd be a nice memory someday — watching it now, it's pretty funny.

Only by drilling that stack of PRD on the flight, at 39°C, could I make real use of the precious 72 hours. One laptop, one stack of PRD, three sets of clothes — and off to Incheon. I've traveled all over: Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Europe, Mexico — but never the US. As a kid from Ansan who always dreamed the American dream and swore he'd only go to the States \"for business,\" this was that dream coming true — self-funded business, sure, but a beautiful moment.

\n\n

To be continued. (I really did keep doing something, ha.)

Potential — the global-expansion development agency. The Korean agency that teams in Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Tokyo call when they're going to market. → potentialai.com

","2026-06-04T09:16:28.860Z",{"_15":123,"_32":124,"_17":125,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":126,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":127,"_44":52},734,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/b0844c09-a247-4fca-89ac-670e15f1e1ee-ax2-img1.png","ax2-img1-79368","AX part2 img1","2026-06-04T09:14:11.116Z",{"_15":129,"_17":130,"_19":131,"_21":132,"_23":133,"_25":26,"_27":134,"_42":135,"_44":52,"_29":136},38,"The 3 Stages of Becoming AI-Native: Grunt, Architect, and the One Who Designs Architects","What we learned watching teammates who'd never touched Claude Code grow into AI-native builders","5 min","ai-native-growth-stages","

Nobody becomes AI-native overnight. Watching teammates who had never opened Claude Code grow into AI-native builders, we noticed something: regardless of role — backend, frontend, PM, designer — they all climb the same three steps. Here's the roadmap we keep seeing, told through one metaphor: building a house, and you're the person in charge of windows.

The \"window\" is just a stand-in. Swap it for a form, a Figma component, or a backend model and the story holds.

Stage 1 — The Grunt: doing the same work, just faster

At this stage, the teammate fixes problems one at a time as they appear. In house terms, the day looks like this:

Spot a crack in the living-room window, fix that window
The living-room window is too small — revisit the design
The bathroom only needs a small vent window, but the plan has a full-height pane — correct it
The entry needs a full pane but has a small window — swap it
Add a sliding mechanism to the bedroom window
Notice the windows ignore heating, and rework them again

It's running room to room, patching whatever's visible with AI. Speed genuinely improves — but if your old pace was 100, this is maybe 150. Better, yet the way you work hasn't changed.

Still, the grunt stage matters, because the tedious repetition is the prerequisite for what comes next. Use AI this way long enough and, if you're going to become AI-native, you eventually ask:

\n
\"I feel like I'm using this wrong — isn't there a better way?\"
\n

That question is the fork in the road.

Stage 2 — The Architect: stop doing the work, design how the work gets done

Before running room to room, the architect writes a file first — call it window.md. It spells out what a window is, what it's for, and the conditions for a good window:

A bathroom window is for ventilation, so it should be angled or small enough that no one can see in.
A living-room window: bigger is better for openness — but account for winter heating.
When you design a living-room window, design the opposite window too, for cross-ventilation.
…and so on, window types A, B, C.

Then they spin up agents against that spec: a window-building agent, an install agent, a repair agent, a maintenance agent — each consulting window.md to do its job. This person no longer installs or repairs windows. They edit window.md and the window agents.

Here's the crux: all those bruises from the grunt stage taught them exactly what AI is good and bad at — so they can now re-architect their recurring work as AI workflows. And note this: you cannot jump straight to the architect stage. Without having built and broken windows with AI countless times, you simply can't tell what's possible and what isn't.

\n
If you want an AI-native organization, the real lever is how many architect-stage people you grow inside the team.
\n

Stage 3 — The Self-Improving Architect: designing the architect itself

From here it gets rare, and frankly radical. I went back and forth on whether to include it, but here's one more idea. In a line, this stage is: you design the architect.

This person no longer hand-writes window.md or window_fix_agent.md. Instead they design a system that improves those things on its own — for now, call it the Self-Improving window agent.

Here's what it does. Given a task — \"we need to build this house\" — it handles the design, building, installation, and maintenance of every window itself, in place of a human. But the important part: after every job, it's scored — by a human or by another AI. Each new house's windows earn a score, and each time it forms a new hypothesis to push that score higher:

\n
\"The windows on this house got this feedback. To raise the score, what if I add a dedicated maintenance agent?\"
\n

Run that loop across hundreds or thousands of houses and the agent gets steadily smarter. The person at this stage doesn't build window.md or window agents. They design the system that produces them.

Why is this so hard inside a normal company? Leadership struggles to even grasp the concept, and it rewrites how the company fundamentally operates — which is nearly impossible for an individual contributor to drive top-down. Outside a small team of high-leverage people, it's vanishingly rare.

The takeaway — you can't skip a stage

The path to AI-native comes down to this:

Grunt — do existing work faster with AI (the unavoidable rite of passage)
Architect — re-architect how you work as *.md specs + agents
Self-Improving Architect — design the system that produces the architects

The most important point: you can't skip a stage. The trial-and-error of grunt work becomes the intuition for architecture; the experience of architecture becomes the instinct for designing architects. So if you want to build an AI-native organization, the first move isn't adopting a tool — it's giving your people the time to climb these steps.

Potential (포텐셜) is the expansion partner for Korean and Asian founders going West — we design and build products the AI-native way. If you're figuring out how to grow an AI-native team, book a consultation.

","2026-06-15T06:51:58.339Z",{"_15":137,"_32":138,"_17":139,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":140,"_44":52},741,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/348cc775-6023-47f4-906f-8d55837ab622-thumbnail.png","thumbnail-41622","2026-06-15T06:51:33.497Z",{"_15":142,"_17":143,"_19":144,"_21":145,"_23":146,"_25":26,"_27":147,"_42":148,"_44":45,"_29":149},37,"What we learned after giving every employee a Claude Code account and forcing them to use it for 6 months","~40 people, 6 months","3","claude-code-6-months-40-people","

Our in-house CC Analytics — how we track each teammate's Claude Code usage.

- The position most enthusiastic about this tool was PM

1) Seems to stem from a kind of liberation — no longer having to depend on developers (ranging freely across frontend, backend, design, devops — like Jayden Jeong)

2) Conversely, response from developers was relatively low — reminiscent of the Luddite movement (though when a team member uses it well, their impact is the most explosive)

- As AI natives, the KPI most closely tied to growth was the number of prompts entered per day.

1) Similar to how, in weight training, the \"go heavy\" camp beats the \"lift pink dumbbells and focus on the mind-muscle stimulus\" camp. In the early stage, don't worry about how well you use it — volume is what matters.

2) Other KPIs with big impact: the proportion of prompts that were questions; frequency of using words/phrases like \"root cause,\" \"explain me easy,\" \"why\"; and session ratio (prompts per session — how deep you dig in).

- The gap between the top 5% and bottom 95% is really large, and this gap tends to grow like compound interest over time.

- Traits once undervalued — knowing things broadly but shallowly, multitasking, ADHD, being a mania for new tools — are now standing out in the AI era.

","2026-06-15T07:27:24.063Z",{"_15":150,"_32":151,"_17":152,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":153,"_44":45},740,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/86b0f7bb-5caf-4ac0-8ad9-8308b526b0dc-claude-6mo-cover.png","claude-6mo-cover-25980","2026-06-11T05:43:04.483Z",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":155,"_63":156},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[157,158,159],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":162,"_17":163,"_27":164,"_82":165,"_42":166,"_44":52},18,"Betting an Agency on Agentic AI: What We Learned | Potential","A Korean global-expansion agency paused all client work for two months and put the whole team on Claude Code. Lessons on AI transformation — part 1.","agentic AI development agency, AI transformation agency, Claude Code agency, Potential, Korean software agency","2026-06-04T06:31:21.141Z","2026-06-15T07:27:24.382Z",{"_15":101,"_17":102,"_19":103,"_21":104,"_23":105,"_25":11,"_27":106,"_29":169,"_46":170,"_48":171,"_50":180,"_75":186,"_77":187,"_42":107,"_44":45},{"_15":109,"_32":110,"_17":111,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":112,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":113,"_44":52},[],[172,174,176,178],{"_15":142,"_17":143,"_19":144,"_21":145,"_23":146,"_25":26,"_27":147,"_42":148,"_44":45,"_29":173},{"_15":150,"_32":151,"_17":152,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":153,"_44":45},{"_15":129,"_17":130,"_19":131,"_21":132,"_23":133,"_25":26,"_27":134,"_42":135,"_44":52,"_29":175},{"_15":137,"_32":138,"_17":139,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":140,"_44":52},{"_15":115,"_17":116,"_19":117,"_21":118,"_23":119,"_25":26,"_27":120,"_42":121,"_44":52,"_29":177},{"_15":123,"_32":124,"_17":125,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":126,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":127,"_44":52},{"_15":86,"_17":87,"_19":88,"_21":89,"_23":90,"_25":11,"_27":91,"_42":167,"_44":52,"_29":179},{"_15":93,"_32":94,"_17":95,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":96,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":97,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":181,"_63":182},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[183,184,185],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":188,"_17":189,"_27":190,"_82":191,"_42":192,"_44":45},46,"Running FDE Myself: 72 Hours Inside a US Client | Potential","A Korean agency founder flew to LA on his own dime to test the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model — observing a US client and building fixes on the spot. AX Part 3.","FDE, forward deployed engineer, 에이전틱 AI, Claude Code, 개발 에이전시, AX 시행착오, Potential, 글로벌 진출","2026-06-10T05:52:22.240Z",{"_15":142,"_17":143,"_19":144,"_21":145,"_23":146,"_25":26,"_27":147,"_29":194,"_46":195,"_48":196,"_50":205,"_75":211,"_77":212,"_42":148,"_44":45},{"_15":150,"_32":151,"_17":152,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":153,"_44":45},[],[197,199,201,203],{"_15":129,"_17":130,"_19":131,"_21":132,"_23":133,"_25":26,"_27":134,"_42":135,"_44":52,"_29":198},{"_15":137,"_32":138,"_17":139,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":140,"_44":52},{"_15":101,"_17":102,"_19":103,"_21":104,"_23":105,"_25":11,"_27":106,"_42":107,"_44":45,"_29":200},{"_15":109,"_32":110,"_17":111,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":112,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":113,"_44":52},{"_15":115,"_17":116,"_19":117,"_21":118,"_23":119,"_25":26,"_27":120,"_42":121,"_44":52,"_29":202},{"_15":123,"_32":124,"_17":125,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":126,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":127,"_44":52},{"_15":86,"_17":87,"_19":88,"_21":89,"_23":90,"_25":11,"_27":91,"_42":167,"_44":52,"_29":204},{"_15":93,"_32":94,"_17":95,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":96,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":97,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":206,"_63":207},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[208,209,210],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":213,"_17":214,"_27":215,"_82":216,"_42":217,"_44":45},47,"What 6 Months of Claude Code Across 40 People Taught Us | Potential","We gave ~40 employees a Claude Code account and required it for six months. The KPI that predicted growth (daily prompt volume), why PMs out-adopted developers, and the compounding top-5% gap.","Claude Code, AI native team, developer productivity, AI adoption, prompt volume KPI, agentic development, Potential","2026-06-11T05:44:14.498Z",{"_15":129,"_17":130,"_19":131,"_21":132,"_23":133,"_25":26,"_27":134,"_29":219,"_46":220,"_48":221,"_50":230,"_75":236,"_77":237,"_42":135,"_44":52},{"_15":137,"_32":138,"_17":139,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":140,"_44":52},[],[222,224,226,228],{"_15":142,"_17":143,"_19":144,"_21":145,"_23":146,"_25":26,"_27":147,"_42":148,"_44":45,"_29":223},{"_15":150,"_32":151,"_17":152,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":153,"_44":45},{"_15":101,"_17":102,"_19":103,"_21":104,"_23":105,"_25":11,"_27":106,"_42":107,"_44":45,"_29":225},{"_15":109,"_32":110,"_17":111,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":112,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":113,"_44":52},{"_15":115,"_17":116,"_19":117,"_21":118,"_23":119,"_25":26,"_27":120,"_42":121,"_44":52,"_29":227},{"_15":123,"_32":124,"_17":125,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":126,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":127,"_44":52},{"_15":86,"_17":87,"_19":88,"_21":89,"_23":90,"_25":11,"_27":91,"_42":167,"_44":52,"_29":229},{"_15":93,"_32":94,"_17":95,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":96,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":97,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":231,"_63":232},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[233,234,235],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":238,"_17":239,"_27":240,"_82":241,"_42":135,"_44":52},48,"The 3 Stages of Becoming AI-Native | Potential (포텐셜)","Engineers who've never used Claude Code grow into AI-native builders along the same path: grunt work, architect, then designing self-improving agents. A role-agnostic roadmap.","AI-native, AI-native engineer, AI-native team, Claude Code, AI agents, AI workflow, becoming AI-native, self-improving agents",{"_15":115,"_17":116,"_19":117,"_21":118,"_23":119,"_25":26,"_27":120,"_29":243,"_46":244,"_48":245,"_50":254,"_75":260,"_77":261,"_42":121,"_44":52},{"_15":123,"_32":124,"_17":125,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":126,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":127,"_44":52},[],[246,248,250,252],{"_15":129,"_17":130,"_19":131,"_21":132,"_23":133,"_25":26,"_27":134,"_42":135,"_44":52,"_29":247},{"_15":137,"_32":138,"_17":139,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":140,"_44":52},{"_15":142,"_17":143,"_19":144,"_21":145,"_23":146,"_25":26,"_27":147,"_42":148,"_44":45,"_29":249},{"_15":150,"_32":151,"_17":152,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":153,"_44":45},{"_15":101,"_17":102,"_19":103,"_21":104,"_23":105,"_25":11,"_27":106,"_42":107,"_44":45,"_29":251},{"_15":109,"_32":110,"_17":111,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":112,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":113,"_44":52},{"_15":86,"_17":87,"_19":88,"_21":89,"_23":90,"_25":11,"_27":91,"_42":167,"_44":52,"_29":253},{"_15":93,"_32":94,"_17":95,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":96,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":97,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":255,"_63":256},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[257,258,259],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":262,"_17":263,"_27":264,"_82":265,"_42":121,"_44":52},45,"Betting an Agency on Agentic AI, Part 2 | Potential","CC-analytics showed 90% of the team barely used Claude Code. The two lessons that followed, firing half the team, and a 72-hour FDE trip to a US client.","에이전틱 AI, Claude Code 도입, AI 네이티브 개발팀, forward deployed engineer, FDE, AX, Potential, agentic AI agency",{"_15":267,"_17":268,"_19":269,"_21":270,"_23":271,"_25":26,"_27":272,"_29":273,"_46":279,"_48":280,"_50":335,"_75":341,"_77":342,"_42":347,"_44":52},34,"Rescuing a Founder Who Got Scammed Out of ₩6.6M on a Dev Project","100% paid upfront, 0% built, two weeks to launch — so we shipped a product in 24 hours","10 min","rescuing-a-dev-outsourcing-scam-victim","

On the evening of the 15th, a founder reached out. He was in an urgent situation, he said, and wanted to talk a few things through. He'd been scammed out of ₩6.6M (~$4.8K) on a dev outsourcing project.

Here's the Situation in Summary

Three months earlier, he'd hired a shop (\"Shop A\") to build an app for managing his store.
As is so often the case, three months passed with zero progress.
Shop A's owner dodged his calls, telling him to \"ask the account manager.\"
He needed the app to launch alongside his store opening on December 3rd.
Worse, even the spec contained an element that would never pass app-store review.
Build progress was at 0% — all he had was a rough Figma mockup.
He'd paid 100% upfront.
Shop A claimed a refund was impossible per the contract — but graciously offered to refund about 10%.

$\"\"$

\n\n

He asked me what options a client has in this situation (lawsuit, etc.). I told him, painfully, that the best he could realistically do was cajole Shop A into giving back whatever he could. The amount was small (₩6.6M), and the mental stress of fighting it would clearly cost him more. And the most serious issue was that he had to launch by December 3rd with absolutely nothing built.

Why We Said No at First

He then asked whether we could take the project on. I declined, for these reasons.

I call projects like this \"cleanup projects.\" A cleanup project is one a dev shop failed to finish and ran from, or one a shop subcontracted out because it wasn't capable enough. These come with absurdly short deadlines and carry a lot of risk, so we generally don't take them — and when we quote, we ask for two to three times our usual price.

$\"\"$

\n\n

As a cleanup project, the quote had to be high, but his budget couldn't support it. He'd already burned money once with Shop A, so I understood his position completely. Paying twice — what he lost to Shop A plus the cost of a new project — has to sting.

The Meeting Where I Caved

I told him repeatedly that we simply couldn't do it within that budget. Market logic says higher risk means higher cost, but this project carried high risk at the same old price. Still, he pleaded earnestly, and I'm weak to an emotional appeal, so I softened. I agreed to at least take a meeting.

$\"\"$

\n\n

At the meeting, seeing a founder around my dad's age who clearly knew nothing about IT services, I softened even more. It turned out he'd come from my hometown, which got to me further. After listening to him vent for about two hours, I told him I'd confer with my team and get back to him. Back home, I called and told him we'd take it — on one condition.

\n
Hand planning, design, and scheduling entirely over to us, and trust us with it.
\n

The bottleneck in most dev outsourcing is the client meetings and back-and-forth. Since this project was on a tight deadline, I asked him to delegate full authority. I also committed that if the product didn't turn out the way he wanted, we'd own it. Thankfully he said yes, and we got started.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Charging Ahead Overnight

The safe move is to wait for a signed contract and a deposit, but there was no time for that. I told him the signature and deposit could come later — we'd start the work first. My teammates were fast asleep at that hour, so I decided to charge ahead myself. Fortunately, because our modules team had pre-built a lot of the features we'd need, I could develop at incredible speed.

Since he'd been burned by a dev shop once already, I over-communicated to keep him at ease. The previous shop had lied, passing off Figma images as if they were actually built — so we communicated through a live link instead.

A Product in 24 Hours

$\"\"$

\n\n

And the next day, 24 hours later, we had a product. It wasn't a high-margin project — but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes the job worth doing.

Money gone, deadline looming, nothing built — that's precisely the situation we're best at. Potential is a development partner that helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward. If you need an urgent rescue, reach out anytime.

",{"_15":274,"_32":275,"_17":276,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":277,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":278,"_44":52},559,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/af8b4723-4f82-4f3f-b804-203adbb8e27f-rescuing-a-dev-outsourcing-scam-victim-naver.png","rescuing-a-dev-outsourcing-scam-victim-naver-32413","Original Naver image - rescuing-a-dev-outsourcing-scam-victim","2026-06-04T01:31:43.669Z",[],[281,294,308,322],{"_15":282,"_17":283,"_19":284,"_21":104,"_23":285,"_25":26,"_27":286,"_42":287,"_44":52,"_29":288},31,"Why Do Dev Agencies Only Ever Build Other People's Apps?","The difference between a shop that does the homework and one that does more than the homework","why-agencies-only-build-others-apps","

I've always wondered about this. Why don't the people who teach you how to trade stocks make their money trading stocks? Why do the people who teach online-store selling teach it instead of just running a store? In the same way: dev agencies are arguably in the perfect position to run an IT business of their own — so why do they only ever build other people's? After getting into this business myself, I learned the industry's open secret: agencies can be great at doing what they're told, but they're remarkably weak at finding and doing work nobody asked them to.

Dev Outsourcing Is a \"Homework\" Business

The economics of dev outsourcing reward you for putting in the least possible engineering resource while charging as much as you can. So you end up treating every task like homework assigned by a teacher. Going and finding extra homework to do earns you nothing.

As a result, all of your thinking centers on \"do the homework the client gave us, well.\" The question \"what does this client actually need next?\" rarely gets asked. Here's an example, from the client behind the dental-clinic website a marketing agency built for ₩5.5M (~$4K) (and what it really should have cost).

$\"\"$

\n\n

How a Typical Agency Responds vs. How We Respond

Take the contact-collection page on a dental clinic's site. A visitor enters their phone number and a message; the clinic's front desk reviews the inquiry and calls the patient back. Dead simple. When an agency gets a request like this, 99% of the time the response is:

Typical agency response

\n
Build a form for the customer's phone number, name, and message, and an admin page that displays exactly that — phone number, name, message.
\n

You might ask: what's wrong with that? Nothing — the agency just finished the homework as assigned. And since building anything more earns them nothing, stopping there is fine. They built exactly what the requirements doc said.

$\"\"$

\n\n

How we responded

Sure, the client asked for a feature to enter and view contact info and inquiries, so we could have stopped there too. But picture the clinic's front desk for a second. Odds are it's chaos. Several people might be handling inquiries at once, or it might be one person juggling everything. In the rush, it's easy to lose track of which inquiries have already been handled across multiple staff. What if you built the feature imagining that situation?

A way to see which admin checked a given inquiry, for when multiple people are handling them
A way to see whether a given inquiry has been fully resolved

We could have built it to just show \"John Doe / 010-1234-1234\" and nothing else. The client never once asked for these features — probably because it's hard to anticipate needing them. They weren't in the requirements doc, and we didn't charge more for them. We just did it. Because we don't want to be a typical agency.

It's the Structure of the Industry

$\"\"$

\n\n

A dev outsourcing shop may be great at doing what it's told (and honestly, even just doing that well puts you in the top 10%), but thinking about what the client needs next is something the structure makes nearly impossible.

The second reason — a shop that's run platforms first-hand and been through the wringer vs. one that's only ever coded — is what I'll cover in the next post.

A good development partner doesn't just do the homework. It thinks ahead to the things nobody asked for. Potential is a development partner that helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward — and we look past the spec to the context behind it. Reach out anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:02:21.213Z",{"_15":289,"_32":290,"_17":291,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":292,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":293,"_44":52},556,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/8054620d-0399-46d6-884f-2ac8bc153de5-why-agencies-only-build-others-apps-naver.png","why-agencies-only-build-others-apps-naver-96155","Original Naver image - why-agencies-only-build-others-apps","2026-06-04T01:31:41.038Z",{"_15":295,"_17":296,"_19":297,"_21":298,"_23":299,"_25":26,"_27":300,"_42":301,"_44":52,"_29":302},29,"What Happens When You Outsource Your MVP to a Dev Agency","Outsourcing shops say 'yes' to any scope — which is exactly why your MVP keeps getting bigger","12 min","outsourcing-mvp-development","

This is a follow-up to \"What happens when you hand a platform build to an agency that has never run a platform.\" This time the topic is the most common trap founders fall into when they outsource their MVP: the MVP that keeps getting bigger.

The MVP That Got Way Too Big

Roughly 90% of the projects that land on our desk are MVP (minimum viable product) requests. Why do so many MVP requests come to us specifically? Two reasons, I think:

We ship fast (usually within 1-2 weeks)
We define the MVP well

What does \"defining the MVP well\" actually mean? Because the MVPs that founders bring us are, more often than not, enormous.

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Running app + community app + gym O2O + meal-tracking app
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Somewhere along the way the whole point of an MVP — ship the smallest possible thing to find out whether the market wants it — gets forgotten, and features start piling on. It feels too thin on its own, so they bolt on a community, then chat, then a rewards system. The founder above originally wanted a running-based rewards app, but ended up adding a community, meal tracking, and nearby-gym recommendations.

I understand the instinct — the more features, the more users will love it. But you have to do the exact opposite. Strip features down and down until you're focused on a single one. You might read this and think \"that's not me,\" but it's only a matter of degree: every founder is weak to the temptation of adding just one more feature. Even Toss — a company famous for getting this right — once put chat into its app and later killed it.

So who benefits when the MVP gets bigger? The outsourcing shop. Whether the MVP is big or small, whether the client's business succeeds or fails, the agency's job is simply to land the biggest possible contract and build what's asked. So no matter how bloated the requested MVP is, the answer is \"sure, sounds great,\" followed by a fat contract and a long build.

How Small Should an MVP Actually Be?

Which raises the most important question: how small should you make it? The simplest answer I can give — cut everything, all the way down to the point where you're asking \"wait, do I have to cut this too?\"

Imagine going back ten years and building the very first food-delivery app.

Cut the map feature?
Cut reviews?
Cut coupons?
Integrate a payment gateway?
Cut restaurant categories?

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My answer to every one of these is no. Remove all the nice-to-haves and ship with just the one or two features you genuinely can't live without. In my view, a single flyer image per restaurant would do, skip payments entirely, and just wire up each restaurant's phone number — that alone functions perfectly well as an MVP. The goal of building an MVP right now isn't success; it's validation.

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\"But surely I need reviews…\"\n\"No. Cut them.\"
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Founding a Company Is Like Baseball

I've always compared startups to baseball. The batter is the founder; the pitcher's ball is the market. Your first time at the plate, the pitch is so fast you can't even see it, and you swing and miss again and again. But the more times you step up, the better your eye gets — you start laying off the bad pitches, fouling some off. And somewhere around your 8th or 9th at-bat, you connect for a hit, or a home run.

In other words, the single most important thing in entrepreneurship is getting to the plate often — in startup terms, \"failing small but continuously taking new swings with new products.\"

Say you have a budget of ₩20M (~$14.5K).

One polished ₩20M attempt
vs ten ₩2M (~$1.4K) attempts

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Which one you bet on is the founder's call.

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PS. An outsourcing shop will say \"OK\" to any MVP, big or small — take their yes with a grain of salt.
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What Is an MVP?

It's an application built for the sole purpose of validating a business — a scout sent ahead to see what's there. You give up every other feature and focus on a single one, just to find out whether the business will land or not.

If you want to validate your idea in its smallest possible form, it starts with defining your MVP properly small. Potential is a development partner that helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward — and we start by thinking through the MVP definition with you. Reach out anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:02:19.177Z",{"_15":303,"_32":304,"_17":305,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":306,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":307,"_44":52},554,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/cc4a2734-712c-4df9-b515-3e7dfe1267d0-outsourcing-mvp-development-naver.png","outsourcing-mvp-development-naver-14058","Original Naver image - outsourcing-mvp-development","2026-06-04T01:31:39.685Z",{"_15":309,"_17":310,"_19":311,"_21":312,"_23":313,"_25":26,"_27":314,"_42":315,"_44":52,"_29":316},30,"What Happens When You Outsource a Platform to an Agency That's Never Run One","Two sign-up buttons don't make a marketplace run","13 min","outsourcing-platform-development","

This is a follow-up to \"Why do dev agencies only build other people's apps?\" This time we go a level deeper: what happens when you hand a platform build to an agency that has never actually run a platform.

When a Company That Only Takes Orders Tries to Build a Platform

As I mentioned in the last post, 99% of dev agencies are used to doing what they're told. When a company built entirely around order-taking suddenly has to empathize with a customer's real needs, its own products fail — ten times out of ten. So agencies give up on building their own services and pour themselves entirely into client work.

Search \"platform development\" on any freelance marketplace and every shop that comes up leads with the same slogan: \"Just tell us what you want — we'll build all of it.\" And sure, they probably will build it. But the platforms they build almost never succeed as actual businesses. The biggest reason: not a single one of them has ever built, run, and grown a platform themselves. When shops with no operating experience take on a platform as pure build work, a lot of things start to break.

Chicken or Egg?

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Say you're building a food-delivery app from scratch. Where should you focus — the restaurants, or the customers placing orders? Without restaurants, no customers will show up. But without customers, restaurants have no reason to list either.

Say you're building a freelance marketplace. Do you focus on the experts, or on the customers who'll buy their services? Same trap: no experts, no customers — but no customers, no reason for experts to join.

Uber, ride-hailing apps, travel-booking platforms — every platform business faces this dilemma. And most agencies don't think about it at all. They assume that once they've built a \"sign up as a customer / sign up as a restaurant\" button — or \"sign up as a customer / sign up as an expert\" — their entire job is done. But what does reality actually look like?

A Platform I Built and Ran Myself: An Academy–Parent Marketplace

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This platform connected private academies in a competitive education district with the parents looking for them. Back in university, my co-founder and I spent a month or two walking the streets in the July heat, interviewing parents and students. We also went academy to academy, quietly slipping flyers and business cards through the gaps in their doors. That's how the service was born.

Back when I knew nothing about business, I'd collect reviews in the morning and code at night — brutal and exhausting, I remember it well. But that's exactly how I learned what to focus on when running a platform. As a result, the service accumulated tens of thousands of academy reviews across the district and built a working ad business. (I'm no longer involved with the company, so I don't know its current state in detail.)

Another One I Built and Ran: A Parent–Manufacturer Sampling Marketplace

The company I started next was the same story. Founded on ₩600K (~$435), it became a diaper-sampling marketing business that distributed over 1.2 million sample packs. Between new parents and diaper manufacturers, which side should we have focused on? It took me more than three years of trial and error to land that first manufacturer — and in the end, the brand became almost a generic term that parent communities reach for whenever a diaper problem comes up.

A Platform Doesn't Run on a Sign-Up Page Alone

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I can't cover everything in one post, but if you think a platform is solved by building \"sign up as an expert\" and \"sign up as a restaurant,\" you're mistaken.

Every page and every piece of copy has to be designed strategically.
The earlier you are, the more you must focus on either the chicken or the egg — not both.
You need to know, before you sell, exactly which side to attack first and where to start.

After long trial and error, we learned which side to lean into — academies or parents, parents or manufacturers — and where to begin when going to sell. Most dev shops can only code, so they're weak on how business actually works in the real world. A platform does not run automatically on a single sign-up page.

What Is a Platform Business?

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Food-delivery restaurants ↔ customers who want food delivered
Travel-booking properties ↔ customers looking for a room
Marketplace sellers ↔ customers looking for goods
Freelance experts ↔ customers looking for experts

A platform is a service where two different types of users buy and sell on the same place. Growth on one side drives growth on the other, and the platform's gravity keeps compounding. But at the very start, there are no users to provide the service yet — and that's the dilemma. Just picture a food-delivery app with no restaurants, or a travel-booking app with no rooms.

This post continues in \"Inflated quotes and the wildly oversized MVP.\"

A platform starts with business design, not code. Potential is a development partner that has built and grown platforms first-hand — and helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward. If you're wrestling with how to scope a platform, reach out anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:02:20.454Z",{"_15":317,"_32":318,"_17":319,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":320,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":321,"_44":52},555,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/cf69f587-1504-485c-8928-24fe698dd8b0-outsourcing-platform-development-naver.png","outsourcing-platform-development-naver-67831","Original Naver image - outsourcing-platform-development","2026-06-04T01:31:40.253Z",{"_15":323,"_17":324,"_19":325,"_21":118,"_23":326,"_25":26,"_27":327,"_42":328,"_44":52,"_29":329},33,"A Clinic Paid an Agency ₩5.5M for a Website. What Did It Really Cost?","Anatomy of the subcontracting food chain — where the client always loses","real-cost-of-a-dental-website","

Last week I met a fascinating client. When I looked up their company name, it turned out to be a design and marketing agency. And yet, oddly, this design company was commissioning us to build a dental clinic's website. Why would a design firm commission a clinic website? Curious, I searched around — and learned this is commonly called \"re-subcontracting.\"

The Subcontracting Structure, in Plain Terms

The client (a dental clinic) hires an agency to build their website. But most agencies can't actually deliver a project like this in-house — they can only do marketing, or only do design. So they go find another shop that can do the work. A shop like ours. And they hand it off for less than what they charged the client.

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They charge the client ₩5M (~$3.6K).
They hand the build to another dev shop for ₩2M (~$1.4K).
The agency pockets ₩3M (~$2.2K).

The Structure Where Only the Client Loses

In the app and website development market, this kind of re-subcontracting is extremely common. And the one who loses most is the client. They end up paying ₩3M more for something that could have been built for ₩2M.

The more serious problem starts after that. To change even one small thing, communication has to flow client → agency → dev shop → agency → client. Nothing moves crisply, and everything takes forever.

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What's a \"Cleanup Project\"?

We usually call projects like these \"cleanup projects\" (literally, \"dishwashing projects\"). A cleanup project is one a dev shop failed to finish and ran away from, or one a shop subcontracted out because it wasn't capable enough. These often come with absurdly short deadlines and carry a lot of risk, so we generally avoid them — and when we do quote, we ask for two to three times our usual price. Because the number of shops that can actually deliver within that kind of timeline is very small.

A typical cleanup project looks like this:

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The client

Furious. The project blew its schedule, so they're tearing into the agency — but they've already paid, and there's nothing they can do.

The agency

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On edge. They want to calm the angry client down, but since they can't build it themselves, all they can do is beg the dev shop to somehow fix it.

The dev shop

Heads down, doing the dishes. The agency demands an unreasonable timeline, but we hit it. The faster and more perfectly we clean it up, the higher our value climbs.

At the Bottom of the Food Chain

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Down at the very bottom of the software-outsourcing food chain, we hold our own. Agencies racing a deadline, founders who got scammed by another shop and lost anywhere from a few million to tens of millions of won — once they work with us, they keep coming back. We're a little less hand-holdy, sure, but we build it cheap, accurate, and fast. (The project with the agency above was a 1.5-week build.)

There's no reason to pay two or three times more for the same deliverable. Potential is a development partner that works with you directly — no middlemen — and helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward. If you're wondering whether a quote is fair, reach out anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:02:25.655Z",{"_15":330,"_32":331,"_17":332,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":333,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":334,"_44":52},558,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/1597ce1d-3c09-4328-bf45-c02ea15c09f1-real-cost-of-a-dental-website-naver.png","real-cost-of-a-dental-website-naver-29713","Original Naver image - real-cost-of-a-dental-website","2026-06-04T01:31:41.738Z",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":336,"_63":337},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[338,339,340],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":45,"_17":343,"_27":344,"_82":345,"_42":346,"_44":52},"Rescuing a Dev Outsourcing Scam Victim | Potential","A founder paid 100% upfront and got nothing but a Figma mockup, two weeks before launch. How we took the 'cleanup project' and shipped in 24 hours.","개발 외주 사기, 설거지 프로젝트, dev outsourcing scam, 외주 환불, app development rescue, 긴급 개발, 외주 사기","2026-06-04T01:29:07.928Z","2026-06-04T02:02:27.287Z",{"_15":323,"_17":324,"_19":325,"_21":118,"_23":326,"_25":26,"_27":327,"_29":349,"_46":350,"_48":351,"_50":360,"_75":366,"_77":367,"_42":328,"_44":52},{"_15":330,"_32":331,"_17":332,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":333,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":334,"_44":52},[],[352,354,356,358],{"_15":282,"_17":283,"_19":284,"_21":104,"_23":285,"_25":26,"_27":286,"_42":287,"_44":52,"_29":353},{"_15":289,"_32":290,"_17":291,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":292,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":293,"_44":52},{"_15":295,"_17":296,"_19":297,"_21":298,"_23":299,"_25":26,"_27":300,"_42":301,"_44":52,"_29":355},{"_15":303,"_32":304,"_17":305,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":306,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":307,"_44":52},{"_15":309,"_17":310,"_19":311,"_21":312,"_23":313,"_25":26,"_27":314,"_42":315,"_44":52,"_29":357},{"_15":317,"_32":318,"_17":319,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":320,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":321,"_44":52},{"_15":267,"_17":268,"_19":269,"_21":270,"_23":271,"_25":26,"_27":272,"_42":347,"_44":52,"_29":359},{"_15":274,"_32":275,"_17":276,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":277,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":278,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":361,"_63":362},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[363,364,365],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":368,"_17":369,"_27":370,"_82":371,"_42":372,"_44":52},43,"The Real Cost of an Outsourced Website | Potential","A clinic paid ₩5.5M for a site that cost ₩2M to build. Inside the subcontracting food chain of web/app development — and who actually pays for it.","재하청, 홈페이지 제작 비용, 외주 견적, web development cost, subcontracting, 설거지 프로젝트, 개발 외주","2026-06-04T01:29:01.104Z",{"_15":374,"_17":375,"_19":376,"_21":377,"_23":378,"_25":26,"_27":379,"_29":380,"_46":386,"_48":387,"_50":442,"_75":448,"_77":449,"_42":455,"_44":52},32,"Why We Started a Dev Agency in Bangladesh, of All Places","Eight failed products, and the one talent I found in the wreckage","15 min","why-we-started-in-bangladesh","

Today I run a software outsourcing business with seven teammates in Bangladesh. The business is simple: individuals and companies that need an app or a platform pay us to build the software for them. People call it system integration, IT outsourcing, or agency work depending on where you are. In Korea, it's often dismissed as grunt work — but I genuinely love this industry. So how did I end up in it, in Bangladesh of all places?

Eight Products, Eight Brutal Failures in a Row

2022 was a genuinely hard year. Following the advice of more experienced founders — \"fail fast, fail often\" — I built product after product and shipped them into the market. But just because a failure is small doesn't mean the wound is. Here's the list from that stretch:

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A deep-learning body-composition analysis service
A deep-learning service for tracking muscle development by body part
A feedback service between personal trainers and their clients
Audio Gym — built on the insight that people blast intense music or motivational videos while working out. (Even now I'd call it the best thing I've ever built. Nobody used it.)
A weight-training log app — there are already countless log apps, and looking back I have no idea what I was thinking
A Pilates sequence log app
A deep-learning posture-assessment app for Pilates instructors (forward head, pelvic tilt, rounded shoulders, etc.)

When #4 failed, the blow was so heavy that I was furious at myself and deleted the entire project with Shift+Delete. My confidence was shot, I badly needed a small win, and I decided to find something — startup or not — that could make money fast. So, like a lot of founders do, I started taking on outsourcing work.

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A Talent I Stumbled Into

Building all those products through 2022, I'd — funnily enough — developed a new talent: I'd gotten genuinely fast at building software, any kind of it. There are plenty of people in the world with more CS knowledge and better coding chops than me, but when it comes to building products fast, I believe I'm in the global 1%.

It's hard to put into words, but when a client says \"I want to build something like this,\" the whole sequence just organizes itself in my head — model the database this way, lay out the app like that, here are the pages you need, simplify this feature down to this.

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A Deep-Learning App in 9 Days

One client messaged me on Nov 21 and asked for a Nov 30 deadline. A nine-day deadline for a deep-learning app — an absurd ask. Once you account for the contract and the kickoff meeting, the actual build time was under a week. But I was confident.

I'd spent the whole year setting eight services on fire, bleeding money the entire time — and yet within a month of taking on outsourcing work, money was coming in fast. That made me wonder: maybe what the market actually needed wasn't the eight services I built, but the ability to build a product fast.

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The Bigger Backdrop: A Shrinking Population

The working-age population is shrinking. Worse, the young productive population is shrinking dramatically. In an industry like IT, where you have to constantly absorb new technology, fresh blood matters enormously — and the supply isn't coming. Which means demand for shops like ours is only likely to grow.

Big tech and trendy startups have it easier, but for small and mid-sized companies in industries that aren't IT-friendly, finding a dev team is brutally hard. There's an episode tied to this: after we wrapped a project, the client CEO asked how big our team was and then offered to acquire us. When I asked why, the answer was simply that finding a decent dev team is that difficult.

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Seeing all this, I concluded that as long as we work honestly, at fair prices, and just do our job well, we won't go hungry in this business.

What Garment Manufacturing and IT Outsourcing Have in Common

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I thought hard about how to grow the team. Unfortunately, in Korea no system-integration shop has ever clawed its way up to become a large company on its own. Which means I, too, will very likely fail to scale up much beyond the other agencies. So I dug into overseas cases. India and Vietnam had plenty of success stories:

An Indian IT company founded on $250 that grew into billions in revenue
A company that pivoted from IBM computer distribution into IT outsourcing and rose into Vietnam's top market caps

The more I looked, the more I noticed a striking pattern. Obvious in hindsight, but IT outsourcing keeps migrating toward cheaper countries. It started in China, moved to lower-cost India, and these days Vietnam — centered on Ho Chi Minh City — is hot.

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The more interesting fact is that another industry shows the exact same pattern: garment manufacturing. Apparel production started in Korea, passed through China and India, and moved on to Vietnam. And today, Bangladesh is the world's second-largest garment producer.

Why I Bet on Bangladesh

I bet on Bangladesh as IT outsourcing's \"next Vietnam.\" Garment manufacturing and IT may look nothing alike, but they're actually quite similar. Both are intensely labor-driven, and both can be started with no capital. Especially now that YouTube has raised access to high-quality educational content, anyone willing to put in the work can learn.

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To sum it up:

I was curious where IT outsourcing's center of gravity would move after Vietnam.
Garment manufacturing and IT outsourcing seemed to follow the same pattern.
Something told me it'd be Bangladesh.

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This post continues in \"An English-phobic founder's nerve-wracking first hire.\"

That small bet, placed in Bangladesh, has grown into Potential — a development partner that helps Korean and Asian founders expand westward. If you're curious what it's like to work with a global dev team, reach out anytime.

",{"_15":381,"_32":382,"_17":383,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":384,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":385,"_44":52},557,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/0e2585ae-bd99-4459-b7b3-685d8845cc02-why-we-started-in-bangladesh-naver.png","why-we-started-in-bangladesh-naver-72208","Original Naver image - why-we-started-in-bangladesh","2026-06-04T01:31:41.499Z",[],[388,402,416,429],{"_15":389,"_17":390,"_19":391,"_21":392,"_23":393,"_25":26,"_27":394,"_42":395,"_44":52,"_29":396},13,"My Second Trip to Bangladesh, 10 Months Later","A team retreat with a team that grew to 24, and meetings with the CEOs of Musemind and Brainstation23.","18 min","second-bangladesh-business-trip","

Ten months later, I returned to Bangladesh. This is a record of a retreat with a remote team that had grown from 6 people to 24 — and of meeting the CEOs of two companies I'd always wanted to emulate, Musemind and Brainstation23. It was a trip that taught me a lot and left me deeply energized.

1. Preparation

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I'm not sure where to start, so I'll just take it piece by piece. This trip began with a suggestion from Siam on our team.

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Siam: \"Lukas, we've been sprinting on projects nonstop for months — I think we need a refresh. How about a team retreat?\"
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Lukas: \"Hmm, I'm fine with it, but does the team actually like company retreats? In Korea, people tend to dislike retreats pushed by the boss.\"
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Siam: \"We really love them. And it's good for the company's public image, too. If you just say OK, we'll handle the planning ourselves.\"
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So the team planned the retreat, and I bowed my head to my wife to get the trip approved. (We have one kid now; with two it'll be harder, so shouldn't I go one more time while I can?) The team always knows how busy I am, so they look out for me in every way — hotel selection, flights, bus bookings, company swag, all handled.

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2. Change — unfamiliar Dhaka becomes familiar

I vividly remember first landing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on February 28th this year. A strange country, a strange city, hazy skies, brutal traffic — it was all unfamiliar. But maybe because this was my second visit, it started to feel familiar. I grew calm even in the traffic, and relaxed enough to smile back at the Bangladeshi kids who stared at me curiously.

When I landed, Siam and Afnan were waiting. The rest of the team had already left for the retreat spot, Cox's Bazar, and we'd follow the next day on a domestic flight. Meeting people in person after only seeing them on a monitor is one of the joys of remote work. You can't predict who's big or small — for example, Siam, who always sat hunched over, turned out to be enormous, while a teammate who'd looked huge turned out to be small in person. Afnan was exactly as I'd pictured.

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The next day Siam and I flew domestic to Cox's Bazar. Whenever I fly, I make a point of talking to the passenger next to me. (Life is decided by luck and effort — and you can actually raise your luck a bit through effort.) Hearing someone's life story is fun, and sometimes you discover an unexpected business opportunity. The man next to Siam runs a real-estate development business in Dhaka and, remarkably, held a stake in the very resort we were heading to. He told me to call him whenever I build an office in Dhaka. He offered to buy me lunch there, but our schedule didn't allow it — pass.

Cox's Bazar is, for Korea, like Jeju Island. People honeymoon there, and with decent hotels, companies use it for retreats too. We stayed at the Sea Pearl resort in Cox's Bazar. Unfortunately, I have no interest in hotels and resorts. The team seemed to love it, though. Bangladeshi Facebook is full of retreat posts, and the fact that people know which company stayed at which property tells me it's an indirect yardstick for a company's benefits. (There was a lot of programming, so I'll skip the retreat details.)

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3. What changed in nine months — and the problems that never go away

A lot changed in nine months. A small team of 6 grew to 24, the projects multiplied, and the scale grew. Revenue went up too, but my own life didn't change. I eat what I ate, wear what I wear. If anything changed, it's that the intensity of the stress kept rising. And the problems the company faces changed.

Last year's questions

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Can we hire Bangladeshi developers well?
Can we run a company fully remote?
Can we run a company on flexible working hours?
I'm not a strong developer myself — can I still build a good dev company?
Is it right for me to keep coding?
I've never led a team — can I run one well?

Today's questions

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How do we further optimize project management?
How do we make the company run while I only do sales?
How do we make the company's cash flow predictable?
How do we become the most desirable company to work for in Bangladesh?
How do we build a fair incentive system?

The problems I'm wrestling with now will soon be solved. But new ones will appear and bring even greater stress. I've learned that business is accepting that this cycle of problems and stress will repeat forever. If I could give a tip to myself a year ago, I'd say: \"Don't be scared of how much you don't know. Keep reading books, keep asking other people lots of questions, like you're doing now, and you'll find the answers soon enough.\"

A thought struck me. Bangladeshi developers and designers who'd never met each other in their lives had brought their families to a remote place called Cox's Bazar to take profile photos with a CEO from Korea. The odds of that, statistically, must be vanishingly small. Watching a company that started from my small idea create bonds between people and leave memories behind — it stirred something new in me. What adventures lie ahead of us next?

$\"\"$

\n\n

4. Heroes of Bangladesh — Musemind

The highlight of the trip was the last day. Since starting this work, I'd heard my team talk endlessly about two companies — Musemind and Brainstation23 — and this was the day I could finally meet their CEOs. From back in Korea, I'd reached out through every channel to meet them: email, mutual contacts, and so on. Gratefully, the meetings came together. Both are married, so I bought an armful of gifts for their wives from Olive Young in advance.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Musemind is a design agency founded in 2022 — only two years old. Yet it does over $1M a month, and its growth is blistering. The skill goes without saying; they're exceptional. I'd wanted to learn from them since back in Korea, and I was lucky enough to meet the founder, Nasir, in person. I got to hear, vividly, the whole story — from his freelancing days in 2021, to starting the business in 2022, to the Musemind of today.

\n
Nasir: \"While many development agencies in Bangladesh were staring only at code, we were the only agency focused on design. Most dev agencies were neglecting design, but we realized what the client ultimately sees is the design — the frontend. So we hired designers who weren't being properly valued, and started the business with a vision of becoming a global top-tier design agency. And we reinvested most of what we earned. We filled the office with iMacs and spent serious money on the interior. I believed it was a necessary investment to inspire the designers. (Though at the time, the costs were so high it scared me a little.)\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

\n
Lukas: \"I think a company faces different problems at different stages as it grows — at 1 person, at 20, at 50. We're going through the problems of being 24. We don't have a sales problem, but we have a lot of operations problems. Can you tell me how Musemind solved them?\"
\n
Nasir: \"The good news is that the business is working. As long as the company is making money, everything else is secondary — don't worry about it too much. How about hiring a senior-level project manager first? Hiring on the HR side helped us enormously too. Operations problems just change in character at each stage of the company; you'll worry about them your whole life, so don't fret too much. They're the easy type of problem.\"
\n
Lukas: \"I think the agency business model rests on three pillars: 1) sales, 2) operations, 3) culture. If, as CEO, you had to focus on just one, which would it be? And what do you actually do in practice?\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

\n
Nasir: \"Sales, without question. I don't look at anything else right now. It's only been eight months since I started focusing on sales, but it was a truly excellent choice. As a former designer, I'm constantly tempted to keep doing design work — but I believe the CEO must focus on sales, full stop. Oh, and one more thing: I'd recommend getting a consultation from an outside consultant. Company CEOs are prone to bias risk, and an outside perspective can resolve it. Our revenue grew a lot with an external consultant's help.\"
\n

What I felt from the Musemind visit was real vibrancy — a sense that the whole company is building a culture all its own. And because it's run by a young CEO, its influence on Bangladeshi designers is enormous. The scariest thing about this company is that — like Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix in Korea — it has established itself as the most desirable design company to work for in Bangladesh. I was so envious, and I learned a lot.

$\"\"$

\n\n

5. Heroes of Bangladesh — Brainstation23

The other company was Brainstation23. The visit was so absorbing, so gripping, that I didn't take a single photo. I already knew a lot about Brainstation23's CEO, Raisul — because from the moment I started Potential, the company I most wanted to emulate was Brainstation23. I can't count how many times I'd watched all his interviews. And yet, meeting him in person, he was another level.

Brainstation23 is a development agency with 800 developers. Any computer-science graduate in Bangladesh wants to get in. The overall level of the developers is very high, and as a company founded in 2006, it has stable, established processes. Raisul had no reason whatsoever to meet the CEO of a potential future competitor. Knowing all too well that a CEO's time is the company's most important asset, I honestly hadn't expected him to agree. But gratefully, he allowed the visit.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The scale was simply enormous. I visited one of their three offices — hundreds of monitors and desktops arranged in rows. The meeting was held in a small room. The down-to-earth Raisul walked in with a book and a notebook in hand. (I later learned he's a voracious reader.) We started with general questions.

\n
Raisul: \"You probably know the stories that have been in the press, so let's skip those and talk about what hasn't been covered. This is a book I recently started reading called The Leadership Pipeline — it's about how it's important to distribute the right responsibility to each leader. Say there's a position that has to manage 12 project managers. You shouldn't put the burden of every project's success on that position. A project's success rests on the project manager, not on the person managing the project managers. I recently learned you have to manage leadership in the form of a pipeline.\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

As he said this, he opened the book — every page packed with highlighter marks.

\n
Raisul: \"Was it Peter Drucker — you've probably heard the idea that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. I read somewhere that Google solves it like this: before promoting anyone, they test the relevant role in advance. If you want to promote someone to tech lead, you give them tech-lead-related work first. If they do well, you promote them; if not, you test someone else. That's how you manage the risk.\"
\n
Raisul: \"You have to acknowledge that every person is either a specialist type or a leader type. Developers especially. You have to distinguish leader types from specialist types and promote accordingly. Okay, that's enough of the general stuff — is there a specific problem where I could actually be helpful?\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

\n
Lukas: \"As our team grows, we're hitting operations problems. You must have gone through operations problems at many stages on the way to your current size — how did you handle it at 30 people?\"
\n

Raisul glanced at his watch, said he had a meeting in 30 minutes and wasn't sure he could finish, but he'd show me how their company does it. Then he pulled out a marker and, writing on the whiteboard, gave me — literally — a detailed lecture on exactly how Brainstation23 does project management at scale, point by point.

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\n\n

I was genuinely moved. That the CEO of a company at this scale could be this sincere about sharing his knowledge. Raisul's one-point lesson didn't end until well past the time of his next meeting. Leaving the office, many thoughts ran through me — gratitude for what I'd received that day, and doubt about whether I could ever teach everything I have to a younger founder who might become my future competitor, and a complex mix of emotions. Watching the book always in his hand, the dense notes filling its pages, and the way he jotted the key points of what I said into his notebook, I learned, secondhand, the virtues of a good CEO.

Closing

A few hours after the meeting, I caught my flight back to Incheon. It was a night flight, but I couldn't sleep well. It was a trip where I learned a lot and drew a lot of energy. The world is truly wide, and the masters are truly many. The moment I got home I came down with a fever and felt awful — and yet I'm carving out time to write this blog. I'd thought I was fine while in Bangladesh; the moment I got home, the tension must have released. I'll take it as a chance to organize my tangled thoughts. End of my second Bangladesh trip.

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\n\n

Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion development partner for Korean and Asian founders building toward Western markets. We build global products with a remote team that spans borders.

","2026-06-04T02:01:42.816Z",{"_15":397,"_32":398,"_17":399,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":400,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":401,"_44":52},538,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/f0ca69f1-2181-4b92-b1a4-e02a2ead3f60-second-bangladesh-business-trip-naver.png","second-bangladesh-business-trip-naver-27671","Original Naver image - second-bangladesh-business-trip","2026-06-04T01:31:33.535Z",{"_15":403,"_17":404,"_19":405,"_21":406,"_23":407,"_25":26,"_27":408,"_42":409,"_44":52,"_29":410},21,"18 Hours on the Ground: A Business Trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh","The day I finally hugged the teammates I'd only ever met on a screen.","11 min","dhaka-bangladesh-business-trip","

I'm swamped — too much to do. But I have to write down what I saw and learned on this 18-hour business trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh, in as much detail as I can, before memory distorts it. There are no direct flights, so it was a brutal 14-plus hours each way. Since my wife was carrying the childcare solo, I had three days. Two of them would be spent on planes or in airports, leaving roughly one full day with the team. Even one day felt like a gift.

A furious first impression

$\"\"$

\n\n

The first thing to do after landing in Bangladesh was get a visa. Short-term visitors like me need a temporary \"landing visa,\" and the process was a shock. The man in a shirt standing to the left of the counter is both a government official and a broker. Pay him about $10 and, like a Lotte World magic pass, he lets you cut to the front of the line. Knowing my team was waiting at the airport for my scheduled arrival made it worse. The visa counter processed everyone at a deliberate crawl, with a vibe of \"in a hurry? buy the bribe, buy the magic pass.\" The temptation to pay and get out fast kept surfacing — but I waited it out stubbornly. If I paid the bribe once, they'd keep demanding it forever.

Guangzhou to Dhaka took four hours; the visa alone took three. Thinking about my team waiting for over three hours in the arrivals hall made my stomach turn. They later told me that, with no contact from me and three hours gone, they'd nearly called the police to report something wrong. I'm so sorry and so grateful to the teammates who waited until 1 a.m.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Actually shaking hands and hugging the teammates I'd only ever met on a monitor was a strange, moving thing. Pohad looked exactly as I'd pictured. Siam — whom I'd somehow imagined as slight — turned out to be a giant, nearly 6'2\". Anik was as confident in person as he'd always been on screen, and Abdul was, of course, sharp. Atik, who'd joined less than a month earlier, was a little shy.

The streets of Dhaka on the way from the airport to the hotel were striking. Unlike the Bangladesh you see on YouTube, the city pulsed with energy — you could feel the force of a place growing fast, almost writhing with it. I'm sorry I didn't get photos, but roughly every 50 meters an IT institute (think coding bootcamp) ad caught my eye.

$\"\"$

\n\n

My teammates told me Bangladesh promotes the outsourcing industry at the national level. The state teaches people to code and shows them how to earn money on Upwork and Fiverr — which I found genuinely remarkable. We checked into the hotel together, and I fell dead asleep.

D-minus-15 hours: a warm welcome

$\"\"$

\n\n

I didn't know what to do with myself in the face of the team's hospitality. Group T-shirts, a banner, even a cake — all of it astonishing. Group tees ordered back home usually come out shoddy, but as you'd expect from one of the world's top-three garment nations, the quality rivaled a major brand.

Over a cup of tea, we talked about things that are hard to bring up in front of a monitor. One thing I learned: a Muslim country lives much the way we do. Abdul couldn't get his wife's okay, so he couldn't stay at the hotel. Pohad and Siam work hard to fund their wives' studies. Atik, sleep-deprived because of a three-month-old, looked tired in a way that reminded me exactly of myself — and that felt oddly comforting. Anik had as many interesting stories as I do; he's also a PUBG commentator — Bangladesh's answer to a pro-gaming caster.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Talking face to face like this, I came to believe that no matter how far the world advances into the age of remote work, the role of offline won't change. Across 200,000 years of Homo sapiens history, we evolved in an environment of sitting face to face, working out how to bring down the prey together.

\n
\"We've worked with a lot of overseas CEOs by now — but you, Lucas, are the first one to actually come to Bangladesh to see us.\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

When I heard that, I knew that carving out the time to come had been absolutely the right call.

I'd agonized over what gift to bring. In the end I prepared a personalized name seal for each teammate. I'm not sure if Bangladesh uses registered seals, but I want the company to grow big enough that they'd have a use for them. Other companies hand new hires an M3 MacBook on day one — I'm honestly envious. I want to become a company that can buy its team MacBooks. (Though I'm still on an M1 myself.)

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\n\n

D-minus-10 hours: downtown Dhaka and Dhaka University

People in Dhaka can really drive. Cars whip past each other with 5–10 cm of gap.

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\n\n

The one place I wanted to visit in Dhaka was Dhaka University. I was curious what students at the country's top school were thinking about. On the plane I'd had a chance to chat with a Bangladeshi engineer seated next to me, who said the dream job for Dhaka University students is civil servant. Thinking back to 1970s–80s Korea, it made sense — the power can be immense, and there's room to skim. Given how full of opportunity the country is, I hope more Bangladeshi students come to dream of being engineers or founders.

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\n\n

The plaza in front of Dhaka University was packed with students. In a Muslim country with no drinking culture, a tea culture had developed around the square, and the atmosphere was strikingly open — people would strike up a conversation with a stranger without hesitation. The streets buzzed with honking, but the sight of a plaza full of people focused on each other's faces rather than phone screens left a deep impression.

D-minus-5 hours: shopping and dinner

$\"\"$

\n\n

I bought the traditional outfit I'd long wanted. Walking around in it, locals looked at me with curiosity. And yes — you can feel BTS's stature even in Bangladesh. Hard to say among adults, but middle and high schoolers greeting me with \"annyeong\" was such a surprise. Anik's youngest sister is 11 or so; next time I go to Dhaka I should bring her one of those BTS lightsticks.

Everyone had been up until dawn, so as evening came our eyes started closing. It was a Spartan three-day-two-flight march. Still, because my teammates handled everything — rentals, reservations — I got to travel in real comfort.

$\"\"$

\n\n

A brief meeting

I'd meant to avoid talking shop, but Siam and Abdul brought it up first, so there was no avoiding it. The shared theme: with so many new people joining Potential these past months, we need to start laying the groundwork now for a larger team. They advised setting up an SOP for each part of the programming work so every member follows it, and getting out of the current stage — where Lucas manages every single project — as fast as possible.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Siam also noted that the outsourcing trend in India and Bangladesh these days isn't project-based but team-based contracts — a kind of subscription model. The large Vietnamese IT outsourcing firms already run an ODC (Overseas Development Center) model: for companies that want a dev team abroad, they set up the team and charge a monthly fee. We should try it within the first half of this year.

In Bangladesh, a company called Brainstation 21 is reportedly the current market leader. On my next trip I should request a visit and learn as much as I can from their founder.

$\"\"$

\n\n

D-zero: heading home

\n
\"Guys, I'm thirty-three. I can get to the airport by myself.\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

Even though I begged them to rest at the hotel, the entire team came out to see me off. I'm not sure I've ever received such a warm welcome in my life. The only way I can repay it is to grow Potential into a bigger company. There will be countless obstacles ahead, but if we keep moving forward honestly, I think there's an answer in it somewhere.

P.S. My thanks to the client founders who accommodated a three-day trip.

$\"\"$

\n\n

On the road West with talent from Bangladesh and across Asia, Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion partner that connects people, person to person.

","2026-06-04T02:02:03.336Z",{"_15":411,"_32":412,"_17":413,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":414,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":415,"_44":52},546,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/911d3f23-3228-4ffd-a7a3-0f38fc0b30ab-dhaka-bangladesh-business-trip-naver.jpeg","dhaka-bangladesh-business-trip-naver-69330","Original Naver image - dhaka-bangladesh-business-trip","2026-06-04T01:31:36.501Z",{"_15":417,"_17":418,"_19":419,"_21":392,"_23":420,"_25":26,"_27":421,"_42":422,"_44":52,"_29":423},28,"An English-Phobic Founder Builds a Global Dev Team (The First Hire)","How a founder who couldn't hold a basic English conversation made his first hire in Bangladesh.","english-phobia-global-agency-first-hire","

This is a record of building an app development business out of Bangladesh. It's an honest account of why I started there of all places, and how a founder with a phobia of speaking English made his first global hire.

1. English phobia

I lived in Ansan, Gyeonggi-do, for over twenty years. I received a textbook Korean education — and, in particular, a textbook Korean English education. Reading isn't a problem at all, but the moment a foreigner starts rattling off at full speed, I break into a sweat. And regardless of whether I've understood a word, I smile.

$\"\"$

\n\n

There were many obstacles to running an app development business out of Bangladesh, but the biggest bottleneck was, without question, my spoken English. Someone who couldn't manage basic conversation was supposed to hire people in English, talk to clients, run software design, and hold one-on-ones with team members? The road ahead looked very long. Still, I decided to do what I could, and on a recommendation from an older friend from school, I signed up for English lessons.

If it weren't for Rinvee, my teacher on the Engoo platform, our team wouldn't exist today. Most students sought out North American teachers, but I deliberately chose a Bangladeshi one. It was a better chance to learn their accent and culture. Slowly, I started to climb out of the \"Hello, I'm fine thank you and you?\" stage and, gradually, improved.

In the mornings, I watched Futur videos on YouTube. Futur is a channel run by the founder of a design agency in the US, and it teaches the various skills an agency business needs. The English is a bonus.

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\n\n

Looking back now, about six months in, I've come to think there's no need to obsess over perfect English. English is ultimately just a tool for communication; what matters more is the message. As long as I'd prepared the message well, my terrible pronunciation and accent didn't get in the way of running the team at all.

2. A nerve-wracking first hire

I have so much to say about hiring. We went through a lot of trial and error to get to the team we have now, but if I had to name the single most important thing, it's that I started hiring despite the fear.

A bit of TMI about me: I've never worked at a company, and I've never experienced organizational life. So I'd never seen how a normal company's hiring process even works. CVs, offer letters, probation periods, employment contracts, how to pay overseas employees, how to comply with foreign labor law, overseas bonus systems, tax handling — I knew nothing about countless things like these.

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\n\n

If I had to summarize what running a company requires, I think it comes down to one thing: when you hit a problem you don't know how to solve, how do you solve it? I haven't experienced organizational life over the past ten years, but I've run into plenty of unfamiliar problems. 99% of them get solved by either (1) asking someone better than me, or (2) reading a book. I worked through the problems above one by one through questions, reading, and YouTube.

The Potential wiki

First, I prepared various materials to give the company some basic structure. Looking at other companies, I saw that many set up a company wiki or onboarding process. You don't want a new team member to feel lost. It would look pretty shabby to people at other companies, but I had to have something, so I cobbled it together. Then I posted the job opening and started taking applicants. This is where the hell party begins.

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\n\n

The candidate list

I have a lot to say about the hiring process. (I'll share it another time if the chance comes.) Since I'd never hired before, I couldn't tell who was a great person at all. And looking back now, four months on, my judgment was spectacularly wrong in plenty of cases. There were many hiring failures. Even so, through trial and error, I'm getting a little better. I have a lot to say about how to hire great overseas team members. (I'll unpack that in detail later.)

The hardest part was, without a doubt, the interviews. It may have been one of the few interviews where the interviewer was more nervous than the interviewee. I asked ChatGPT to draft an interview script, then prepared it by layering in our own flavor. And since reading off it would be obvious, I memorized it cold. Korean-style English education actually paid off here.

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\n\n

So I interviewed one candidate at a time. I'm genuinely sorry to say that through the first three interviews I was such a mess that I didn't lead them well. But as I kept at it, confidence set in, and now I even have enough ease to crack jokes and work hard to put the interviewee at ease.

Interviewing often had an unexpected benefit, too. As I did more interviews, my spoken English improved naturally, and I no longer needed to pay for conversation lessons on the Engoo platform. So I was able to save the cost of those lessons.

3. My precious teammate, Forhad

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\n\n

It would be a lie to say all of this was possible through my effort alone. The reason I've been able to carry this journey this far is that it would have been impossible without my first teammate and dear friend, Forhad.

My first meeting with Forhad is still vivid. I interviewed him in the early days, when I still wasn't good at English interviews, and just a few words in I had the feeling that this guy was different. Perhaps thanks to his experience dealing with many US clients, he was at ease and witty in everything. What I especially liked was his negotiating ability — Forhad proposed a salary that no Bangladeshi designer would normally have imagined asking for. Watching that, I became convinced this was someone who knew how to sell, so I offered him a high salary, and that judgment was right. I can't really imagine how I'd have run the team without him. Forhad is responsible, honest, and knows how to work like a professional.

He even got married during his time on the team. To make sure Forhad and his family can grow financially secure and happy, I have to give it everything to grow this company.

4. Something more important than salary and benefits

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\n\n

Most of you reading this are probably reading it with this in mind. (I went into Bangladesh with the same mindset, after all.) How can I run a development team at low cost? How can I save money? Business is reality in the end, so I understand why you'd look at it strictly through a cost/revenue lens.

But the moment I start thinking of my team members as a means to save money, they start seeing me as nothing more than a machine that pays salaries. I overlooked this badly at first, and now it's what I pay the most attention to. Through trial and error, I learned that people aren't moved by money alone. I'll cover this more in the next post.

P.S.

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\n\n

Yesterday I set up a Fiverr account. Now I have to compete not with Korean firms but with Indian and Pakistani development shops. It won't be easy, but I believe that if I keep giving it my best, a way will appear.

Potential (포텐셜) is a partner that builds the path to global markets alongside Korean and Asian founders. If you're curious about building a global team, feel free to reach out anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:02:17.954Z",{"_15":424,"_32":425,"_17":426,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":427,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":428,"_44":52},553,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/579639f7-bdca-409c-8821-a4d9d4c588f7-english-phobia-global-agency-first-hire-naver.png","english-phobia-global-agency-first-hire-naver-75847","Original Naver image - english-phobia-global-agency-first-hire","2026-06-04T01:31:39.227Z",{"_15":430,"_17":431,"_19":432,"_21":104,"_23":433,"_25":26,"_27":434,"_42":435,"_44":52,"_29":436},12,"What the Best Global CEOs Actually Do","Lessons from cold-requesting 30-minute meetings with South Asian founders — and from The Goal and The Leadership Pipeline.","what-great-global-ceos-do","

Of everything I could do today, what's the highest-impact move? Lately, the answer is a 30-minute meeting with a global CEO. Here's what I've learned cold-requesting meetings with South Asian founders — plus two books, The Goal and The Leadership Pipeline.

I finally got some free time — maybe the first in eight months. Thanks to my mother-in-law and my wife giving me a break, I'm sitting in a café for the first time in ages. I read a lot, and thought a lot. I want to spend one hour of this (genuinely rare) time off writing down what's happened recently — following YR's advice to make as much content as I can.

A 100% acceptance rate, regardless of company size

I've started beginning each day with this question: of all the things I could do or choose today, what's the highest-impact one? There are several candidates, but lately I mostly do 30-minute meetings with CEOs.

Literally — I reach out to CEOs and request a meeting. Can you spare 30 minutes? I've tried it various ways: Google Meet, in-person office visits. And remarkably, regardless of company size, I've had a 100% acceptance rate so far. I tend to reach out to South Asian founders (India, Bangladesh). Maybe it's that a Korean is a novelty, and maybe it's that most other founders hate the idea of approaching hat-in-hand, so few people do this.

The world is full of formidable founders. Nasir, who built his design agency to ₩10B (~$7.2M) in two years. Divij, an Indian founder in his 20s who hit $50K MRR six months after launching. Rasiul, who runs the \"Naver of Bangladesh\" with 800+ Bangladeshi developers.

What the masters have in common — they share knowledge freely

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\n\n

The thing these people had in common: they were sincere about sharing their knowledge.

Nasir told me the US market isn't necessarily the answer — \"we're focused on the Middle East; Lukas, why don't you take a proper second look at the Korean market?\"
Raisul spent a full hour, whiteboard and all, teaching me how an agency can scale up.
Divij told me the agency business grows bigger by narrowing the market, not widening it.

The world is wide and the masters are many — and just doing business in Korea, with its relatively strong currency, made me reflect on how easy I have it. Naturally, India and Bangladesh have none of Korea's startup grants or TIPS-style programs; most people earn their dollars from a standing start.

A side note from these meetings: asking for help is a great way to start a relationship. I think it's from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People — every human has a desire to feel important. Whether it's a homeless man at Seoul Station or a global CEO, the question \"tell me the best and worst decisions of your life\" has the power to make the other person feel important. (And honestly, I do think of them as important.)

High-impact book 1 — The Goal

It's such a shame I only read this book now. Beyond the truth it contains, the way it makes that truth easy for an ordinary person to grasp is genuinely admirable. Here's one example from its story.

There's an army unit. Say the soldiers march at an average speed of 3 km/h. If they have to march a total of 30 km, when does the unit reach its destination?

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\n\n

Since I've posed it as a problem, you can probably guess the simple answer \"10 hours\" isn't it. The members average 3 km/h, so let's assume they walk somewhere between 2 km/h and 4 km/h. The lead soldier probably arrives in 10 hours. But what about the second, the third, the very last? Anyone who's actually marched in a unit knows the column stretches out — no matter who ends up at the back.

For example:

1st (4 km/h)
2nd (3.5 km/h)
3rd (3 km/h)
4th (1.9 km/h)
...
Last (0.5 km/h)

Unless you overtake the column, you can't move faster than the person in front of you. What this means is that the speed of the very last person determines the speed of the whole team. And to raise the team's overall speed, you have to figure out how to raise the slowest person's speed. There are several ways:

Walk two columns abreast instead of single file.
Move the slowest person to the front.
Tether front and back so everyone moves at a set pace.

The Goal introduces the bottleneck phenomenon that arises from statistical fluctuation (2–4 km/h) and dependent events (you can't go faster than the person ahead). And it frames the CEO's most important role as solving that bottleneck.

Apply this to our company. Objectively, our weakest team is the backend team. Which means: no matter how well the frontend team performs, if we don't solve the backend team's API-development speed, the whole team's project speed stays put. You have to define the bottleneck and fix it.

Basketball business vs. soccer business

$\"\"$

\n\n

Another book I'm reading (The Leadership Pipeline) has a point worth connecting here. The author says the world's businesses can be split into two types: basketball businesses and soccer businesses.

Basketball

Scoring is high, around 90 points.
It's common for a single player to take the ball coast-to-coast and score themselves.
The top 2–3 players who can manufacture a basket no matter how they're defended are crucial.
Having 1–3 star players on the team matters enormously.

Soccer

Scoring is low, 2–3 goals.
A goal takes 7–8 passes to set up.
The floor — the level of your weakest player — is what matters.

For the SaaS industry, where a handful of people create huge impact, the basketball star-player approach fits. But for a company like ours, the soccer approach is right. There are many similar analogies — \"a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,\" and so on.

High-impact book 2 — The Leadership Pipeline

$\"\"$

\n\n

Remarkably, two masters recommended this book to me at the same time. One was Raisul, mentioned above; the other is a friend who practically carries our company. Both told me I really needed this book, so I read it — and it's teaching me exactly what I need right now. I think it's the first book I've ever read while taking notes.

I'm reading slowly because I'm chewing on every bit. But in the simplest terms, it explains leadership across several layers:

Leader of Self
Leader of Others
Leader of Leaders
Leader of Function
Leader of Business

It describes the difficulty of moving leadership from one layer to the next, and shows that each stage needs a systematic approach. Because it's exactly what I'm struggling with, it went straight in. I'll actually experiment with what the book lays out and share more of what I learn.

I have many more books to recommend, but the post is getting long, so I'll stop here.

Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion development partner for Korean and Asian founders building toward Western markets. We fold what we learn from the world's best operators back into how we run our own team.

","2026-06-04T02:01:33.092Z",{"_15":437,"_32":438,"_17":439,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":440,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":441,"_44":52},537,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/ba92a916-89df-4505-b2a0-f12fda91da31-what-great-global-ceos-do-naver.png","what-great-global-ceos-do-naver-64698","Original Naver image - what-great-global-ceos-do","2026-06-04T01:31:33.046Z",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":443,"_63":444},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[445,446,447],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":450,"_17":451,"_27":452,"_82":453,"_42":454,"_44":52},42,"Why We Started Our Agency in Bangladesh | Potential","Eight failed products, an accidental talent for shipping fast, and a bet on Bangladesh as IT outsourcing's next frontier. The origin story of Potential.","방글라데시 개발, IT 아웃소싱, 개발 외주 창업, Bangladesh dev, IT outsourcing, 글로벌 개발팀, 소프트웨어 외주","2026-06-04T01:28:53.220Z","2026-06-04T02:02:23.795Z",{"_15":282,"_17":283,"_19":284,"_21":104,"_23":285,"_25":26,"_27":286,"_29":457,"_46":458,"_48":459,"_50":479,"_75":485,"_77":486,"_42":287,"_44":52},{"_15":289,"_32":290,"_17":291,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":292,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":293,"_44":52},[],[460,462,464,477],{"_15":323,"_17":324,"_19":325,"_21":118,"_23":326,"_25":26,"_27":327,"_42":328,"_44":52,"_29":461},{"_15":330,"_32":331,"_17":332,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":333,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":334,"_44":52},{"_15":295,"_17":296,"_19":297,"_21":298,"_23":299,"_25":26,"_27":300,"_42":301,"_44":52,"_29":463},{"_15":303,"_32":304,"_17":305,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":306,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":307,"_44":52},{"_15":465,"_17":466,"_19":467,"_21":89,"_23":468,"_25":26,"_27":469,"_42":470,"_44":52,"_29":471},19,"Why We Only Take On the Hardest Software Projects","There's a time to make money, and a time to build capability. We chose the second.","why-we-only-take-hard-projects","

Most dev shops would never take these projects at our price. We take them on purpose. Right now, building our team's capability matters more than making money — so we deliberately bid on the hardest, most communication-heavy work we can find. Here's why.

Like most founders, March and April were a forced march. Barely sleeping because of a newborn, buried in work, with no room left in my head to read or write. Yesterday my mother-in-law watched our son, and for the first time in two months I woke up with a clear mind. Times like this are exactly when I need to write down what's been happening at Potential. As always, a lot has.

The projects we're running right now

$\"\"$

\n\n

The work we're handling at Potential is the kind no outsourcing shop would touch at this price. A quick tour:

Company A

$\"\"$

\n\n

A SaaS that talks to an AI board mounted on forklifts, with a per-operator dashboard showing real-time status. The app has to catch signals coming off the AI board and push them over sockets, in real time, to each tenant's dashboard. That means working closely with the hardware engineer, understanding how the hardware communicates, and designing an architecture that fits a multi-tenant SaaS.

Company B

We had to communicate over WebRTC with a Jetson board embedded inside a CCTV unit. You have to understand how WebRTC actually works, and push alerts to a farm owner's phone based on what the camera detects. There are several ways to control the CCTV, and since the camera ships with its own AI engine, this again meant tight coordination with the camera engineer. In short — very hard.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Company C

A used-car marketplace. When we started, I had no idea the database design for a used-car platform required this much thought. Once you account for manufacturer, product line, model, sub-model, grade, and sub-grade, you cross 12,000 possible combinations — plus hundreds of vehicle options. The condition inspection alone has more than 80 fields. On top of that, you have to integrate several third-party APIs: feed in a plate number, pull the car's data, and parse it to fit our server exactly. Insurance history, the same. Brutally hard.

$\"\"$

\n\n

And here's what we charge for it

If you knew what we charge to build these, you'd be shocked. Most of them land around ₩20M (~US$14,500). (Other agencies will understand better than anyone how unrealistic that price is.) That's a big part of why so many of our clients want to keep working with us.

When I said I was starting a software company in Bangladesh, everyone said the same things — I heard them again just last week:

$\"\"$

\n\n

\"You can barely communicate with Koreans — you think you can communicate with foreigners?\"
\"Project management matters more than the actual development.\"
\"100% remote with flexible hours? You really think that works?\"

Why we choose the hard ones on purpose

$\"\"$

\n\n

No matter how I answered those questions, people stayed unconvinced — so I decided the fastest argument was to show, not tell. We deliberately bid only on projects our team has never done before, the ones that look like a communication nightmare. We could make more money churning through easy work, but right now building the organization's capability matters more than the revenue. We have to deliver hard projects cheaper, faster, and honestly. That's the only way we'll ever compete with the shops in Vietnam and India.

Maybe it's the Spartan training of these past few months, but communication inside the team is improving fast. Our English levels are all over the map, yet the team has reached the point where half a sentence is enough to be understood.

The less I sleep, the more the team's level climbs. Better engineers keep joining, and their suggestions are changing large parts of how the company runs. We also closed the deal with the U.S. company I mentioned in an earlier post — which makes Potential, officially, a company that exports software to America. The company is still a mess, but this is how we move: one step at a time.

$\"\"$

\n\n

In the end, three principles

You don't need a brilliant mind for this business. You only need to remember three principles:

$\"\"$

\n\n

Build it cheap, fast, and honest, and clients will love you.
Fail to, and you'll go under.

For Korean and Asian founders expanding West, Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion partner that takes on the hardest problems alongside you.

","2026-06-04T02:01:56.503Z",{"_15":472,"_32":473,"_17":474,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":475,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":476,"_44":52},544,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/170c698a-d245-42d1-99a4-0fe574962f4b-why-we-only-take-hard-projects-naver.png","why-we-only-take-hard-projects-naver-64245","Original Naver image - why-we-only-take-hard-projects","2026-06-04T01:31:35.862Z",{"_15":309,"_17":310,"_19":311,"_21":312,"_23":313,"_25":26,"_27":314,"_42":315,"_44":52,"_29":478},{"_15":317,"_32":318,"_17":319,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":320,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":321,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":480,"_63":481},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[482,483,484],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":487,"_17":488,"_27":489,"_82":490,"_42":491,"_44":52},41,"Why Dev Agencies Only Build Others' Apps | Potential","Dev outsourcing is a 'homework' business — built to do exactly what's asked, no more. Here's why that structure produces order-takers, not partners.","앱 개발 외주, 외주 개발사, dev agency, app outsourcing, 개발 외주, software outsourcing, 개발 파트너","2026-06-04T01:28:42.469Z",{"_15":309,"_17":310,"_19":311,"_21":312,"_23":313,"_25":26,"_27":314,"_29":493,"_46":494,"_48":495,"_50":504,"_75":510,"_77":511,"_42":315,"_44":52},{"_15":317,"_32":318,"_17":319,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":320,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":321,"_44":52},[],[496,498,500,502],{"_15":282,"_17":283,"_19":284,"_21":104,"_23":285,"_25":26,"_27":286,"_42":287,"_44":52,"_29":497},{"_15":289,"_32":290,"_17":291,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":292,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":293,"_44":52},{"_15":465,"_17":466,"_19":467,"_21":89,"_23":468,"_25":26,"_27":469,"_42":470,"_44":52,"_29":499},{"_15":472,"_32":473,"_17":474,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":475,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":476,"_44":52},{"_15":295,"_17":296,"_19":297,"_21":298,"_23":299,"_25":26,"_27":300,"_42":301,"_44":52,"_29":501},{"_15":303,"_32":304,"_17":305,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":306,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":307,"_44":52},{"_15":267,"_17":268,"_19":269,"_21":270,"_23":271,"_25":26,"_27":272,"_42":347,"_44":52,"_29":503},{"_15":274,"_32":275,"_17":276,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":277,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":278,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":505,"_63":506},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[507,508,509],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":512,"_17":513,"_27":514,"_82":515,"_42":516,"_44":52},40,"Outsourcing a Platform Build: The Real Risk | Potential","Most dev shops can code a platform but have never grown one. Here's the chicken-and-egg problem they miss — and why it sinks marketplace MVPs.","플랫폼 개발, 플랫폼 외주, platform development, 양면 마켓플레이스, two-sided marketplace, 닭과 알, 외주 개발사","2026-06-04T01:28:33.098Z",{"_15":295,"_17":296,"_19":297,"_21":298,"_23":299,"_25":26,"_27":300,"_29":518,"_46":519,"_48":520,"_50":529,"_75":535,"_77":536,"_42":301,"_44":52},{"_15":303,"_32":304,"_17":305,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":306,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":307,"_44":52},[],[521,523,525,527],{"_15":323,"_17":324,"_19":325,"_21":118,"_23":326,"_25":26,"_27":327,"_42":328,"_44":52,"_29":522},{"_15":330,"_32":331,"_17":332,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":333,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":334,"_44":52},{"_15":465,"_17":466,"_19":467,"_21":89,"_23":468,"_25":26,"_27":469,"_42":470,"_44":52,"_29":524},{"_15":472,"_32":473,"_17":474,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":475,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":476,"_44":52},{"_15":309,"_17":310,"_19":311,"_21":312,"_23":313,"_25":26,"_27":314,"_42":315,"_44":52,"_29":526},{"_15":317,"_32":318,"_17":319,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":320,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":321,"_44":52},{"_15":282,"_17":283,"_19":284,"_21":104,"_23":285,"_25":26,"_27":286,"_42":287,"_44":52,"_29":528},{"_15":289,"_32":290,"_17":291,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":292,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":293,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":530,"_63":531},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[532,533,534],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":16,"_17":537,"_27":538,"_82":539,"_42":540,"_44":52},"Outsourcing Your MVP: The Hidden Trap | Potential","Why MVPs balloon when you outsource them, how small an MVP should really be, and what to watch for before you sign with a dev agency.","MVP 개발, 외주 개발사, MVP outsourcing, minimum viable product, 스타트업 검증, dev agency, 앱 외주","2026-06-04T01:28:25.926Z",{"_15":417,"_17":418,"_19":419,"_21":392,"_23":420,"_25":26,"_27":421,"_29":542,"_46":543,"_48":544,"_50":553,"_75":559,"_77":560,"_42":422,"_44":52},{"_15":424,"_32":425,"_17":426,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":427,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":428,"_44":52},[],[545,547,549,551],{"_15":374,"_17":375,"_19":376,"_21":377,"_23":378,"_25":26,"_27":379,"_42":455,"_44":52,"_29":546},{"_15":381,"_32":382,"_17":383,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":384,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":385,"_44":52},{"_15":403,"_17":404,"_19":405,"_21":406,"_23":407,"_25":26,"_27":408,"_42":409,"_44":52,"_29":548},{"_15":411,"_32":412,"_17":413,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":414,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":415,"_44":52},{"_15":430,"_17":431,"_19":432,"_21":104,"_23":433,"_25":26,"_27":434,"_42":435,"_44":52,"_29":550},{"_15":437,"_32":438,"_17":439,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":440,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":441,"_44":52},{"_15":389,"_17":390,"_19":391,"_21":392,"_23":393,"_25":26,"_27":394,"_42":395,"_44":52,"_29":552},{"_15":397,"_32":398,"_17":399,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":400,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":401,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":554,"_63":555},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[556,557,558],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":129,"_17":561,"_27":562,"_82":563,"_42":564,"_44":52},"English-Phobic Founder, First Global Hire | Potential","A founder who feared speaking English built a global dev team in Bangladesh. An honest record of the first hire — and what mattered more than salary.","global hiring, 글로벌 채용, 방글라데시 외주, English phobia, remote team, 첫 채용, global expansion, 글로벌 진출","2026-06-04T01:28:15.998Z",{"_15":566,"_17":567,"_19":568,"_21":104,"_23":569,"_25":26,"_27":570,"_29":571,"_46":577,"_48":578,"_50":631,"_75":637,"_77":638,"_42":643,"_44":52},27,"Why Agencies Struggle to Scale: The Marketing, Onboarding, and Dev Flywheel","An agency only scales when every team meshes like gears. Here's how we broke ours down.","how-we-disrupted-agency-pricing","

I'd heard endlessly that agencies are hard to scale, and now that I'm living it, it feels even harder than the warnings suggested. The reason is that it only works when every single element meshes together perfectly, like gears in a machine. Let me break down how our three teams — marketing, onboarding, and development — interlock.

The marketing team

The marketing team has to produce quality content to make our existence known. It also has to find niche markets that need software, make them a compelling offer, and earn an interested reply.

Here's how we actually do it. There are countless real estate agents in Dubai. These agents have plenty of money, but the websites and software they use are often outdated. So our marketing team shows them the custom software and websites we could build for them, and makes an offer. The team's goal is to win as many positive replies from Dubai agents as possible.

The strategy above is the work of ANIK, whom I'm genuinely proud of.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The onboarding team

A Dubai real estate agent emails us: \"Hello, is this Potential? I received this email and I'm interested — could we talk?\"

From this point on, the onboarding team has to put care into every detail: email replies, chat replies, Google Meet calls. The team's goal is to deliver a proposal and quote the client will love, and to hear a \"Yes.\"

The development team

There are two ways to earn ₩100M (~$72,500) a month. One is to raise our technical level high enough to win a single ₩100M project. Early on, I honestly thought that was the only way. But once I started doing the work myself, I realized there was another. The second way is to raise development speed. If we can compress a ₩3.3M (~$2,400) mini-project from a week down to a day, we can hit ₩100M by winning thirty of those ₩3.3M projects.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The development team's goals are complex, with a lot to attend to:

Internal R&D to raise development speed
Excellent designers
Stronger internal manuals for easy handoff
Studying new technologies

There's an enormous amount of ground to cover, but we're focused on the first one.

The module team: the power of building things in advance

For example, we build many versions of sign-up pages and features in advance, from design through to code. Designers design many pages ahead of time, and developers turn everything into modules — from simple UI like buttons and text to API calls and state management. (We have a Flutter package we use only internally.) That lets us cut development time and deliver software to clients at a more reasonable cost.

The module team described above is led by Abdur, whom I'm proud of (for the second time in this post).

$\"\"$

\n\n

There's a metric we're proud of: our onboarding-to-close rate is very high. When we send a quote to clients, most of them say yes. We're able to propose a reasonable price, and clients like that price. (A lower price doesn't mean lower quality, so don't misread it.) We plan to keep refining our modules so we can deliver software at an even more reasonable cost.

And an honest reckoning

I failed to hit this year's KPI. The personal goal I'd set was ₩100M a month. I could have done better and didn't, which leaves me with plenty of regret. There's only one way a not-so-smart boss wins in the market: be diligent, ask people smarter than you relentlessly, and actually listen to what they say.

Potential (포텐셜) is a partner that designs the path to global markets alongside Korean and Asian founders. If you need software done right at a reasonable cost, reach out anytime.

",{"_15":572,"_32":573,"_17":574,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":575,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":576,"_44":52},552,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/b4ad1dcd-f153-4f41-b965-c8054df54770-how-we-disrupted-agency-pricing-naver.png","how-we-disrupted-agency-pricing-naver-42770","Original Naver image - how-we-disrupted-agency-pricing","2026-06-04T01:31:38.931Z",[],[579,592,605,618],{"_15":580,"_17":581,"_19":582,"_21":270,"_23":583,"_25":26,"_27":584,"_42":585,"_44":52,"_29":586},26,"What a Software Agency and a Handmade Cake Shop Have in Common","Our team breaks past five concurrent projects. Here's the bottleneck — and the two ways out of it.","software-agency-and-cake-shop","

This week was relentless. New hires, managing development projects, meetings with new clients — work was piling up faster than I could clear it. When there's so much to do that it overwhelms me, I tend to hesitate before starting anything at all. And it's precisely at moments like these that I most need to organize my thoughts, so I'm carving out a sliver of a busy schedule to write.

A day that starts at 3 a.m.

My day starts at 3 a.m. After I feed the newborn who's woken in the early hours and finally get them back to sleep, I'm granted the one quiet stretch of the day — about five hours to gather my thoughts. I usually spend it writing, or thinking through what to do next and how.

The team breaks past five concurrent projects

$\"\"$

\n\n

My biggest preoccupation lately is: how do we grow the organization's capacity to take on projects? After watching closely for the past month, the pattern is clear — our team starts to break down once we have more than five projects running at once. Right now, 100% of our clients are Korean companies, so for the time being I have no choice but to manage everything myself. When a new project comes in, I break the work into tasks, translate them into English, and hand them to the team; when issues arise, I communicate with the client directly. Since I only have 24 hours in a day, I can't take on more than five projects. And hiring isn't a simple fix either — finding a team member who can mediate between Korean clients and a global team is genuinely hard. The very ability that let me run a one-man show across development, sales, design, marketing, and management is now acting as a bottleneck just when it's time to scale.

The vicious cycle runs like this:

Projects exceed five.
I'm consumed by management.
Sales and new clients inevitably get neglected (in fact, taking on more clients is no longer possible).
Build requests keep coming, and I have no choice but to turn them down (which hurts).
Growth stalls.

What decision should I make as a leader?

So what decision should I make as a leader here? Two options come to mind:

$\"\"$

\n\n

Hire someone to share my role mediating between Korean clients and the global team.
Shift our client base toward global customers.

I'm currently focused on option 2, but since I can't simply turn away the steady stream of build requests from Korean clients, I can't ignore option 1 either. How we get through this stage will likely shape the company's future direction in a big way. Every single day there's so much to do that I can barely breathe — but even so, I keep trying to take one step forward at a time.

Facing requests that weren't in the spec

Clients sometimes ask for things that weren't in the original plan. Since they don't have a technical background, they make these requests assuming \"this much should be quick\" — which I completely understand. But when the request involves significant effort, I often feel genuinely conflicted about how to handle it. By the book, you simply cut it off: \"This isn't in the requirements, so we'll skip it.\" But human relationships don't work that cleanly — especially in an agency business, where customer satisfaction has to be treated as life or death.

The chart dashboard this client asked for was exactly such a case. It required cleaning and shaping data by month, by order channel, and by order status — a finicky job. I'd replied over KakaoTalk that it would be difficult, but something about it nagged at me from the night before, so I've decided to just set aside the weekend and build it for them.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The handmade cake shop's dilemma

These days I often feel like Potential is running a handmade cake shop. We've succeeded, to a degree, at making cakes that are affordable, beautiful, and delicious. Customers are satisfied, and the ones who come once come back. But a handmade cake shop can only make so many cakes in a day. Potential can only make five cakes a day. There must be a way somewhere to grow a handmade cake shop into a Paris Baguette — I just can't quite see it yet.

Potential (포텐셜) is a partner that thinks through the path to global markets alongside Korean and Asian founders. I hope this is a small hint for someone at a similar stage.

","2026-06-04T02:02:15.105Z",{"_15":587,"_32":588,"_17":589,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":590,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":591,"_44":52},551,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/231f8b49-5028-49bf-837b-d33b96141896-software-agency-and-cake-shop-naver.png","software-agency-and-cake-shop-naver-83710","Original Naver image - software-agency-and-cake-shop","2026-06-04T01:31:38.541Z",{"_15":593,"_17":594,"_19":595,"_21":118,"_23":596,"_25":26,"_27":597,"_42":598,"_44":52,"_29":599},22,"My First Layoff, a New Team, and a First Trip Abroad","What a first-time team lead learned from the decision he most wanted to delay.","first-layoff-new-team-first-trip","

I've been buried, no time to breathe. My last post was on January 7th, and I haven't written since. Writing used to pour out the moment I touched the keyboard; today I keep hesitating, which tells me just how long it's been. So much has happened that I don't know where to start. Still, let me get it down somehow — I have to record my thoughts and experiences as honestly as I can, so that next year's version of me can look back through this.

1. My first layoff

It was a hard decision. Looking back, it's one I should have made last November, yet I put it off for almost three months before I could finally act. Running projects with a limited team, I'd gone a long time without reviewing one teammate's code. Then one day a problem surfaced and I had to look at it myself — and, as I'd feared, it wasn't in good shape. I had two options:

Give them time to grow and change.
Let them go right away.

At that moment, option 2 was the right call — but there were a few reasons I couldn't take it. First, I'm a soft-hearted person and a rookie team lead with almost no management experience. Second, this person was our team's very first employee. Third, I was afraid that letting someone go the moment performance dipped would breed a climate of fear inside the team.

So I chose option 1, and I asked the team for advice. Here's the situation — what's the right thing for me to do as a leader? One of our senior engineers volunteered to take it on. \"Let me try to coach them — give me a few weeks. If nothing's changed after that, you can act.\" That colleague genuinely went all in, hand-building a clean architecture and walking them through it step by step. Sadly, it didn't translate into change.

In the end, they left the company. In Bangladesh there's roughly a one-month notice period. Since this was my first time through it, there's so much I don't know. I'm not even sure what we should wrap up together during that month of notice. Goodbyes matter as much as hellos, and I don't yet know how to close things out professionally. As always, I'm surrounded by things I don't know. One thing is clear, though: I should have faced it honestly, and far earlier.

2. A full pipeline

$\"\"$

\n\n

Projects are running at full capacity. The founders who'd trusted us before kindly renewed — thanks to how well the team performed. But there are plenty of problems too. With the pipeline maxed out, I'm feeling the limits of a labor-intensive business vividly:

The pipeline fills up.
New projects come in, and we have to turn them down.
Marketing falls by the wayside.
An existing project ends.
A gap opens in the pipeline.
Anxiety sets in, so we restart marketing.
Back to step 1.

Breaking this loop means hiring more — but hiring raises risk, and the bigger the headcount, the more organizational inefficiency creeps in. I've never done this, so I don't know the right move. Whenever I feel that way I turn to Andrew Grove's High Output Management, and I always find a hint.

3. New teammates

There's a scene in High Output Management. A vendor sells fried eggs. If making a fried egg has several steps, at which step should you run your quality check?

Buy eggs from the supplier.
Sort the eggs by expiration date.
Heat oil in the pan.
Crack the egg.
Flip the egg.
Move it to the plate.

Now say you're hiring a developer. With multiple stages — 1) resume screen, 2) coding test, 3) team-lead interview, 4) founder interview — at which stage should you invest the most effort, i.e., at which stage should you filter out the most people, to call it an efficient hiring process?

$\"\"$

\n\n

Grove insists, unconditionally, that filtering early — when little processing has happened yet — is what matters. The further along the process, the more resources you've sunk in. Nothing is more wasteful than \"inspecting every finished fried egg\" or \"putting every applicant through a CEO interview,\" so he recommends running the most rigorous quality check at the very first stage of every process.

Taking that lesson to heart, I poured effort into the resume screen and stopped just collecting CVs — I issued a take-home assignment at the same time. The harder the assignment, the fewer people applied. But that meant we only reviewed excellent candidates, and in the end we could run high-quality interviews efficiently with a small, strong shortlist.

4. First trip: Dhaka

At last I'm going to Dhaka to meet the team. Since my wife is carrying childcare solo at home, I can't be away long. I have three days, and with no direct flights, about two of them will be spent at Guangzhou airport or on the plane.

Preparing for this Dhaka trip, I learned for the first time just how expensive a workshop is. My heart used to lurch every time my wife suggested a hotel staycation — and now, trying to book this many hotel rooms at once, the number on the screen felt unreal. I hope the company grows fast enough that we can do workshops without worrying about money.

Either way, I'm really looking forward to this visit. I'll go, see a lot, and learn a lot.

From building a team to protecting it and growing it strong — all on the road West — Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion partner that walks the whole journey with you.

","2026-06-04T02:02:04.108Z",{"_15":600,"_32":601,"_17":602,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":603,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":604,"_44":52},547,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/a0b3bf64-e51a-4f43-955c-d4a619b062c5-first-layoff-new-team-first-trip-naver.png","first-layoff-new-team-first-trip-naver-14539","Original Naver image - first-layoff-new-team-first-trip","2026-06-04T01:31:36.797Z",{"_15":606,"_17":607,"_19":608,"_21":89,"_23":609,"_25":26,"_27":610,"_42":611,"_44":52,"_29":612},23,"We're Hiring Career-Break Designers — 100% Remote, Flexible Hours","Fully remote, flexible work is a win for the company, the team, and society.","hiring-career-break-designers-remote","

We're hiring designers whose careers were interrupted by parenting — fully remote, flexible hours. From the day I founded this company, I built it around 100% remote work and flexible hours (start when you want, finish when you want). There are three reasons I made that choice.

1. It's good for the company

With 100% remote work, a company can hire talent anywhere in the world.

For example, our teammates in Bangladesh live in three different cities — Dhaka, Sylhet, and Chattogram — each roughly 500 km apart. They've never once met in person, yet everything runs smoothly. If I'd targeted only one neighborhood (Gangnam) in one country (Korea), I could never have found teammates as good as the ones I have now.

2. It's good for the team

Teammates can reclaim the time they used to burn on commuting. Korean office workers spend an average of about three hours a day commuting; multiply that by 20 workdays and you get a staggering 60 hours a month. Those 60 hours can go to self-development or to family. I'd value 60 hours at at least ₩1,000,000 (~US$725).

$\"\"$

\n\n

Young people outside the capital don't have to strain to move to Seoul. There are no jobs in the provinces — but for those without roots in Seoul, the cost of living there is steep (a young person needs over ₩1,000,000 a month just to live independently in Seoul). If we can offer a way to keep living in the provinces and still work, those teammates can save at least ₩1,000,000 a month.

Just by changing the way we work, we created over ₩2,000,000 of added value a month. If a company's leader can trust the team, I thought a small company like ours had every reason to take the bet.

Once, I asked a teammate what they liked about working here, and the most common answers were:

No more hellish morning commute.
They could juggle childcare and work at the same time.

3. I needed it myself

I started preparing Potential in earnest in July, with a baby due in September. To run a startup and parent at the same time, 100% remote work with flexible hours looked like the only answer.

Over the past four months of building the company while raising a child, I've realized that in parenting, raw hours matter — but the freedom to adjust your schedule for the unexpected matters even more. When a child gets sick, or daycare goes on break, annual leave and vacation days alone can't cover it. And even when they technically can, you feel the weight of your coworkers' eyes. In my twenties I believed the nuclear or single-person household was the ideal form; after having a child, I've become an evangelist for the extended family. In parenting, having reserves who can step in at any moment is genuinely vital.

$\"\"$

\n\n

In our home, my wife currently carries the childcare solo while I work from home and help out in the gaps. Even with her handling it full-time, the reassurance that I can step in at any moment helps enormously. (She needs to use the bathroom too, and to step out for a short walk.)

So — we're hiring career-break designers

Juggling parenting and work, even briefly, taught me a lot. It made me think about how many mothers have had no choice but to give up their careers for childcare. (Since fathers' incomes are usually higher, it's the mothers who tend to give it up.) At the same time, I found it heartbreaking that so much exceptional talent goes unused because of a career interruption — extraordinary ability, unable to be put to social use, buried somewhere in the provinces.

So we want to hire designers (living outside the capital) whose careers were interrupted by parenting. The work is 100% remote with flexible hours, and it's completely fine if you can only work up to four hours a day. If you know someone like this, I'd be grateful for an introduction — reach Dongsub Shin (contact@potentialai.com). It's good for our company, good for the designer, and good for society.

Working with great talent wherever they happen to be — that's how Potential (포텐셜), the global-expansion partner for Korean founders going West, gets things done.

","2026-06-04T02:02:04.751Z",{"_15":613,"_32":614,"_17":615,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":616,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":617,"_44":52},548,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/b5d24d32-184d-4c96-93d2-07faf54e3c48-hiring-career-break-designers-remote-naver.png","hiring-career-break-designers-remote-naver-14418","Original Naver image - hiring-career-break-designers-remote","2026-06-04T01:31:37.194Z",{"_15":162,"_17":619,"_19":620,"_21":621,"_23":622,"_25":26,"_27":623,"_42":624,"_44":52,"_29":625},"Why Am I So Bad at Hiring? A Bootstrapped Founder's Confession","After six years of bootstrapping, why the first real hire is the hardest wall a solo founder ever hits.","4 min","why-am-i-so-bad-at-hiring","

It might look frustrating to watch a leader make foolish attempts day after day, but I want to write down as many of my trials and errors as I can. After six years of nothing but bootstrapping, here's why I hesitate so badly in front of my first real hire — and how the word \"leverage\" finally changed my mind.

The Feeling of Being Frantically Busy

Since I posted a job listing on JobKorea, a lot more people have been reading the blog. As always, March and April were dizzyingly busy. Not busy in a smart way — busy in a frantic, scrambling way — which gave me a strong sense that something was seriously off.

The client base is growing, but I haven't built the internal systems to handle this many clients. Unexpected bugs kept piling up, holes started opening in sales, and the internal systems were threadbare. Mulling over what the problem was, I called the mentor I always turn to. His answer was simple: \"Hire a Korean.\" Other founders seem to do this so effortlessly — why is it so hard for me? I went to another founder, a woman I look up to. Her answer, again: \"Grow a little Dongsub.\" Deep down, maybe I already knew the answer. So why was I hesitating?

Solopreneurship, the Inertia of Bootstrapping

For the last six years I've bootstrapped, nonstop. No government grants, no outside investment. As a result, the idea of growing while running a deficit doesn't compute for me — it's a frightening approach I can barely even imagine. For a bootstrapper, failing to hit break-even meant my family going hungry, which was the same as the business not being viable at all.

This approach has its pros and cons. The upside is you survive like a weed; the downside is that growth is correspondingly slow. Say there's about ₩50M (~$36K) sitting in the company account — money I earned with blood and sweat. That's enough to pay a teammate a full year's salary even if the company earns nothing at all. It's also 25 months of living expenses for my household. Or one Grandeur sedan. These thoughts tangle together and make hiring hard.

$\"\"$

\n\n

I knew I had to break through this wall to reach the next step, yet I couldn't bring myself to act. The way I see it, hiring isn't a simple transaction of company money for an employee's time. (Even more so if they have a family.) It's them betting the freshest years of their twenties and thirties on our company. When I ask myself, \"Would I take a job at a company like ours, at this salary?\" and even I can't easily say yes, I kept hesitating. (They say founders with the MBTI \"F\" type struggle to grow companies — maybe this is what they mean, ha.)

If You Could Make 1 + 1 Bigger Than 2 — Leverage

To overcome this inertia that's blocking my growth, there's a word I'm fixated on lately: leverage. The word carries an unsavory connotation of using or exploiting others, so I shied away from it too — but my thinking has changed a lot recently.

There's a designer we regularly ask for help. She does excellent work. Suppose a ₩20M (~$14.5K) project comes in. We could grind through the design ourselves without her help. In that case our revenue is 20M and the designer's is 0. Or, instead, we hand the design to her and take on another project we're good at. If we pay her ₩2M (~$1,450) per project, our revenue becomes ₩36M and the designer's becomes ₩4M. Everyone gains.

You Can Do Global Business Even If Your English Is Bad

You can do global business even if your English is bad. I know because I've done it. Recently I had a meeting with a UK software development firm. If I'd approached it defensively, the way I did as a rookie founder — \"Are they trying to steal our company's information?\" — no one would have gained anything. But the UK firm wants Korean clients, and we want UK clients. Both firms have enough experience to know exactly how much early portfolio work matters. So I made this proposal:

$\"\"$

\n\n

\n
We'll connect you with Korean clients — no commission needed. In return, route the low-margin UK clients that come to you over to us. There's got to be a direction where we both win.
\n

And so we agreed to work together.

What's the Direction Where Everyone Wins From a Hire?

To hire successfully, a founder needs a ready answer to: \"Elsewhere you'd get 1, but with us you get 1 + something.\" The more tangible and less pie-in-the-sky, the better. What is our \"something\"? What can I offer? In the end, is it just salary?

Since I started hiring, I've met many people — many of them more capable than me. Our salary isn't attractive, so I felt genuinely sorry, but they applied anyway. Some offered to take nearly a 50% pay cut; some had been through the wringer at Samsung SDS. What can I promise these people? It's a night that makes my head spin.

Potential thinks about the global expansion of Korean and Asian founders — and works on building a better team ourselves, every day. If you're wrestling with similar questions, let's talk anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:01:53.737Z",{"_15":626,"_32":627,"_17":628,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":629,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":630,"_44":52},543,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/ad0c6388-d1c9-4277-a915-f030933d8dae-why-am-i-so-bad-at-hiring-naver.png","why-am-i-so-bad-at-hiring-naver-88990","Original Naver image - why-am-i-so-bad-at-hiring","2026-06-04T01:31:35.578Z",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":632,"_63":633},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[634,635,636],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":142,"_17":639,"_27":640,"_82":641,"_42":642,"_44":52},"Why Agencies Struggle to Scale | Potential","How an agency's marketing, onboarding, and dev teams mesh like gears — and how reusable modules lower the cost of delivering software.","agency scaling, 에이전시 스케일업, software outsourcing, 외주 개발, reusable modules, 모듈화, Flutter, global expansion","2026-06-04T01:28:08.072Z","2026-06-04T02:02:15.895Z",{"_15":580,"_17":581,"_19":582,"_21":270,"_23":583,"_25":26,"_27":584,"_29":645,"_46":646,"_48":647,"_50":656,"_75":662,"_77":663,"_42":585,"_44":52},{"_15":587,"_32":588,"_17":589,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":590,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":591,"_44":52},[],[648,650,652,654],{"_15":566,"_17":567,"_19":568,"_21":104,"_23":569,"_25":26,"_27":570,"_42":643,"_44":52,"_29":649},{"_15":572,"_32":573,"_17":574,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":575,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":576,"_44":52},{"_15":593,"_17":594,"_19":595,"_21":118,"_23":596,"_25":26,"_27":597,"_42":598,"_44":52,"_29":651},{"_15":600,"_32":601,"_17":602,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":603,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":604,"_44":52},{"_15":606,"_17":607,"_19":608,"_21":89,"_23":609,"_25":26,"_27":610,"_42":611,"_44":52,"_29":653},{"_15":613,"_32":614,"_17":615,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":616,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":617,"_44":52},{"_15":162,"_17":619,"_19":620,"_21":621,"_23":622,"_25":26,"_27":623,"_42":624,"_44":52,"_29":655},{"_15":626,"_32":627,"_17":628,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":629,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":630,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":657,"_63":658},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[659,660,661],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":101,"_17":664,"_27":665,"_82":666,"_42":667,"_44":52},"Software Agency vs. Cake Shop | Potential","Why a software agency scales like a handmade cake shop — and the founder bottleneck between Korean clients and a global team.","agency scaling, 에이전시 스케일업, founder bottleneck, 외주 개발, global team, 글로벌 진출, project capacity, delegation","2026-06-04T01:28:00.445Z",{"_15":669,"_17":670,"_19":671,"_21":312,"_23":672,"_25":26,"_27":673,"_29":674,"_46":680,"_48":681,"_50":735,"_75":741,"_77":742,"_42":747,"_44":52},25,"A Founder's Year in Review: What I Got Right, and What I Didn't","An honest year-end reckoning: selling off a cash cow, making my first hires, and becoming a father.","year-in-review-wins-and-losses","

As the year closes, here's an honest accounting of what I got right and what I got wrong. It was the year I sold off a cash-cow business, started hiring for the first time, and became a father.

What I got right

$\"\"$

\n\n

1. Letting go of Sseobom

I finally let go of Sseobom, the business I'd carried for years. It had reached the stage where it only needed operating, and I no longer had the appetite to keep dragging it along. As a cash cow it might have been fine, but I had the sense that holding onto it would actually get in the way of my own growth. I met a few candidates to take it over, worked alongside them, picked one, and handed it off.

On the last day, when I went around to say goodbye to the elderly folks near the warehouse, something caught in my chest. For nearly three years we'd lived like family, and I knew each household's story. I'd started with ₩600,000 (~$435) borrowed from my father and ended up distributing over a million diaper sample packs across the country. Because of Sseobom, society saved billions of won in unnecessary spending, and parents saved millions of hours otherwise lost to choosing diapers. I have no regrets at all. I was just genuinely happy to escape Paju's –20°C winters and the warehouse's pit toilet.

$\"\"$

\n\n

2. Antler

I made a big mistake here. It cost me money and time. The reason I still file it under \"what I got right\" is that I think it was a good vaccine for my current stage. The venture itself — Choose — was stopped, but I gained excellent peers I'll keep talking shop with about startups for years to come. Going forward, I plan to avoid co-founding wherever possible. And huge thanks to my wife for understanding it all with such grace.

$\"\"$

\n\n

3. The beginning of Potential

As someone used to running a one-man show, hiring was a genuinely terrifying mission. But thanks to a mentor's advice, I got past it, and right now I'm practicing — through plenty of hiring and firing. Remote work, fully flexible hours, a compensation system: I'm clumsy at all of it, but I keep practicing.

$\"\"$

\n\n

There were wins and losses. I didn't break the ₩100M/month ceiling, and my first overseas client fell through. But our core competency — software delivery speed — keeps climbing, and organic client inflow is growing. We're still taking baby steps, but we've taken the first one.

4. Meeting Jaeha

After living child-free for a while, five years into marriage we decided to have a child. The reasons I'd hesitated were simple: money and time. Neither was ever enough. What changed my mind was something I learned through founding companies — that nothing is more meaningless than the \"I'll do B once A happens\" kind of assumption.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Once I've saved a billion won, I'll do B.
Once I'm 50, I'll do B.
Once I've made enough in the market, I'll do B.
Once revenue climbs high enough, I'll do B.
Once I sell the company for a few billion, I'll do B.

And so on. In truth, doing B usually didn't require resource A at all. What mattered more, in most cases, was my own state of mind. So despite having neither the time nor the money, I decided to have a child. In my experience, the best stories with the people around me have always come from setting out on an adventure when resources were scarce.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Story 1. During my first startup, my co-founder and I pulled all-nighters at a Tom N Toms in Jonggak, nursing a single cup of coffee between us. We got by on ₩3,000 pork cutlets in Sinchon. Much later, we had our first samgyeopsal team dinner at a two-story place in Seocho, and the taste — more dazzling than any hotel restaurant or Michelin spot — is still vivid in my memory.

Story 2. I made money with Sseobom. My bank balance had never crossed ₩1M in my life, and then for the first time a large sum — ₩5M — was sitting in my account. Wondering how to spend it well, I put ₩4M toward a ring and ₩1M toward plane tickets, and proposed to the woman who is now my wife. Back then, my wish was simply a life where we could afford an Outback dinner on each anniversary. The balance went from ₩5M back to zero, and there was plenty of worry and anxiety — but we're living very well now.

$\"\"$

\n\n

No fancy wedding package. Daiso flowers, a bow tie, Ilsan Lake Park, and an iPhone were all we needed.

The time I can spend on work has shrunk even further, and life's difficulty has gone up another notch — but I trust we'll figure out childbirth and parenting somehow.

What I got wrong

$\"\"$

\n\n

1. Not careful enough

I jumped into things without enough caution. I neglected to prepare contracts (well — I didn't do them at all), and I sent money on trust alone. Trusting people and being rigorous about the work are things you can do at the same time, and I failed to. It was a bad case where my easygoing, laid-back nature worked as poison instead. It stings all the more because the people around me warned me heavily at the time, and I went ahead on my own judgment anyway. I need to remember this year's events well so I don't repeat the mistake.

$\"\"$

\n\n

2. I'm bad at delegating

I'm still clumsy at delegating. I think I keep repeating the mistakes that owners who've only ever run solo operations tend to make. I should be reducing how much I do myself and trusting my team with it — I try, but it doesn't come easily.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The ghost of \"but I could finish it faster myself…\" keeps rattling around in my head, making me hesitate every time I try to delegate. I need to do better at this next year.

3. My kindness dropped a level

Kindness was always my greatest weapon. But as the number of clients grew and the projects I had to manage piled up, at some point I started noticing irritation creeping in. I need to work on staying kind — to customers, family, and friends.

$\"\"$

\n\n

This reflection is the record of one year of building Potential (포텐셜). We help Korean and Asian founders build their journey into global markets.

",{"_15":675,"_32":676,"_17":677,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":678,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":679,"_44":52},550,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/0744290d-51b5-4cca-add9-ab554ebe0709-year-in-review-wins-and-losses-naver.jpeg","year-in-review-wins-and-losses-naver-79517","Original Naver image - year-in-review-wins-and-losses","2026-06-04T01:31:38.250Z",[],[682,695,708,721],{"_15":683,"_17":684,"_19":685,"_21":104,"_23":686,"_25":26,"_27":687,"_42":688,"_44":52,"_29":689},9,"Networking in Vietnam From Zero: A Korean Founder's Da Nang Trip","What I learned cold-networking with Vietnamese dev shops — toddler in tow, zero contacts.","networking-in-vietnam-from-zero","

I started networking in Vietnam with zero contacts and not a single meeting on the calendar. This is a record of cold-meeting Vietnamese dev agencies in Da Nang — and a week that made me feel, viscerally, how easy global business has become.

Last Sunday I flew home from a trip to Vietnam. It taught me a lot — both about the business and about what actually makes me happy.

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A trip with just my son

This was the first time I'd traveled alone with my son — a vacation and a business trip rolled into one. My wife was nearly due, so leaving her at home with our toddler while I disappeared abroad felt like too much. So I decided to bring him along. True to my ENFP nature, I didn't plan an itinerary or line up meetings in advance — I'd improvise as I went. The rough plan was simple:

During my son Jaeha's nap, take a taxi out, do one or two meetings, come back.

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That's how recklessly I kicked off the trip — starting from the gate at Incheon Airport.

The first thing I did after checking into the hotel was find a sitter to help with Jaeha. A Korean agency made it easy, and they assigned us Aunt Thi. I'd never used a sitter before, so handing my kid over felt a little awkward — but thanks to her, I got a lot done. I'd vaguely wondered before whether living in Singapore or Vietnam, with a sitter watching the kids, might let me focus more on the business. This trip settled that question for me. A sitter buys you ease and time, yes — but in the end, my son just wants to play with his dad.

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GMO-Z: 20 years of scar tissue and a 1,000-person dev team

The first company I met was GMO-Z. This whole trip was actually planned because they kept insisting I come visit. With 1,000+ developers and 20+ years in the business, there was a lot to learn. My first impression wasn't great, honestly — the contact I was supposed to meet had gone silent right up until the day before. I finally messaged: \"Look, if you can't make it, just tell your Da Nang office I'm coming and who I should talk to.\" That's when they finally replied.

After months of communicating with this company, here's my read: compared to Korea, they're relaxed — and slow. (A note for Korean founders raised on \"빨리빨리\" / hurry-hurry culture.)

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But their internal dev operations? The real deal. Twenty years of experience doesn't appear out of nowhere. Seeing a 1,000-person team running 100+ projects in person, I realized how far we still have to go. Even when I grilled them like an industrial spy, the GMO-Z Da Nang team shared everything they knew, freely. I learned a lot just from their attitude. \"When you're ever in Korea, call me — drinks are on me,\" I said, and left the office.

It was only back home, writing up my notes, that the regrets surfaced — why didn't I ask that one question? Next time.

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LinkedIn opened the second meeting — Code Complete

Since I was already there, I wanted to meet more companies. What makes global business so easy now is that LinkedIn alone connects you with founders all over the world. (From a Vietnamese founder's side, a Korean entrepreneur who flew all the way to Da Nang in person was probably fascinating, too.) I got a flood of replies, and out of them I picked a company in our space — but bigger than us — to meet.

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Gemma, who connected with me on LinkedIn, was warm and a fantastic communicator. At her invitation I visited a company called Code Complete, which had a lot in common with us. The founder, Simon Saeki, is Japanese, with only the dev team based in Vietnam. Most of their revenue came from Japan, so they had a lot on their mind: how do we break into the US and Europe? That's the exact question we were wrestling with a year ago. On operations — 200 developers, 10 project lines — they were ahead of us.

If at GMO-Z I'd mostly asked questions, this time I tried something different. I shared everything from our last year of overseas sales — the mistakes, what worked, what didn't — with the Code Complete team. And I told them: if you ever want to sell into the Korean market, there's plenty I can help with, so reach out.

Code Complete had a warm team culture. I was struck by how freely people shared opinions regardless of rank. (Their CTO, Viet, pressed some Vietnamese mint-flavored jelly candy into my hand, insisting I had to try it.) If I ever make it to Japan, I'm definitely meeting their founder.

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The babysitter set up the third meeting — NinePlusSolution

The last company came through the most unexpected channel. Aunt Thi — Jaeha's babysitter — had actually worked as a QA engineer at FPT, Vietnam's largest IT outsourcing firm, and her husband was a front-end developer in Da Nang. (It's a small world.) Through her introduction, I got a meeting with a company called NinePlusSolution.

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This was honestly the most fun meeting. When I first arrived, only four people were there — and none of them spoke English, so we muddled through with Google Translate and a lot of gesturing. The company builds and sells software solutions, focused mainly on the Japanese market. (It struck me that nearly every Vietnamese IT company sells aggressively into Japan.)

Then the guy in the Levi's t-shirt finally showed up — he spoke English, and we got into all kinds of topics. His English wasn't perfectly fluent, but he was a strong salesperson, and his particular energy reminded me of Rana on our own team.

The founder offered to grab a beer, but I had a kid alone at the hotel, so I had to decline and head out. They offered to introduce me to yet another company. I couldn't make the visit work around childcare, but once again I felt the power of communication — how one introduction calls forth the next.

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It all came back to a book

This trip owes a lot to a book my mentor recommended. Whenever I'm in financial trouble, or the company's growth stalls, this mentor shows up like Superman with an answer. It was a recommendation from someone I trust 500%, so I read it several times.

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Here's my takeaway, condensed:

Most founders believe they're smart.
So they believe only the solutions they discovered, invented, or designed are the real ones.
But the great solution usually already exists in the market.
The founder's real job is to find the great solution that's already out there.

I don't believe excellence in custom software development lives inside me. I believe it lives in Vietnam.

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Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion development partner for Korean and Asian founders building toward Western markets. If you're weighing a move abroad, let's talk.

","2026-06-04T02:01:29.993Z",{"_15":690,"_32":691,"_17":692,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":693,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":694,"_44":52},535,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/8f41f298-0b29-4e6e-be11-dc722b502618-networking-in-vietnam-from-zero-naver.jpg","networking-in-vietnam-from-zero-naver-26537","Original Naver image - networking-in-vietnam-from-zero","2026-06-04T01:31:32.139Z",{"_15":696,"_17":697,"_19":698,"_21":118,"_23":699,"_25":26,"_27":700,"_42":701,"_44":52,"_29":702},20,"How We Sold Software to America and Earned Our First $50K","Revenue is never just a number — where and how you earn it changes everything.","selling-software-to-america-50k","

When we started Potential in earnest last August, the team had one goal that never wavered: sell software to America. Earning our first $50K from the U.S. took failing on nearly every channel — until a single buried message changed everything. Here's how it happened.

I believe revenue is never just a number. ₩30M earned in Korea and US$25K earned in the U.S. may look similar on paper, but they mean completely different things.

What selling software to America actually means

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Being able to sell software to the U.S. carries several meanings:

First, that our team's competitiveness has risen enough that a distant Korean company — one that can't meet in person and isn't fluent in English — is worth trusting with the build.
Second, that if we can do it there, we can do it in any country.
Third, that we've taken a very, very, very, very small first step toward competing with the shops in Vietnam. (For reference, Vietnam's FPT does about US$1B a year.)

Because selling software to America means that much to us, we've poured a lot of effort into it.

Almost every attempt failed

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Upwork, the infinite-competition market

We opened an account on Upwork — the apex of freelance marketplaces, famous for brutal competition — and diligently uploaded our portfolio. When we set up the agency account, we weren't thinking about money at all. We were happy to win work at rock-bottom prices just to gain experience working with overseas clients. Even that didn't work. Project inquiries through Upwork: zero.

Managing our Dribbble and Behance portfolios

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In the Korean market, breaking into design work had naturally led to software projects, so we uploaded to Dribbble and Behance relentlessly. Pohad, who'd generated plenty of leads on Dribbble and Behance before, pushed hard for this, so our hopes were high. A few portfolios did occasionally pop in likes and views — but none converted into an actual project.

Posting portfolios to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn

We tried every social network we could to make our existence known — uploading portfolios, uploading company news. Honestly, we didn't expect much. What we're best at is enterprise-level applications with heavy customization, like ERPs and CMS platforms, and those are hard to grab attention with at a glance and hard to target an audience for. Again, the effect was zero.

Going niche: Dubai real-estate agencies

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When all of the above fell flat, it became clear that the generic, everyone-does-it approach wasn't going to win global work. The idea of targeting only Dubai real-estate agencies came from our teammate Anik. Despite relatively high revenue, many Dubai firms were running nothing but template-based WordPress — so pitching concepts already proven in Korea, like Zigbang and Hogangnono, seemed well worth a shot.

We went the exact opposite direction from the generic approach: pick one company and treat it like royalty — super-ultra-customized marketing. For each chosen firm we hand-crafted a 20-slide proposal, spelling out why their website was a problem, what would change if we helped, and exactly what they'd gain.

There were no economies of scale, and if one company said no, the whole thing got thrown away — pure grind. By the usual arc of a blog story, this is where it should have landed a deal. Sadly, it didn't. But I still think it's an approach worth trying again.

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A referral through our network

Maybe because we'd always worked honestly, the companies we'd worked with referred us widely to others. One of them, very kindly, introduced us to a Singaporean healthcare company. We even made it through a second Google Meet — but it was dropped due to the founder's circumstances.

One message hidden among the spam

Just when none of our attempts were landing, one day a \"1\" appeared in our company contact database. I emailed the company back and found it was a printing business that had run in California for 30 years. Over the last decade a developer had left their code so messy that updates were now nearly impossible, and they wanted a fresh e-commerce + ERP build. Along with a short but earnest reply — \"we think we can help\" — we pulled together everyone we could spare and started picking apart this company's e-commerce and ERP structure, corner by corner.

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Maybe because we'd cranked out so many proposals during the Dubai effort, we'd built an internal knack for it, and within hours we had a solid proposal. Very kindly, the founder requested an interview. I'd never once been nervous before — and I walked into that meeting shaking. It was officially our first meeting conducted 100% in English with a \"client.\"

The prep paid off

Fortunately, the meticulous up-front analysis of the client's project structure paid off. The printing industry demands processes far more complex than they appear. The number of item variations runs into the tens of thousands, and the workflow goes: order confirmation → pre-press → customer file review → batching (grouping items with the same paper stock and coating style) → layout (arranging items on a huge print sheet) → group cutting → coating and bindery → fine cutting → shipping. On top of that, they use countless third-party software tools, so you have to support file Export and Import in many formats to stay compatible.

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It was a genuinely hard project, but I badly wanted to win it. The client could see how hard we'd prepared, and we held two or three more Google Meets after that. We asked more questions to understand the printing-industry domain, and they responded warmly to our enthusiasm.

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\"You haven't been paid, you don't even have a contract — and you're doing all this?\"
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I wanted to beg the founder, \"So work with us, then.\" Instead I answered flatly: \"We do this for every client.\"

And then

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Finally we sent the company our final proposal and quote. The founder said they'd align internally and set a meeting for sometime the following week — see you then. We really can do this well; I just hope we're given the chance. Win or lose, I'll be sure to share the outcome on the blog.

For Korean founders heading toward the U.S. and Western markets, Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion partner that helps you prepare for that first deal.

","2026-06-04T02:01:59.049Z",{"_15":703,"_32":704,"_17":705,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":706,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":707,"_44":52},545,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/2529f98d-9542-461e-aeb5-150aab4fd4d1-selling-software-to-america-50k-naver.png","selling-software-to-america-50k-naver-27740","Original Naver image - selling-software-to-america-50k","2026-06-04T01:31:36.166Z",{"_15":709,"_17":710,"_19":711,"_21":104,"_23":712,"_25":26,"_27":713,"_42":714,"_44":52,"_29":715},14,"One Year of Building Potential: From Zero Income to a 20-Person Global Software Team","From zero monthly income to a 20-person remote team and a bet on the U.S. market — a founder's first-year log.","potential-one-year-retrospective","

It's already been a year since I started this business. I'm not sure how the time passed. I want to keep as detailed a record as I can. Here's a look back at my first year in app outsourcing — from zero monthly income to a 20-person team in Bangladesh, and the beginning of a bet on the U.S. market.

Two Months Before My Son Was Born, Earning Nothing

Around last spring and summer I joined an accelerator program called Antler. I met a lot of impressive people and learned a great deal. I co-founded a company with someone from the group, but like most co-founding stories it didn't end well, and I had to find a new way to put food on the table. It was exactly two months before my first child came into the world. My monthly income was zero.

I set aside all the talk of vision and philosophy and made my family's survival the top priority. I listed out the skills I had and decided to do whatever could generate cash flow fastest. That turned out to be app and web outsourcing. I had no grand ambition to build a big company, and no philosophy. I just needed to earn enough to buy formula.

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I posted my first listing on Kmong and Soomgo, Korea's freelance marketplaces. I wrote the service description and the title, picked the thumbnail image, and drafted a script for handling client chats. That single page was the beginning of Potential. I'm deeply grateful to Kmong for letting me dream big.

Books, Books, Books — How I Closed My First Deals With No Marketing Budget

Whenever business gets hard or money runs short, I have a habit of reading. Usually I don't feel the benefit of books at all — but when I was setting up my Kmong listing, they helped enormously. I worked everything I'd learned from books into the hook messages, the chat scripts, the thumbnails. As a result, even without spending a won on paid marketing, I was able to sign a lot of clients.

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I took on everything, from small ₩500,000 (~$360) jobs to large ₩20M (~$14.5K) ones, and I coded 24/7, all month, without rest. Building everything solo, my product velocity was extremely high. Most landing pages or funnel pages I'd ship in a day; somewhat larger apps in three weeks. The \"wow\" experiences I gave clients looked like this (sadly, it's now hard to deliver experiences like these — more on that below):

They messaged me at 2 a.m. and got a reply straight from the developer (me).
I finished a demo in one week, and the client used it to raise funding.
Half the cost, twice the speed.
I took over a project another shop had started but couldn't finish — very cheap, under ₩10M (~$7.2K), and done in two weeks.

These wow experiences naturally turned into referrals, and even with almost no marketing, the work kept coming. First-month revenue hit around ₩28M (~$20K), and my wife and I went out for omakase. The formula problem, for now, was solved.

Books that helped:

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You Can Negotiate Anything, Herb Cohen
The Laws of Sano (Korean bestseller)
Made to Stick, Chip & Dan Heath

From Freelancer to Business — Why Bangladesh

I knew from the start this business model is hard to scale. I wanted to try anyway. I asked the mentor I always turn to. His answer: \"Find the best practice — the shop that grew the biggest starting from a freelancer like you, and study it.\" I looked into Korean and overseas software-services firms. The ones that impressed me most were Vietnamese.

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I thought a lot about how to grow a team. Unfortunately, in Korea there's no example of a software-services firm clawing its way to large-enterprise status on its own steam. Which means I, too, would very likely fail to scale the way other agencies have failed. So I dug into international cases. There were many success stories in India and Vietnam — Infosys, founded with $250 and now doing $18B in revenue; FPT, which started in IBM computer distribution, moved into IT outsourcing, and is now a top-20 company by market cap in Vietnam.

The more I looked, the more I noticed a pattern: IT outsourcing keeps migrating to ever-cheaper countries. It started in China, moved to cheaper India, and these days Vietnam — centered on Ho Chi Minh City — is hot. The more interesting fact is that another industry follows almost the same pattern: garment manufacturing. It started in Korea, passed through China and India to Vietnam, and today Bangladesh is the world's second-largest garment producer.

I bet on Bangladesh as the \"next Vietnam\" for IT outsourcing. Garment manufacturing and IT may look completely different, but they're actually quite similar. Both are highly labor-intensive and can be started with no capital. And thanks to YouTube, access to high-quality educational content has risen so much that anyone willing can learn.

In short:

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I was curious where IT outsourcing would go after Vietnam.
Garment manufacturing and IT outsourcing turned out to be similar.
My gut said Bangladesh.

I still remember July 22nd. With no English skills and never having hired anyone before, I hired my first employee — a Bangladeshi designer. I didn't know how to run a hiring interview, how to work with a designer, or how to be a good leader. I still vividly remember the interview with Fahad, the designer. Even though I was the one doing the hiring, I was incredibly nervous. Fahad, by contrast, was poised and impressive. I don't know what he saw in this fumbling founder that made him agree to be the company's only employee, but Fahad is now a treasured colleague and friend.

I learned everything from scratch. I searched Google and YouTube for remote-first companies and copied them diligently. Even now, when I don't know something, I search \"How to...\" on YouTube or Google, and most of my questions get answered. The keyword \"Bangladesh\" was set; all that was left was to move forward.

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From 1 to 20 — The New Wall Called \"Systems\"

We work in a charming little remote-work environment called Gather. From a single person, Fahad, the team has now grown to around 20. I still remember the advice my mentor gave me in the early days: \"Trust me and just hire one person, please. Everything will change.\" As always, he's never once been wrong. That first hire terrified me; now I hire aggressively. My goal is to build a software factory, and to compete with the factories in Vietnam and India, I need at least 300 people. Every won I earn, I reinvest straight back into hiring.

As headcount grows, unexpected costs keep appearing. The list of SaaS tools keeps expanding, and fixed costs creep up. One ironic thing I discovered as we grew: with more people, we don't hit the development velocity or performance I had when working solo. Compared to when I developed while communicating 1:1 with clients, a lot of inefficiency crept in. Where I used to just imagine something in my head and immediately show it as an app or web page, now everything has to be written up in documents — and even in English.

Early on, with no systems in place and headcount rising, there was a lot of internal chaos. I felt like I was grinding myself to the bone, insanely busy, yet the work wasn't moving forward.

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In my tenth year as a founder, I started thinking about \"systems\" for the first time. It was a domain I'd never worked in, so it felt deeply awkward. But with the help of books and mentors, I muddled through.

High Output Management, Andy Grove (Intel)
Grinding It Out, Ray Kroc (McDonald's)

These helped a lot. There's still a long way to go, but things are better now. Every process in the company has to be written up as a manual. I'm scatterbrained, lazy by nature, a hardcore \"P\" personality — terrible at this kind of thing — but I learned a lot.

If I had to name the single biggest accomplishment of the past year, it's that the team is now set up so I don't have to write any code at all. The pace is slower than in my solo-developer days, but we have something resembling a system now. (Of course, I'm still just as busy with everything else.)

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How Do I Grow This in Korea — The Wall of Public Bidding

Once we had 7–8 projects running at once, internal confusion set in. The developers are all in Bangladesh, and I was running all the project management myself, so things started slipping in every direction. I'd hit another wall. What now? My conclusion was to hire a project manager and clone myself.

I made my first Korean hire. Posting on JobKorea, conducting interviews — all of it was new to me. Having never worked at a company, I had no sense of how good companies operate. To my genuine surprise, many people applied, and after a lot of deliberation I hired a complete entry-level candidate with no prior work experience. My intuition played a huge role in the decision.

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Working with that junior PM, I realized that no matter how skilled a project manager is, it's inherently less efficient than having the actual developer communicate directly with the client. I had badly underestimated how much my ability to run many parallel projects in the early days came from developing and communicating with clients myself.

On top of that, in Korea once a project crosses a certain size it becomes a public-bidding business, and the evaluation criteria work against us — number of developers registered for the four major insurances, company size, years in operation. Considering all that, growing in Korea might just be my own ego talking.

How Do I Grow This in the U.S. — A Base Camp Appears

I knew I had to go to the U.S., but I had no idea where to start. Honestly, even I wouldn't want to hand development to a company run by a founder whose English is as shaky as mine. The need to go was crystal clear, but the path wasn't. Then something I can only describe as luck happened. Early on I'd posted a few times on EO, a Korean startup community, and a Korean-American who runs a printing factory in California saw one of those posts and reached out.

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He was Korean, but having lived in the U.S. for a long time, he preferred to communicate in English. For us, this was a golden opportunity — a kind of base camp where we could work with an American company entirely in English and start networking. It was an opportunity we absolutely could not miss, and I prepared an English sales pitch with everything I had.

Gratefully, we won them as a client. Encoding every process of a printing factory into software is a genuinely difficult project, and actually doing it gave me a lot of confidence.

Plenty of other strokes of luck followed. A Korean founder based in Japan reached out and we ran a project together. We're no longer growing our Korean client base; we're focused on the U.S. market. I believe the next year — the contest in the U.S. — will decide our company's fate.

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In a video by the YouTuber Alex Hormozi, I once saw the line \"Volume can make luck.\" Hormozi's advice is simply to do a lot. Smart people preach \"work smart,\" but an ordinary person like me has no choice but to compete doggedly on volume. My view counts and follower counts are pathetic, but bit by bit I'm seeing signs that something is coming together.

Setbacks and Hardships

Three layoffs. The reasons varied. Some had great attitudes but lacked skill; some were highly skilled but had poor attitudes. Whatever the reason, letting someone go is never easy. But it's something you have to do.

Choked cash flow. On paper our operating margin might look great, but cash often didn't arrive on time, which made things hard. In particular, I failed to account for VAT, and this VAT filing was brutal.

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Trouble in Bangladesh. Student protests in Bangladesh led to roughly two weeks of martial law and an internet shutdown. Not knowing when it would lift, and unable to reach the Bangladesh team, I went through a genuinely difficult stretch. It's resolved now, but the stress kept me up at night.

Raising a child while building a company. Since I was the one who pushed my wife to have a child, I had to be deeply involved in parenting. I kept strict 9-to-6 work hours and spent the rest of my time on childcare. Sleeping next to my child at night gave me an irregular sleep pattern and insomnia, which was very hard. Growing a company on just 45 hours of work a week isn't easy. But I have to make it work.

Unpaid balance. I never collected a final balance of around ₩10M (~$7.2K). I figured this day would come eventually — it just came sooner than expected.

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This Year's Goal

The goal is $1M in U.S. revenue. If I just do my part, it's a perfectly achievable number. Last year's version of me couldn't have imagined where I am this year. There's plenty of stress and plenty to do, but I'm genuinely excited to see what my team and I look like a year from now.

Potential is exactly this — a global-expansion partner that starts in Korea and pushes into the U.S. market. If you're a founder walking a similar road, I'd love to talk anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:01:47.402Z",{"_15":716,"_32":717,"_17":718,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":719,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":720,"_44":52},539,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/0085ab75-7231-4115-8dc9-dbac78325c9c-potential-one-year-retrospective-naver.png","potential-one-year-retrospective-naver-90850","Original Naver image - potential-one-year-retrospective","2026-06-04T01:31:33.910Z",{"_15":722,"_17":723,"_19":724,"_21":725,"_23":726,"_25":26,"_27":727,"_42":728,"_44":52,"_29":729},15,"Earning Dollars in America, Part 1: Why a Korean Agency Chose the Hard Road West","Leaving an easy home market for a U.S. one where nothing is proven yet — and why the ROI still points West.","7 min","earning-dollars-in-america-part-1","

The Korean market may look easy right now, but thinking about the future, we have to go to the U.S. This is the record of why a small-town guy from Ansan who can't speak a word of English decided to take on the U.S. market alongside a team in Bangladesh — and how we took our first steps from nothing.

Why the U.S.? — The Wall of Korea's Software-Services Market

Korea's software-services (SI) market has a peculiar culture all its own. Once a project crosses a certain size, it becomes a public-bidding business. The evaluation criteria include things like the number of developers registered for the four major national insurances, company size, and years in operation. Our team is around 20 people, but only two of us — including me — are formally registered employees, so on paper we're a two-person company. We don't have an impressive office either, which makes it hard to break into the bidding market. This is also exactly why large Vietnamese or Indian firms struggle to enter the Korean market.

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We could just target small-to-mid projects under ₩100M (~$72K), but coordinating between Korean clients and an overseas dev team requires a deft project manager — someone with development knowledge and an almost animal instinct for communication.

Then, by chance, we won a contract with a California printing factory. It was the first project to run on the team alone, without a Korean project manager (me) in the middle. Removing just one layer from the chain — dev team ↔ project manager ↔ client became dev team ↔ client — made communication dramatically easier, and the project flowed far more smoothly. With a senior developer managing directly, internal communication got faster, and there was no need to add staff. I'd tasted a whole new world.

So I faced two roads: focus on Korea, which is working but whose ceiling is clearly visible, or take on the U.S., where nothing is proven yet but the upside is huge. After long deliberation, I chose.

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The \"Triumphant Return\" Strategy — The ROI Points West

No matter how hard you grind in Korea, unless you reach Samsung-SDS scale, there's little advantage to be had for entering the U.S. market. Whether you do ₩1B, ₩10B, or ₩100B in Korea, you start from the bottom all the same. But conversely, if you do more than $10M in the U.S. market, then — given how much Koreans respect Silicon Valley and the U.S. itself — you can carry enormous authority back in the Korean market. So succeeding in the U.S. has a far higher ROI. The Korean market may look easy right now, and the U.S. may look hard right now, but thinking ahead, we have to go to the U.S.

From Scratch

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There are a few English phrases I love, and \"from scratch\" is one of them. A small-town guy from Ansan who's never once been on a flight to the U.S. has to take on this challenge alongside teammates in Bangladesh. I genuinely had no idea where to start, yet I wasn't worried. This is a fairly safe challenge with a very high floor on failure — and the floor, as I see it, is \"business English that improved without spending a dime.\"

Finding a Mentor — Copy the Best Practice

While agonizing over where to begin, I remembered the advice my go-to mentor always gives: \"Find the best practice and copy it.\" So I went looking. For me, the best practice was an agency founder who had grown a company from $1M to $10M. Along the way I came across a YouTuber, and I paid the largest sum I've personally spent in the last decade to join his training program.

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Finding Books

There's no investment with a higher ROI than books. You can buy the experience of someone far better than you for less than ₩10,000 (~$7). To get more comfortable with English, I bought an Amazon Kindle and picked up $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi, who's been dominating the YouTube algorithm. A wonderful book by a fantastic operator. Buy it directly on Kindle and it's about ₩12,000 (~$9). I intend to copy every single one of his tactics.

Executing the Mentor's and Books' Lessons

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\n\n

YouTube / X (Twitter) / TikTok / Instagram / Threads. My pronunciation is genuinely bad, but pronunciation doesn't seem to matter that much. I followed the lessons of my blue-eyed teacher, Matthew, one at a time. Matthew told me not to be discouraged by small view counts and to keep going quietly. He said one view on a B2B channel is worth thousands of times a view on a B2C channel. Standing in front of a camera, stumbling through broken English, is not easy. Often the videos don't break 10 views, and it gets demoralizing. Even so, when some person of unknown nationality leaves a comment, I draw a little courage from it.

Setting up cold email. Setting up cold email cost me around ₩2M (~$1,450), I think. Each domain can send 30 emails a day. I'd never sent a cold email in Korea, but Matthew insisted on it. Before you start sending in earnest, you have to warm up the domain for about 15 days.

LinkedIn — commenting and starting conversations. Every day I spend an hour starting conversations with C-level executives I don't know. At first it felt like grunt work and made me wonder what I was even doing, but Matthew insisted on a full hour. Doing it, I started to get why. And though it was scary at first, I learned that approaching people warmly isn't much different in Korea or the U.S. There's no easier way to become someone's friend than asking them a question. Some people do this instinctively; people like me who can't just memorize the script and run it. For the details, see Part 4, Chapter 6 of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

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\n\n

Dribbble / Behance / Fiverr and similar platforms. Luck scales with the number of attempts. You never know where it'll hit, so it's best to be active everywhere relevant. Fiverr is the animal kingdom of outsourcing and freelancing. If you can win there, you can compete with anyone anywhere in the world and come out on top. Unfortunately, my clicks are still at zero. A long way to go.

Many Hardships and Setbacks

Martial law in Bangladesh. This past week there was a major event in Bangladesh, where our teammates are. Students protested the ruling party's policy (a kind of patronage system), and martial law was declared. More than 200 students died, and the government shut down all internet in the country to keep the news from spreading. Bangladeshis spent a week in anxiety without internet, and countless companies in Bangladesh lost clients and saw their reputations damaged. I, too, was genuinely shaken when I couldn't reach my teammates. Thankfully, even amid the chaos, Fahad spent expensive international call charges to relay the situation and served as an emergency contact line confirming everyone was safe. I'm so grateful. But it was a serious crisis for us, too — our software factory had to shut its doors for about a week. We informed our clients and asked for their understanding.

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\n\n

A departure during probation. I learned that one teammate had signed a full-time contract with another company while still in their probation period. Running a 100% remote operation, I knew something like this would happen eventually — it just came sooner than expected. They were very talented, but I believe trust comes before skill, so I ended the contract immediately.

A VAT bomb. Figuring \"how big could the VAT really be,\" I gave it no thought and got hit hard. I'd failed to account for how software businesses have almost no deductible expenses. My most recent venture had been a diaper business — VAT-exempt — which probably made it worse. My bank balance went thin in an instant.

The Constant Unease, and Small Wins

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\n\n

When you adventure through unknown territory from scratch, there's always plenty of fear. Countless startup mentors say that if you just run enough iterations you'll eventually find product-market fit — but whether each iteration is in the right direction always requires the founder's conviction. Korean clients keep pouring in, and the doubt keeps rising in a corner of my mind: am I doing something pointless here? Every time, I steady myself.

When the unease is heavy like this, a small win — personally and for the team — is genuinely vital. I have trouble sleeping and wake in the small hours every night. Then today, out of nowhere, I received an email.

The amount doesn't matter. What matters is that we succeeded in taking a first step in unknown territory. I got the email at 4:30 a.m. and my heart raced too much to sleep. I wrote up a proposal and quote in the same format I use for Korean clients and sent it off. I'm genuinely desperate — but the trick is to never let it show. I really hope Potential's second U.S. client comes out of Texas.

$\"\"$

\n\n

I write all my content in English now, but this challenge in the U.S. market is one thing I want to record whenever I get the chance — for some future Korean coming up behind me who will one day knock on the door of the U.S. market.

Potential is a global-expansion partner that walks the road West alongside Korean and Asian founders. If you're weighing a move into the U.S. market, let's talk anytime.

","2026-06-04T02:01:51.238Z",{"_15":730,"_32":731,"_17":732,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":733,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":734,"_44":52},540,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/4cdc937a-ddde-4f74-b3cf-c62c28351f9f-earning-dollars-in-america-part-1-naver.png","earning-dollars-in-america-part-1-naver-89740","Original Naver image - earning-dollars-in-america-part-1","2026-06-04T01:31:34.290Z",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":736,"_63":737},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[738,739,740],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":115,"_17":743,"_27":744,"_82":745,"_42":746,"_44":52},"A Founder's Year in Review | Potential","An honest founder's year-end review — selling a cash-cow business, the first hires, a costly mistake, and learning to delegate.","founder year in review, 창업 회고, startup lessons, 위임, delegation, 창업가 일기, 글로벌 진출, hiring","2026-06-04T01:27:52.571Z","2026-06-04T02:02:14.232Z",{"_15":749,"_17":750,"_19":751,"_21":312,"_23":752,"_25":26,"_27":753,"_29":754,"_46":760,"_48":761,"_50":762,"_75":768,"_77":769,"_42":774,"_44":52},24,"Building a Store Dispatch App: How We Cut a 10-Minute Phone Process to 1 Second","How we replaced a cleaning brand's phone-and-spreadsheet dispatch with an auto-assignment algorithm and a store-owner app.","store-reservation-app-case-study","

We recently shipped a new project with Saerow (주식회사 새로): a store dispatch and reservation app for store owners. It's the story of how we replaced an order-assignment process that ran entirely on phone calls and spreadsheets with an auto-assignment algorithm and a dedicated store-owner app. Before getting into the app itself, some background is in order.

Background: A dispatch process that ran on phone calls

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\n\n

Saerow is a specialty cleaning brand that handles sofas, mattresses, mats, and the like. They served both individual customers and corporate clients. The problem was scale: order volume was high, and there were so many stores to dispatch those orders to that managing it by hand had become nearly impossible.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The old assignment process looked like this:

Head office collects orders coming in from partners and various channels.
They check each order's address and call the nearest store.
They confirm whether that store has a conflicting schedule on the date.
If it does, they call another nearby store.
If that store's schedule is open, they hand the order off to it.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Because every step was manual, a CS team member was tied up doing nothing but this all day long. So head office and the store owners asked us to build internal software to manage orders. We diagnosed their situation from the inside and set out to build exactly the software they needed.

The build (admin dashboard)

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The core problem was that assigning a single order to a store was too complex and took too long. So we set out to automate it. More than any other project we'd done, this one lived or died on the design of the admin dashboard.

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\n\n

1. Putting store data into a database

First, we moved all the store information into a database. We collected coordinate data based on each store's location, and designed the system so that only the respective store owners could access the app.

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2. Automatic order assignment

This is the heart of the service. The CS team at head office no longer has to call each store owner one by one to ask whether they're available. When a CS agent enters the customer's information, address, and service date, our algorithm shortlists the five nearest stores. If a store is already booked on that date, the algorithm adds the next-nearest store with an open schedule. An assignment that used to take 10 minutes of phone calls per store now resolves in a single second. Once an order is assigned, a notification goes straight to the store owner's phone for immediate review.

$\"\"$

\n\n

3. Turning data into a dashboard

$\"\"$

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We also turned the per-store order data — previously tracked in spreadsheets — into live metrics the team can read at a glance.

The build (store-owner app)

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\n\n

So how does a store owner actually use the app once they receive an order notification? As you can see, orders flowing in through the admin dashboard can be tracked in real time in a calendar view.

Owners can check detailed information on each order and adjust its status as the order progresses. The app is also integrated with Naver Maps, so the location of every order can be pulled up directly.

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\n\n

Owners can also add orders that came in on their own, not just orders routed through head office. The founder of Saerow stressed that this feature was essential. Until now, head office had no way to see the schedule of those self-generated orders, which made the CS team's job of assigning work painfully difficult. With every order digitized and managed this way, head office no longer has to contact each store owner individually to check schedules — because orders simply won't be assigned to a store that's already booked on that date.

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\n\n

Who built it

This project was led by Abdur, our senior developer and a genuine point of pride for the team. People often ask us how we manage to build software this complex while communicating in English with an overseas development team — software that would be hard enough to spec out in Korean. It's a fair question, and we're constantly working internally on better ways to communicate.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Project architecture

In outsourced development, it's common for teams to care only about how things look on the surface and to pay almost no attention to code quality. But looking at the architecture of the project Abdur led, it's so clean and free of clutter that I've learned a lot from it myself.

$\"\"$

\n\n

I handled the backend API and most of the communication with the client. There were moments of internal debate when features that weren't in the original requirements got added along the way, but in the end we built everything the client requested at no extra charge. Looking back, I think that was the right call. That was the Potential x Saerow project.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Want to digitize a complex internal operation and turn it into software? Potential (포텐셜) is a partner that helps Korean and Asian founders design their path into global markets. We'd love to hear about your project.

",{"_15":755,"_32":756,"_17":757,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":758,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":759,"_44":52},549,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/840b876e-a779-473d-a27f-922d25ec4283-store-reservation-app-case-study-naver.png","store-reservation-app-case-study-naver-38819","Original Naver image - store-reservation-app-case-study","2026-06-04T01:31:37.813Z",[],[],{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":763,"_63":764},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[765,766,767],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":267,"_17":770,"_27":771,"_82":772,"_42":773,"_44":52},"Store Dispatch App Case Study | Potential","How Potential built an admin dashboard and store-owner app with an auto-assignment algorithm — cutting a 10-minute phone dispatch to 1 second.","store reservation app, 점포 예약 관리 앱, dispatch automation, 자동배정, custom software case study, 외주 개발 후기, admin dashboard, 글로벌 외주","2026-06-04T01:27:45.710Z","2026-06-04T02:02:10.346Z",{"_15":606,"_17":607,"_19":608,"_21":89,"_23":609,"_25":26,"_27":610,"_29":776,"_46":777,"_48":778,"_50":787,"_75":793,"_77":794,"_42":611,"_44":52},{"_15":613,"_32":614,"_17":615,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":616,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":617,"_44":52},[],[779,781,783,785],{"_15":162,"_17":619,"_19":620,"_21":621,"_23":622,"_25":26,"_27":623,"_42":624,"_44":52,"_29":780},{"_15":626,"_32":627,"_17":628,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":629,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":630,"_44":52},{"_15":566,"_17":567,"_19":568,"_21":104,"_23":569,"_25":26,"_27":570,"_42":643,"_44":52,"_29":782},{"_15":572,"_32":573,"_17":574,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":575,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":576,"_44":52},{"_15":580,"_17":581,"_19":582,"_21":270,"_23":583,"_25":26,"_27":584,"_42":585,"_44":52,"_29":784},{"_15":587,"_32":588,"_17":589,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":590,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":591,"_44":52},{"_15":593,"_17":594,"_19":595,"_21":118,"_23":596,"_25":26,"_27":597,"_42":598,"_44":52,"_29":786},{"_15":600,"_32":601,"_17":602,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":603,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":604,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":788,"_63":789},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[790,791,792],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":323,"_17":795,"_27":796,"_82":797,"_42":798,"_44":52},"Hiring Career-Break Designers, 100% Remote | Potential","Why we built our company on 100% remote, flexible-hours work — and why we're hiring talented designers whose careers were interrupted by parenting.","remote work, career break designers, 경력단절 디자이너, 재택근무, 유연근무, flexible hours, hiring designers, Potential","2026-06-04T01:27:36.309Z",{"_15":593,"_17":594,"_19":595,"_21":118,"_23":596,"_25":26,"_27":597,"_29":800,"_46":801,"_48":802,"_50":811,"_75":817,"_77":818,"_42":598,"_44":52},{"_15":600,"_32":601,"_17":602,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":603,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":604,"_44":52},[],[803,805,807,809],{"_15":580,"_17":581,"_19":582,"_21":270,"_23":583,"_25":26,"_27":584,"_42":585,"_44":52,"_29":804},{"_15":587,"_32":588,"_17":589,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":590,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":591,"_44":52},{"_15":162,"_17":619,"_19":620,"_21":621,"_23":622,"_25":26,"_27":623,"_42":624,"_44":52,"_29":806},{"_15":626,"_32":627,"_17":628,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":629,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":630,"_44":52},{"_15":566,"_17":567,"_19":568,"_21":104,"_23":569,"_25":26,"_27":570,"_42":643,"_44":52,"_29":808},{"_15":572,"_32":573,"_17":574,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":575,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":576,"_44":52},{"_15":606,"_17":607,"_19":608,"_21":89,"_23":609,"_25":26,"_27":610,"_42":611,"_44":52,"_29":810},{"_15":613,"_32":614,"_17":615,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":616,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":617,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":812,"_63":813},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[814,815,816],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":374,"_17":819,"_27":820,"_82":821,"_42":822,"_44":52},"My First Layoff as a First-Time Team Lead | Potential","A founder's honest reflection on his first difficult personnel decision, building a hiring process from scratch, and what leadership really demands.","first layoff, 첫 해고, leadership lessons, hiring process, 채용 프로세스, High Output Management, team building, Potential","2026-06-04T01:27:26.648Z",{"_15":403,"_17":404,"_19":405,"_21":406,"_23":407,"_25":26,"_27":408,"_29":824,"_46":825,"_48":826,"_50":835,"_75":841,"_77":842,"_42":409,"_44":52},{"_15":411,"_32":412,"_17":413,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":414,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":415,"_44":52},[],[827,829,831,833],{"_15":374,"_17":375,"_19":376,"_21":377,"_23":378,"_25":26,"_27":379,"_42":455,"_44":52,"_29":828},{"_15":381,"_32":382,"_17":383,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":384,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":385,"_44":52},{"_15":417,"_17":418,"_19":419,"_21":392,"_23":420,"_25":26,"_27":421,"_42":422,"_44":52,"_29":830},{"_15":424,"_32":425,"_17":426,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":427,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":428,"_44":52},{"_15":430,"_17":431,"_19":432,"_21":104,"_23":433,"_25":26,"_27":434,"_42":435,"_44":52,"_29":832},{"_15":437,"_32":438,"_17":439,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":440,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":441,"_44":52},{"_15":389,"_17":390,"_19":391,"_21":392,"_23":393,"_25":26,"_27":394,"_42":395,"_44":52,"_29":834},{"_15":397,"_32":398,"_17":399,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":400,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":401,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":836,"_63":837},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[838,839,840],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":282,"_17":843,"_27":844,"_82":845,"_42":846,"_44":52},"An 18-Hour Business Trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh | Potential","A founder's first trip to meet his Bangladesh dev team in person — visas, Dhaka's energy, remote-work reflections, and why offline still matters.","Dhaka business trip, Bangladesh dev team, 방글라데시 출장, 다카, remote team, software outsourcing, 원격 근무, Potential","2026-06-04T01:27:19.335Z",{"_15":696,"_17":697,"_19":698,"_21":118,"_23":699,"_25":26,"_27":700,"_29":848,"_46":849,"_48":850,"_50":859,"_75":865,"_77":866,"_42":701,"_44":52},{"_15":703,"_32":704,"_17":705,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":706,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":707,"_44":52},[],[851,853,855,857],{"_15":722,"_17":723,"_19":724,"_21":725,"_23":726,"_25":26,"_27":727,"_42":728,"_44":52,"_29":852},{"_15":730,"_32":731,"_17":732,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":733,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":734,"_44":52},{"_15":669,"_17":670,"_19":671,"_21":312,"_23":672,"_25":26,"_27":673,"_42":747,"_44":52,"_29":854},{"_15":675,"_32":676,"_17":677,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":678,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":679,"_44":52},{"_15":709,"_17":710,"_19":711,"_21":104,"_23":712,"_25":26,"_27":713,"_42":714,"_44":52,"_29":856},{"_15":716,"_32":717,"_17":718,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":719,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":720,"_44":52},{"_15":683,"_17":684,"_19":685,"_21":104,"_23":686,"_25":26,"_27":687,"_42":688,"_44":52,"_29":858},{"_15":690,"_32":691,"_17":692,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":693,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":694,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":860,"_63":861},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[862,863,864],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":309,"_17":867,"_27":868,"_82":869,"_42":870,"_44":52},"Selling Software to America: Our First $50K | Potential","Upwork, Dribbble, niche outbound — every channel failed until one buried inbox message led to our first U.S. software deal. The full story.","selling software to US, 미국 소프트웨어 수출, software exports, Upwork agency, global outsourcing, 글로벌 외주, US$50K, Potential","2026-06-04T01:27:12.349Z",{"_15":465,"_17":466,"_19":467,"_21":89,"_23":468,"_25":26,"_27":469,"_29":872,"_46":873,"_48":874,"_50":883,"_75":889,"_77":890,"_42":470,"_44":52},{"_15":472,"_32":473,"_17":474,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":475,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":476,"_44":52},[],[875,877,879,881],{"_15":282,"_17":283,"_19":284,"_21":104,"_23":285,"_25":26,"_27":286,"_42":287,"_44":52,"_29":876},{"_15":289,"_32":290,"_17":291,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":292,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":293,"_44":52},{"_15":295,"_17":296,"_19":297,"_21":298,"_23":299,"_25":26,"_27":300,"_42":301,"_44":52,"_29":878},{"_15":303,"_32":304,"_17":305,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":306,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":307,"_44":52},{"_15":309,"_17":310,"_19":311,"_21":312,"_23":313,"_25":26,"_27":314,"_42":315,"_44":52,"_29":880},{"_15":317,"_32":318,"_17":319,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":320,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":321,"_44":52},{"_15":323,"_17":324,"_19":325,"_21":118,"_23":326,"_25":26,"_27":327,"_42":328,"_44":52,"_29":882},{"_15":330,"_32":331,"_17":332,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":333,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":334,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":884,"_63":885},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[886,887,888],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":295,"_17":891,"_27":892,"_82":893,"_42":894,"_44":52},"Why We Only Take Hard Software Projects | Potential","Why our software agency deliberately takes on the hardest, lowest-margin projects — and how it builds the team capability to compete globally.","software outsourcing, hard projects, 어려운 외주 프로젝트, 글로벌 외주, SaaS development, 개발 외주, team capability, Potential","2026-06-04T01:27:04.322Z",{"_15":162,"_17":619,"_19":620,"_21":621,"_23":622,"_25":26,"_27":623,"_29":896,"_46":897,"_48":898,"_50":907,"_75":913,"_77":914,"_42":624,"_44":52},{"_15":626,"_32":627,"_17":628,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":629,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":630,"_44":52},[],[899,901,903,905],{"_15":580,"_17":581,"_19":582,"_21":270,"_23":583,"_25":26,"_27":584,"_42":585,"_44":52,"_29":900},{"_15":587,"_32":588,"_17":589,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":590,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":591,"_44":52},{"_15":593,"_17":594,"_19":595,"_21":118,"_23":596,"_25":26,"_27":597,"_42":598,"_44":52,"_29":902},{"_15":600,"_32":601,"_17":602,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":603,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":604,"_44":52},{"_15":606,"_17":607,"_19":608,"_21":89,"_23":609,"_25":26,"_27":610,"_42":611,"_44":52,"_29":904},{"_15":613,"_32":614,"_17":615,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":616,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":617,"_44":52},{"_15":566,"_17":567,"_19":568,"_21":104,"_23":569,"_25":26,"_27":570,"_42":643,"_44":52,"_29":906},{"_15":572,"_32":573,"_17":574,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":575,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":576,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":908,"_63":909},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[910,911,912],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":417,"_17":915,"_27":916,"_82":917,"_42":918,"_44":52},"Why Am I So Bad at Hiring? | Potential","A bootstrapped founder on the inertia of solo-preneurship, the real cost of a hire, and why 'leverage' — making 1+1 bigger than 2 — finally changed his mind.","채용, 부트스트랩, hiring, bootstrapping, leverage, 레버리지, solopreneur, 솔로프리너","2026-06-04T01:26:57.464Z",{"_15":920,"_17":921,"_19":922,"_21":621,"_23":923,"_25":26,"_27":924,"_29":925,"_46":931,"_48":932,"_50":933,"_75":939,"_77":940,"_42":945,"_44":52},17,"Startup Visionaries vs. Merchants: Two Kinds of Founders, No Right Answer","A founder who long wrestled with the word 'vision' offers a only-half-serious taxonomy of who builds, and why.","startup-visionaries-vs-merchants","

In the startup world, \"vision\" is forever praised — but nobody remembers the vision of a company that failed. Here's a only-half-serious taxonomy that splits founders into two camps: visionaries and merchants. And why I crossed from one to the other.

The Word \"Vision\" Tormented Me

\"Vision,\" that word so common in the startup world, was a subject that tormented me for a long time. There are many interpretations, but put simply, it's something like \"the problem I'd stake my whole life to solve, the company's goal, the founding team's philosophy.\" Because founding a startup demands bone-grinding pain, the startup world insists you need a company philosophy — a \"vision\" — that won't waver in the face of any hardship.

When you join a startup accelerator or similar founder program, the usual sequence goes like this:

Form teams of people who are a good fit.
Have the team define its vision.
Brainstorm services that could achieve that vision.

The Moment the Order Flips

But sometimes steps 2 and 3 show up in reverse:

\n
3) \"Gen AI is hot right now — got any ideas we could build with it? What if we applied it to HR, or design, or marketing?\"
\n
2) \"Our company's vision is to revolutionize HR, design, and marketing through AI.\"
\n

The reversal is sneaky enough to create cognitive dissonance, making the founder genuinely believe they defined the vision first. That was me for the last ten years:

First I'd think up a service,
then somehow wedge in a vision to match it,
and then act as if it had been my long-held vision all along.

And when the service failed, I'd watch myself abandon the vision and beat myself up about it for ages. At first I didn't really notice. But once the number of services I'd shut down passed five or six, I had to admit it: I'm someone who readily abandons visions.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Visionaries vs. Merchants — A Taxonomy of Zero Credibility

Watching the founders around me closely, I could sort them into two types: visionaries and merchants. (The word \"merchant\" sounds a little off, but I'm using it just for clarity.) These aren't categories you can split with a knife — it's more of a spectrum. Below is the zero-credibility taxonomy I put together for fun.

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Trait	Visionary	Merchant
Education	Highly educated	-
Childhood environment	Affluent	Not affluent
Area of interest	Changes in the world (deep tech, innovation, the future)	Fundamental human needs (health, money, sex)
Motivation to start	To make the world better	To support family and parents, a comfortable life
Founding style	Co-founded	Solo-founded
Funding	Investment, grants, accelerators	Bootstrapping
Field	Deep tech, startups	Distribution, manufacturing, franchises, knowledge businesses
Failure rate	High	Low
Cash-generating ability	Low	High
Study IQ	High	-
Street IQ	-	High (the ability to deal with people in the real world)

Curiously, these two groups tend to look down on each other. The visionary looks at the merchant and thinks, \"That's just hustling, not a real business.\" The merchant looks at the visionary and thinks, \"Okay, so how much do you actually make a month?\"

Jajangmyeon or Jjamppong?

The visionary-vs-merchant question is like choosing between jajangmyeon and jjamppong — two Korean-Chinese noodle dishes — there's no right answer. If you like jajangmyeon, eat jajangmyeon. If you like jjamppong, eat jjamppong.

I'm a case of starting as a visionary and moving to merchant. I used to prefer jajangmyeon; now I prefer jjamppong. Because nobody remembers the vision of a company that failed.

I don't think there's a better framework for explaining people and companies than Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Where on the pyramid does our company, Potential, sit? I hope we can soon climb out of the survival stage and start finding meaning.

This week is Eid, one of the major religious holidays in Bangladesh. Thanks to it, I'm grateful to finally have some time to sort out my thoughts. Eid Mubarak.

Potential is right now moving past the survival stage and into the search for meaning. If you're a founder wrestling with similar questions, let's talk anytime.

",{"_15":926,"_32":927,"_17":928,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":929,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":930,"_44":52},542,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/205f6ce1-5273-4714-be68-4654cf054832-startup-visionaries-vs-merchants-naver.png","startup-visionaries-vs-merchants-naver-69547","Original Naver image - startup-visionaries-vs-merchants","2026-06-04T01:31:35.207Z",[],[],{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":934,"_63":935},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[936,937,938],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":566,"_17":941,"_27":942,"_82":943,"_42":944,"_44":52},"Startup Visionaries vs. Merchants | Potential","Two kinds of founders: visionaries chasing world-changing ideas, and merchants chasing cash flow. A bootstrapped founder on why he crossed from one camp to the other.","비전파, 장사파, startup vision, bootstrapping, 부트스트랩, founder types, 창업, cash flow","2026-06-04T01:26:50.449Z","2026-06-04T02:01:53.048Z",{"_15":947,"_17":948,"_19":949,"_21":621,"_23":950,"_25":26,"_27":951,"_29":952,"_46":958,"_48":959,"_50":960,"_75":966,"_77":967,"_42":972,"_44":52},16,"What a $4,000 Agency Course Taught Me About Finding the Kingpin","On finding the one 'kingpin' behind every complex problem — and why I paid the steepest tuition of my career to learn it.","lessons-from-a-5600-agency-course","

Behind every seemingly complex business problem, there's always a \"kingpin\" — the one core thing that, once knocked down, brings the rest with it. Behind my decision to pay the steepest tuition of my career to learn from a U.S. agency mentor was a long-running search for exactly this kingpin.

What Is a Kingpin?

I've always been in awe of people who can grasp the essence of a complex situation and propose a solution. Whether in business or relationships, every seemingly complicated phenomenon has a \"kingpin.\" The term comes from bowling: the kingpin is the key pin that, once knocked down, lets you take the whole strike.

The kingpin looks obvious at a glance, but it's actually very tricky to find. Even in real bowling, the front pin — the 1 pin — gives the illusion of being the kingpin, when in fact the kingpin is the 5 pin. Complicated problems of the world, of business, of raising a child — they all have kingpins. They're just hard to find.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Feynman's One Sentence

One video gave me a big insight into finding the kingpin. One day someone asked the physicist Richard Feynman this question:

\n
Imagine the Earth is on the brink of destruction. You can leave just one sentence for the twenty surviving children. What would you leave?
\n

Feynman's answer:

$\"\"$

\n\n

\n
Everything is made of atoms.
\n

In that brief moment, Feynman distilled the kingpin that would become the foundation of humanity's technological progress into a single short sentence: everything is made of atoms. It's the kind of brilliant insight someone like me wouldn't dare to come up with. Ever since that video, whenever I face a problem I've gotten into the habit of asking: what's the kingpin beneath this?

What's the kingpin for raising a child well? (Though of course it depends on how you define \"well.\")
What's the kingpin for growing a business?

The Kingpin of Business — Asking for Help, Asking Questions, Changing Your Mind

$\"\"$

\n\n

Different business books each champion what they believe matters most. Some say the team is what matters; others say never abandoning your vision is. Team, vision, product, execution, grit, honesty, diligence, and on and on. Just as the kingpin of the primordial Earth was captured in the single sentence \"everything is made of atoms,\" surely the complicated world of business also has a kingpin everyone could nod along to. What is it?

After a long time mulling it over, I found a hint in a book by the entrepreneur Seung-ho Kim: 1) ask for help from people better than you, 2) ask questions, and 3) be willing to change your view. A bit longer than Feynman's kingpin, but in short — \"ask people better than you, then execute.\"

Team, execution, vision, grit, honesty, diligence — all good values, but each has a hole in it. Maybe because we're so used to the \"entrepreneur overcomes adversity through sheer will\" style of storytelling, asking for help and changing your mind somehow feels unglamorous. But if there's a kingpin that works for anyone, in any industry, at any stage — I suspect this is it.

$\"\"$

\n\n

The Steepest Tuition

Maybe because I'm so used to running a business on a shoestring, I'm still extremely frugal. Unless I'm buying a meal for a younger founder, I don't spend big. I can barely remember buying anything over ₩1M (~$725) in the last five years. So for me, $4,000 (₩5.6M) is a lot of money. My heart pounded at the notification of it leaving my account — but I decided that for a chance to learn from someone better than me, I'd invest time and money without holding back.

My New Teacher, Matthew

Let me introduce my new teacher, Matthew. Matthew has exited three agencies in the U.S. and is the kind of operator who grew one to $1M MRR in a single year. Actually joining his program, I could see exactly why he was able to do that.

$\"\"$

\n\n

Just when I was lost about what to do and how in the U.S. market, I found a genuinely great mentor. Matthew and I are trying a number of things; when something worth sharing comes out of it, I'll share it then. Right now I'm flailing quite a bit.

I'm honored to be Matthew's first Korean student. I'll do my best to make our company a good portfolio piece for him.

Potential, too, approaches the global expansion of Korean and Asian founders with a kingpin mindset. If you have an essential question on your mind, let's talk anytime.

",{"_15":953,"_32":954,"_17":955,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":956,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":957,"_44":52},541,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/7d8b2ba6-e850-4daf-ad4d-b7c85932c788-lessons-from-a-5600-agency-course-naver.png","lessons-from-a-5600-agency-course-naver-39711","Original Naver image - lessons-from-a-5600-agency-course","2026-06-04T01:31:34.900Z",[],[],{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":961,"_63":962},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[963,964,965],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":580,"_17":968,"_27":969,"_82":970,"_42":971,"_44":52},"Finding the Kingpin: A $4K Agency Lesson | Potential","Every complex problem hides one 'kingpin.' A founder's reflection on Feynman, mentorship, and paying $4,000 to learn from an agency operator who exited three times.","킹핀, 에이전시 교육, kingpin, mentorship, agency growth, 멘토, 본질, first principles","2026-06-04T01:26:41.622Z","2026-06-04T02:01:52.769Z",{"_15":722,"_17":723,"_19":724,"_21":725,"_23":726,"_25":26,"_27":727,"_29":974,"_46":975,"_48":976,"_50":985,"_75":991,"_77":992,"_42":728,"_44":52},{"_15":730,"_32":731,"_17":732,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":733,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":734,"_44":52},[],[977,979,981,983],{"_15":709,"_17":710,"_19":711,"_21":104,"_23":712,"_25":26,"_27":713,"_42":714,"_44":52,"_29":978},{"_15":716,"_32":717,"_17":718,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":719,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":720,"_44":52},{"_15":696,"_17":697,"_19":698,"_21":118,"_23":699,"_25":26,"_27":700,"_42":701,"_44":52,"_29":980},{"_15":703,"_32":704,"_17":705,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":706,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":707,"_44":52},{"_15":669,"_17":670,"_19":671,"_21":312,"_23":672,"_25":26,"_27":673,"_42":747,"_44":52,"_29":982},{"_15":675,"_32":676,"_17":677,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":678,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":679,"_44":52},{"_15":683,"_17":684,"_19":685,"_21":104,"_23":686,"_25":26,"_27":687,"_42":688,"_44":52,"_29":984},{"_15":690,"_32":691,"_17":692,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":693,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":694,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":986,"_63":987},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[988,989,990],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":669,"_17":993,"_27":994,"_82":995,"_42":996,"_44":52},"Why We Chose the U.S. Market | Potential","A Korean founder's playbook for breaking into the U.S.: the 'triumphant return' strategy, building from scratch, cold email, LinkedIn, and the first overseas deal.","미국 진출, 달러 벌기, US market entry, cold email, LinkedIn outreach, 글로벌 진출, agency growth, from scratch","2026-06-04T01:26:34.117Z",{"_15":709,"_17":710,"_19":711,"_21":104,"_23":712,"_25":26,"_27":713,"_29":998,"_46":999,"_48":1000,"_50":1009,"_75":1015,"_77":1016,"_42":714,"_44":52},{"_15":716,"_32":717,"_17":718,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":719,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":720,"_44":52},[],[1001,1003,1005,1007],{"_15":669,"_17":670,"_19":671,"_21":312,"_23":672,"_25":26,"_27":673,"_42":747,"_44":52,"_29":1002},{"_15":675,"_32":676,"_17":677,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":678,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":679,"_44":52},{"_15":696,"_17":697,"_19":698,"_21":118,"_23":699,"_25":26,"_27":700,"_42":701,"_44":52,"_29":1004},{"_15":703,"_32":704,"_17":705,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":706,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":707,"_44":52},{"_15":722,"_17":723,"_19":724,"_21":725,"_23":726,"_25":26,"_27":727,"_42":728,"_44":52,"_29":1006},{"_15":730,"_32":731,"_17":732,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":733,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":734,"_44":52},{"_15":683,"_17":684,"_19":685,"_21":104,"_23":686,"_25":26,"_27":687,"_42":688,"_44":52,"_29":1008},{"_15":690,"_32":691,"_17":692,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":693,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":694,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1010,"_63":1011},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1012,1013,1014],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":749,"_17":1017,"_27":1018,"_82":1019,"_42":1020,"_44":52},"One Year Building a Global Dev Agency | Potential","A founder's first-year retrospective: bootstrapping app outsourcing from zero income to a 20-person Bangladesh team, and the pivot toward the U.S. market.","앱 외주, 글로벌 진출, app outsourcing, software agency, Bangladesh dev team, bootstrapping, 미국 진출, 회고","2026-06-04T01:26:26.639Z",{"_15":389,"_17":390,"_19":391,"_21":392,"_23":393,"_25":26,"_27":394,"_29":1022,"_46":1023,"_48":1024,"_50":1033,"_75":1039,"_77":1040,"_42":395,"_44":52},{"_15":397,"_32":398,"_17":399,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":400,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":401,"_44":52},[],[1025,1027,1029,1031],{"_15":374,"_17":375,"_19":376,"_21":377,"_23":378,"_25":26,"_27":379,"_42":455,"_44":52,"_29":1026},{"_15":381,"_32":382,"_17":383,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":384,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":385,"_44":52},{"_15":403,"_17":404,"_19":405,"_21":406,"_23":407,"_25":26,"_27":408,"_42":409,"_44":52,"_29":1028},{"_15":411,"_32":412,"_17":413,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":414,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":415,"_44":52},{"_15":417,"_17":418,"_19":419,"_21":392,"_23":420,"_25":26,"_27":421,"_42":422,"_44":52,"_29":1030},{"_15":424,"_32":425,"_17":426,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":427,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":428,"_44":52},{"_15":430,"_17":431,"_19":432,"_21":104,"_23":433,"_25":26,"_27":434,"_42":435,"_44":52,"_29":1032},{"_15":437,"_32":438,"_17":439,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":440,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":441,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1034,"_63":1035},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1036,1037,1038],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":606,"_17":1041,"_27":1042,"_82":1043,"_42":1044,"_44":52},"My Second Trip to Bangladesh, 10 Months On | Potential","A Korean founder returns to Dhaka: a 24-person remote team retreat in Cox's Bazar, and candid lessons from the CEOs of Musemind and Brainstation23.","방글라데시 출장, 리모트 팀, Brainstation23, Musemind, 방글라데시 개발 에이전시, remote team retreat, Cox's Bazar, global expansion","2026-06-04T01:26:18.263Z",{"_15":430,"_17":431,"_19":432,"_21":104,"_23":433,"_25":26,"_27":434,"_29":1046,"_46":1047,"_48":1048,"_50":1057,"_75":1063,"_77":1064,"_42":435,"_44":52},{"_15":437,"_32":438,"_17":439,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":440,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":441,"_44":52},[],[1049,1051,1053,1055],{"_15":374,"_17":375,"_19":376,"_21":377,"_23":378,"_25":26,"_27":379,"_42":455,"_44":52,"_29":1050},{"_15":381,"_32":382,"_17":383,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":384,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":385,"_44":52},{"_15":403,"_17":404,"_19":405,"_21":406,"_23":407,"_25":26,"_27":408,"_42":409,"_44":52,"_29":1052},{"_15":411,"_32":412,"_17":413,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":414,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":415,"_44":52},{"_15":417,"_17":418,"_19":419,"_21":392,"_23":420,"_25":26,"_27":421,"_42":422,"_44":52,"_29":1054},{"_15":424,"_32":425,"_17":426,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":427,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":428,"_44":52},{"_15":389,"_17":390,"_19":391,"_21":392,"_23":393,"_25":26,"_27":394,"_42":395,"_44":52,"_29":1056},{"_15":397,"_32":398,"_17":399,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":400,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":401,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1058,"_63":1059},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1060,1061,1062],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":593,"_17":1065,"_27":1066,"_82":1067,"_42":1068,"_44":52},"What the Best Global CEOs Actually Do | Potential","Cold-requesting 30-min meetings with South Asian founders, a 100% acceptance rate, and lessons on bottlenecks and leadership from The Goal and The Leadership Pipeline.","글로벌 CEO, 30분 미팅, 더 골, 리더십 파이프라인, The Goal, Leadership Pipeline, 인도 방글라데시 창업가, global expansion","2026-06-04T01:26:04.618Z",{"_15":1070,"_17":1071,"_19":1072,"_21":406,"_23":1073,"_25":26,"_27":1074,"_29":1075,"_46":1081,"_48":1082,"_50":1083,"_75":1089,"_77":1090,"_42":1095,"_44":52},11,"Our First Hell Gate Since Founding Potential","A lead dev's quality collapse, facing the client head-on, and rethinking the whole business model.","first-hell-gate-since-founding","

For the first time since founding Potential, I hit a real crisis. A project whose quality had collapsed under its lead developer, facing the client head-on, and the bigger question that crisis dragged out into the open — a question about the agency model itself.

It's been a while since I wrote. After meeting YR last week, an uneasy sense set in that I had to make time to think things through. So let's rewind three months.

February: the problems had piled up

In February, Potential had 5–6 projects running and the team was growing fast. Unlike two years ago, when we were under ten people, I could no longer be involved in the details of every project. And then I got the message.

What had gone wrong? I gathered all the project leads for 1-on-1s, and I went through the code myself, line by line. (It was an Android project — and for the record, I'm not an Android developer.) And there it was: a mountain of problems.

I'd handed the project to a lead developer I fully trusted, and the quality was a mess.
The lead developer didn't grasp how serious the situation was.
My personal creed — never micromanage — was starting to crack.

I was furious at the developer who'd repaid my trust this way. And I felt terrible for the client I'd put in this position. So — how do I fix this? I decided to cool my head and untangle it one piece at a time.

You can't hide behind it. You go straight through

Usually in a situation like this your head runs hot and the stress makes sleep impossible. The urge to fold everything up and hide somewhere was overwhelming — but I know that the worse it gets, the more you have to go straight through it. So I called the client.

\n
\"Hello, this is Dongsub Shin, CEO of Potential. First, I'm sorry for putting you through this. What I'm about to tell you will be hard to believe, but I will fix this problem. Please give me a little time.\"
\n

And starting the next day, I showed up at the client's office in person. That first day, the heavy mood in their office was suffocating — but there was no other way. My employee's mistake is my mistake. So I worked through it, piece by piece. Money you can always make again. But trust, once lost, can't be bought back at any price. Day and night, weekends and weekdays, I pushed through the recovery, the stress piling higher — but slowly, threads of a solution began to appear.

Then came the bombshell. The lead developer who caused all this announced he was quitting. He was going to dump on me on his way out, properly. I couldn't understand his way of thinking at all — but there was nothing to do. Keeping someone like that around long-term would surely have caused problems down the line.

Living through this, I finally understood why the bigger a company gets, the more it shifts toward a system where any member can be replaced at any time. The CEO of a Vietnamese company I met recently said something similar: don't trust your employees too much — set the company up assuming anyone could leave at any moment. (It doesn't fit my leadership style, but still.)

February felt utterly hopeless, but looking back now, there really is no problem that can't be solved. Thanks to the crisis, both the company and I got a lot more solid. The hell gate was resolved, the relationship with that client recovered well, and they even entrusted us with another project. As always — never retreat in a crisis.

$\"\"$

\n\n

What is our company actually accumulating?

Someone reading that episode might say, \"Wow, CEO Shin, impressive — you're growing.\" But I saw it differently. Two precious months that should have driven the company forward had vanished. And a question surfaced: is this the right way to grow a company at all?

The agency model I run has a huge upside and a huge downside. The big upside: you have cash flow from day one, and if you just work diligently and honestly, you can make good money. The fatal downside: its business multiplier is 1, or maybe 1.1 if you're generous.

What's a \"business multiplier\"?

It's a name I made up over dinner with YR last week, for lack of a better one. The Korean YouTuber Shin Saimdang once explained this idea. There are two kinds of work:

Type 1) Put in 1 unit of effort, get 1 unit of result.
Type 2) Put in 1 unit of effort, and the effect compounds to N over the long run.

Type 1 looks like: working a convenience-store shift, running a project-based business like mine, or earning a salary at a job. Type 1 work doesn't return exactly 1 — it carries a small extra multiplier of 1.1–1.2. In our case, for instance, portfolio accumulates and industry reputation builds. Running more projects also accumulates know-how inside the company. But the multiplier is never large.

Type 2 looks like: making investments, creating video content, or running a SaaS business. You put in effort over a fixed period, and the effect pays out over the long run. Think of the company that created Pororo (a Korean kids' character). Researching and building that character took enormous effort. But once it's designed and made, the returns keep coming for years.

By this lens, our company always carries a weakness. With a tiny business multiplier of 1.1 or 1.2, you can't generate big impact. How do we expand from the Type-1 zone into the Type-2 zone? And right then, an opportunity came.

Opportunity 1 — online Korean-language education

I flew to Jeju to meet one of our clients. I've always respected this man: he's past 70, yet runs an online business that actually earns foreign currency. We talked about all sorts of things in his Jeju office, and over sashimi — his treat, thanking us for the good work — he brought something up.

\n
\"Mr. Shin, I have something important to say. As you know, given my age, growing this business won't be easy for me. But I have real conviction in it, and my dream is to see how it grows from here. If you're willing, would you take over my company and grow it?\"
\n
\"Thank you for the offer, but I don't really know your field. I'm not sure I could do it well. And my own company has so many employees now that I can't just abandon it all.\"
\n
\"Don't worry about that. The truth is, I think every business is the same underneath — only the shape differs. In the end it's all problem-solving. You've done everything else well so far, so you'll surely do this well too. Think it over and let me know.\"
\n

$\"\"$

\n\n

The business he offered — the one he runs now — carries real meaning. It teaches Korean online to foreigners. It's socially meaningful, and it's a wonderful business that earns foreign currency at a time when the country is in a precarious spot. After mulling it over for a few days, I told him I'd do it.

And so I became the CEO of an online education service. Given how much trust he placed in me, I feel the weight of the responsibility.

Opportunity 2 — a proposal from an army buddy

While I was buried in the handover of the Korean-language education service, I got a call from a buddy from Marine Corps boot camp. There's a lot I could say about this guy, but he's the real deal. He's rough around the edges, but a genuinely good operator — he started a malatang franchise and grew it to 40 stores.

\n
\"Dongsub, I've got something important. To get to the point — want to do a business together?\"
\n

I'll skip the details of the business, since it'd run long, but more than the business itself, I could see the angle that something with this guy would just work. So we're talking, positively.

Why did they come to me?

Why did both that older founder and my friend come to me? I thought about it for a long time. What am I best at, and what do I most enjoy? If you lined up everyone in the world, what's the skill of mine that ranks in the top 1%?

I can set up a (well-functioning) IT service dev team at the lowest cost in the world.
I've grown businesses from nothing, without outside investment, three times.

If I combine these two weapons, maybe I land in the world's top 1%. And what's the highest-business-multiplier thing I could do by combining them? There could be many paths:

Launching my own product instead of running an agency.
Helping talented, high-potential people in their earliest stage, and taking equity.

Which is the right direction? And what will our company have become a year from now?

Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion development partner for Korean and Asian founders building toward Western markets. The crises and the next-stage questions — we're glad to work through them with you.

",{"_15":1076,"_32":1077,"_17":1078,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":1079,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1080,"_44":52},536,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/120149cf-2bd8-475e-aae4-b7cb35e32abf-first-hell-gate-since-founding-naver.png","first-hell-gate-since-founding-naver-13716","Original Naver image - first-hell-gate-since-founding","2026-06-04T01:31:32.569Z",[],[],{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1084,"_63":1085},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1086,1087,1088],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":403,"_17":1091,"_27":1092,"_82":1093,"_42":1094,"_44":52},"Our First Hell Gate Since Founding | Potential","A failing project, a lead dev who quit mid-crisis, and facing the client head-on. Plus the agency model's fatal weakness — and two unexpected opportunities.","헬게이트, 에이전시 비즈니스, 위기관리, agency crisis, 비즈니스 가중치, client crisis, 정면돌파, global expansion","2026-06-04T01:25:56.386Z","2026-06-04T02:01:30.688Z",{"_15":683,"_17":684,"_19":685,"_21":104,"_23":686,"_25":26,"_27":687,"_29":1097,"_46":1098,"_48":1099,"_50":1108,"_75":1114,"_77":1115,"_42":688,"_44":52},{"_15":690,"_32":691,"_17":692,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":693,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":694,"_44":52},[],[1100,1102,1104,1106],{"_15":722,"_17":723,"_19":724,"_21":725,"_23":726,"_25":26,"_27":727,"_42":728,"_44":52,"_29":1101},{"_15":730,"_32":731,"_17":732,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":733,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":734,"_44":52},{"_15":696,"_17":697,"_19":698,"_21":118,"_23":699,"_25":26,"_27":700,"_42":701,"_44":52,"_29":1103},{"_15":703,"_32":704,"_17":705,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":706,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":707,"_44":52},{"_15":669,"_17":670,"_19":671,"_21":312,"_23":672,"_25":26,"_27":673,"_42":747,"_44":52,"_29":1105},{"_15":675,"_32":676,"_17":677,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":678,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":679,"_44":52},{"_15":709,"_17":710,"_19":711,"_21":104,"_23":712,"_25":26,"_27":713,"_42":714,"_44":52,"_29":1107},{"_15":716,"_32":717,"_17":718,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":719,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":720,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1109,"_63":1110},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1111,1112,1113],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":465,"_17":1116,"_27":1117,"_82":1118,"_42":1119,"_44":52},"Networking in Vietnam From Zero | Potential","A Korean founder's Da Nang trip: cold-meeting Vietnamese dev agencies (GMO-Z, Code Complete, FPT alumni) with zero contacts, and what global networking really takes.","베트남 출장, 베트남 개발 에이전시, networking in Vietnam, Da Nang dev shops, 글로벌 네트워킹, Vietnam outsourcing, 링크드인 네트워킹, global expansion","2026-06-04T01:25:40.391Z",{"_15":1121,"_17":1122,"_19":1123,"_21":1124,"_23":1125,"_25":26,"_27":1126,"_29":1127,"_46":1133,"_48":1134,"_50":1135,"_75":1141,"_77":1142,"_42":1146,"_44":52},10,"Growth Lives in the Work You Don't Want to Do","I hate making videos — but if it's the path to revenue in the US, I'll do it anyway.","1 min","doing-the-work-you-dont-want-to","

Looking back at my own history, the biggest growth always came when I was doing the work I didn't want to do. Today is a short note to myself about exactly that.

The work I dread most

I hate filming YouTube videos — making content for content's sake (unlike this blog). Where the blog is me talking comfortably about what's on my mind, video feels like wringing something out of myself, and putting my own clumsy content out in public is genuinely embarrassing. But it's the easiest, fastest way to generate revenue in the US.

I do it anyway

I hate it, and I can't even stand to rewatch what I make — but today I forced out two more videos and posted them.

I want to become the king of marketing and sales.

Potential (포텐셜) is the global-expansion development partner for Korean and Asian founders building toward Western markets.

",{"_15":1128,"_32":1129,"_17":1130,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":1131,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1132,"_44":52},510,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/8923f6bc-07e2-4670-8ef1-c52a5540594c-doing-the-work-you-dont-want-to-thumb.png","doing-the-work-you-dont-want-to-thumb-82597","Potential blog thumbnail - doing-the-work-you-dont-want-to","2026-06-04T01:25:48.301Z",[],[],{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1136,"_63":1137},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1138,1139,1140],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":696,"_17":1143,"_27":1144,"_82":1145,"_42":1146,"_44":52},"Do the Work You Don't Want to Do | Potential","Why growth comes from the work you dread. A founder pushes through the discomfort of making sales content to reach the US market.","하기 싫은 일, 성장 마인드셋, 미국 시장 진출, founder mindset, sales content, 마케팅 세일즈, discomfort growth, global expansion","2026-06-04T01:25:48.341Z",{"_15":1148,"_17":1149,"_19":1150,"_21":132,"_23":1151,"_25":11,"_27":1152,"_29":1153,"_46":1158,"_48":1162,"_50":1176,"_75":1182,"_77":1183,"_42":1188,"_44":52},4,"Why I am working in potential","why we are doing this","why-i-am-working-in-potential","

At 9pm, with my son (1 year old baby Jaeha) sleeping next to me, I came to watch a youtube short.

It was about an Ukraine Soldier who has wife and son like me.
Video Link

He had to send his wife and kid to safe place and need to join army.

He didn't want to make his family sad.

He made his son laugh by chasing after the departing train in as ridiculous a pose as possible so as not to make the moment of parting sad.

His son laughed but his wife cried.

This video made myself feel two kinds of emotion

What am I gonna do, If I'm a dad in the video
I'm lucky

After watching video, I remembered something I'd forgotten for a long time

What is meaning of life
Why am I doing this (Working in Potential)

I worked in Potential so busy that sometimes I forgot why I am doing this.

After watching the video, I thought deeply about why I do what I do.

First 1-2 year of Potential

I just wanted show that my hypothesis is right. I thought that The Country - Bangladesh was under-evaluated. and It has great Potential to growth. First 1-2 years, It wasn't easy but I could meet wonderful team members. There were good news and bad news, but I've pushed hard myself and our team to grow our company.

One Question Arised : Why should I grow my company?

I know that this is ridiculous question. I know that Growing is Mission / Purpose / Destiny of All companies. but I didn't ask this question to myself and think deeply.

Am I growing my company to make more money?\n
- Why should I make more money? \n
  - Do I need to make more money to buy bigger house?
  - Do I need to make more money to bring my children to private school?
  \n
\n
Am I growing my company to be famous?
\n
- why should I be famous?
\n

I don't want to be a hypocrite. Money and Fame can be a reason for growing company. but It was not enough.
If were a Ukraine Father that needs to join army leaving family, Money and Fame'd not be enough reasons for growing Potential

Why am I doing this?

I asked myself. Tbh, I know that I can't impact the world with Potential. (There are tons of software / design agency like us. Even if Our Company, potential, disappears suddenly, Nobody Knows)

But

At Least, I can change life of our Team members. I always feel appreciated to our team. They've betted on our company which has less than 2 years history. Our company is not Meta, Open AI and Nvidia so we don't gurantee any financial success but anyway, Our team has chosen Potential. Only way I can pay back to them is Educating them and Making them Top Tier.

Higher Salary, Good Benefits are all good but they have short term effect in life. But Education has the Biggest Leverage and Impact. If I teach our developers, designers, pm properly, they can achieve anything in the world. and also it will impact their kids and family.

They can switch to better job than our company
They can start their own business
They can have top tier network among potential team member
They can also educate their kids in better directions.

If it's the reason why I'm doing Potential, Working in Potential's worth it.

Even if there's a war in Korea five years from now and I end up as a soldier, it's worth it

",{"_15":1154,"_32":1155,"_17":1156,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1157,"_44":52},312,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/c8088c4c-bcff-41d0-b71c-b3a8e9fcee18-WHY WE ARE DOING THIS.png","WHY WE ARE DOING THIS-20657","2025-08-05T02:48:29.409Z",[1159],{"_15":465,"_53":1160,"_27":1160,"_42":1161,"_44":52},"Education","2025-07-17T07:34:57.557Z",[1163],{"_15":1164,"_17":1165,"_19":1166,"_21":1167,"_23":1168,"_25":11,"_27":1169,"_42":1170,"_44":52,"_29":1171},3,"Before & After of Potential Website","We've rebranded our brand & website","5 mins","before-after-of-potential-website","

Finally, we are launching our new website and brand!
I’d like to share our journey of rebranding with you. Let’s take a step back and look at where we started, three months ago.

","2026-06-02T06:10:12.419Z",{"_15":1172,"_32":1173,"_17":1174,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1175,"_44":52},306,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/620931b8-8afa-44a2-b421-9ac7b10fa52d-ScreenRecording2025-07-30at5.41.52PM-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter.gif","ScreenRecording2025-07-30at5.41.52PM-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter-49092","2025-07-31T00:06:49.596Z",{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1177,"_63":1178},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1179,1180,1181],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":1121,"_17":1184,"_27":1185,"_82":1186,"_42":1187,"_44":52},"Why I Work at Potential: A Founder's Real 'Why' | Potential (포텐셜)","A founder's honest reflection on the deeper reason behind building Potential — beyond the work itself.","founder motivation, startup why, 창업 동기, founder story, mission-driven, 일하는 이유, Potential, purpose","2026-06-15T07:37:08.886Z","2026-06-02T06:12:05.328Z",{"_15":1190,"_17":1191,"_19":1192,"_21":132,"_23":1193,"_25":11,"_27":1194,"_29":1195,"_46":1200,"_48":1201,"_50":1204,"_75":1210,"_77":1211,"_42":1216,"_44":52},5,"What we've learned from Subway","How subway saved 133min everyday","what-we-ve-learned-from-subway","

I eat the same menu every morning and lunch. Subway runs a monthly event where you can get a different kind of sandwich for 7,800 won, including a sandwich + drink + cookie at a discount. The price is reasonable and it's nutritious. I like that I don't have to worry about choosing a menu, and it saves me time.

Going there daily made me observe Subway's serving process closely. From the server's perspective, my set menu requires arranging 1 sandwich + cookie + cup on a tray to complete service. If Subway's workflow designer was incompetent, they would have created the manual like this:

1. Complete the sandwich
2. Place the sandwich, cookie, and cup on the tray
3. Click ‘Ready’ for this order

But Subway's actual serving method was slightly different. When my order number (132) appeared as complete on the monitor and I went to pick it up, just as I reached the counter, they placed the cookies in a bag onto the tray and said, “Take the cup and pour your drink.” I suspect Subway's manual might actually be this way.

1. Complete the sandwich
2. Place the sandwich on the tray
3. Click ‘Ready’ for the relevant order document
4. Place cookies on the tray
5. Shout ‘Take your cup!’

This method has two major advantages.

1) Packaging cookies and placing them on the tray while the customer walks over saves about 30 seconds.

2) By having customers take their own cups instead of servers placing them, we save about 10 seconds.

You might think, “What's 40 seconds?” But calculating with 200 daily visitors, each store saves 133 minutes daily. Considering annual or global Subway store counts, this is a massive improvement.

In the software development outsourcing market, every minute and second is money.

We must constantly ponder:
- How can we increase development speed?
- How can we reduce communication time with clients?

",{"_15":1196,"_32":1197,"_17":1198,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1199,"_44":52},319,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/9f89a67c-72ef-4218-8bf1-fc641922a18b-Blog Thumbnail.png","Blog Thumbnail-22138","2025-09-03T00:32:10.391Z",[],[1202],{"_15":1148,"_17":1149,"_19":1150,"_21":132,"_23":1151,"_25":11,"_27":1152,"_42":1188,"_44":52,"_29":1203},{"_15":1154,"_32":1155,"_17":1156,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1157,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1205,"_63":1206},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1207,1208,1209],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[],{"_15":389,"_17":1212,"_27":1213,"_82":1214,"_42":1215,"_44":52},"What Subway Taught Us About Process Optimization | Potential (포텐셜)","How a simple Subway process change saved 133 minutes a day — and what it taught us about optimizing software workflows.","process optimization, 프로세스 최적화, operational efficiency, 업무 효율, workflow improvement, Subway lessons, software process, 자동화","2026-06-15T07:37:08.963Z","2026-06-02T06:12:05.221Z",{"_15":1218,"_17":1219,"_19":1220,"_21":1221,"_23":1222,"_25":11,"_27":1223,"_29":1224,"_46":1229,"_48":1235,"_50":1242,"_75":1248,"_77":1360,"_42":1364,"_44":52},6,"How I Got Featured on Behance with ZERO Projects","Our secret sauce","10 mins","how-i-got-featured-on-behance-with-zero-projects","

It is a dream of any design agency to be featured on behance. Not everyone get this opportunity. if you wondering \"what is behance?\" then let me break it down for you. Behance is a platform where designers not just only showcase their work to the world but also get to connect with other designers and potential client. It's more like a community where we engaged with other designers, appreciated their work, and learned from them. However, it's really difficult to be featured on behance. But we made this difficult thing possible with our hard work. Today I'm going to share our exiting journey with you that how we made it.

We are a design agency and we launched Potential's Behance profile in May 2025. Even a few months ago, our agency was at a point where We had no client projects, no well designed case studies to show. It means there was nothing that could represent our skills on platforms like Behance. That's why we decided to create our own identity instead of looking for clients. We started designing projects from zero using only our innovative ideas, inspiration, and the mindset of dedicating ourselves. We had only one goal to create top-notch design like top design agencies. Within a few months, After completing some projects we started publishing them in behance and to our surprise our four projects got featured one after another. It felt like a dream come to true as our hard work paid off. In case you are wondering \"how did they manage to do it within such a short time!\" then let me spill the tea for you.

",{"_15":1225,"_32":1226,"_17":1227,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1228,"_44":52},429,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/4085b7b8-8238-4d23-80c4-914f7aa25afc-Blog.jpg","Blog-90825","2025-09-25T10:29:22.220Z",[1230],{"_15":1231,"_53":1232,"_27":1233,"_42":1234,"_44":52},2,"Design","show design blog","2025-07-17T06:07:12.246Z",[1236,1238,1240],{"_15":1148,"_17":1149,"_19":1150,"_21":132,"_23":1151,"_25":11,"_27":1152,"_42":1188,"_44":52,"_29":1237},{"_15":1154,"_32":1155,"_17":1156,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1157,"_44":52},{"_15":1190,"_17":1191,"_19":1192,"_21":132,"_23":1193,"_25":11,"_27":1194,"_42":1216,"_44":52,"_29":1239},{"_15":1196,"_32":1197,"_17":1198,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1199,"_44":52},{"_15":1164,"_17":1165,"_19":1166,"_21":1167,"_23":1168,"_25":11,"_27":1169,"_42":1170,"_44":52,"_29":1241},{"_15":1172,"_32":1173,"_17":1174,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1175,"_44":52},{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1243,"_63":1244},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1245,1246,1247],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[1249,1268,1279,1290,1301,1305,1316,1327,1338,1349],{"_1250":1251,"_1252":1253,"_27":1266,"_1267":1264},"row_title","Choosing the right niche","thumbnails",[1254],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1256,"_1261":1262,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},"image",[1257],{"_15":1258,"_17":1259,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1260,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},435,"2-25520","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/83996091-4a5c-402e-a8a0-3dcee7cfe658-2.jpg","mediaIds",[1258],"row_thumbnail_column","","row_thumbnail_content","

The first step of designing a case study is to select the right and trending niche. We didn't pick any random regular ideas. We tried to look for niches that are futuristics, booming and related to AI. As AI is growing real fast, so it's really important to include the concept of AI in our work to keep up with the design industry. We researched on trending topics like AI heathcare, Fintech using AI Agent and so on.

","row_subtitle",{"_1250":1269,"_1252":1270,"_27":1278,"_1267":1264},"Using AI tools",[1271],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1272,"_1261":1277,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1273],{"_15":1274,"_17":1275,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1276,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},436,"3-35826","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/26885bf8-40c9-42bd-8f7c-b81120411f90-3.jpg",[1274],"

After selecting the niche when it comes to research, it is really important to use AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok to get to know about the right competitors, market trends, target audience and other stuffs. Otherwise it is really time consuming to do all these manually. AI not just only provide us the right information, it also saves us a lot of time and manpower. We tried to study everything that is important and relevant to our project and created information architecture, site map and user flow using AI. It helped us understand the concept inside and out.

",{"_1250":1280,"_1252":1281,"_27":1289,"_1267":1264},"Deciding USP",[1282],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1283,"_1261":1288,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1284],{"_15":1285,"_17":1286,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1287,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},437,"4-71895","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/e214f82e-b2f7-4702-b323-8d4ec664d9d8-4.jpg",[1285],"

To make any project stand out, It's a must to have a USP. The full form of USP is Unique Selling Proposition. It means to have one special thing that makes your product or project different from others. There are thousands of similar products out there. So if your product don't have a USP, then the user won't be able to differentiate your product from others. So, if you fail to grab the attention of the users, then there is no point in creating a product that is already existing. That's why our each project has it's USP to make it unique than the other similar projects or products.

",{"_1250":1291,"_1252":1292,"_27":1300,"_1267":1264},"Our Design Approach",[1293],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1294,"_1261":1299,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1295],{"_15":1296,"_17":1297,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1298,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},438,"4-54482","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/ae739051-ad10-479d-bedf-f027cbc8c996-4.png",[1296],"

When it comes to creating a new design, collecting the right inspirations (moodboards) and building a design system are essential, as they are the foundation of the project. One should select inspirations that are modern, relevant, and creative from online platforms like Behance. And can also use AI tools to get creative layout ideas. Before starting the design, we always used to spend a quality time collecting moodboards and developing a design system that aligned well with our project. After that we created detailed screens following the userflow. And we also designed our presentation sharing our design process, Challenges, keeping layout consistency and highlighting the product’s branding. We also added motion design in each projects to bring it to life, so that anyone can easily connect with the project.

",{"_1250":1302,"_1252":1303,"_27":1304,"_1267":1264},"Always Use Relevant Content & Visuals",[],"

If a project doesn't have relevant content (Text, images), then the users won't be able to connect with the product. So it's very important to have relevant data or content even in the presentation. Sometimes we notice that designers use dummy or irrelevant content in their presentation, which causes a bad impact on the viewers. So, before uploading our projects, we made sure that all the content are updated and relevant. And for the visual part, We tried to create clean and eye-catching thumbnails, mockups. Didn't add too much text at once and created design breakdown using mockups or images. And focused on visibility issues keeping the right contrast or opacity. In short, We maintained the overall hierarchy of the presentation.

So that's the working process that we still follow to do our projects. Hope it may help. And in case you want to know about the projects that got featured on behance then let me give you some idea about that. Four of our projects got featured and all of them are from different niches like HealthTech, FinTech and so on.

Here are some details about the projects:

",{"_1250":1306,"_1252":1307,"_27":1315,"_1267":1264},"Agrilo(AgroTech)",[1308],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1309,"_1261":1314,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1310],{"_15":1311,"_17":1312,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1313,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},432,"Agrillo-93310","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/0618bfac-2256-462c-b579-d96665f19572-Agrillo.jpg",[1311],"

It's a home gardening AI agent mobile application for plant issue detection. This was our very first project. We not just only designed the application but also created a 3d device design to connect with the users.

",{"_1250":1317,"_1252":1318,"_27":1326,"_1267":1264},"Finly (FinTech)",[1319],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1320,"_1261":1325,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1321],{"_15":1322,"_17":1323,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1324,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},433,"Finly-74925","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/dee44773-b14b-4460-aa00-d8a070609b06-Finly.jpg",[1322],"

It's a personal expense tracking mobile application with AI insights. We tried to make the daily life's expense tracking easy by integrating AI in it. We used analytics to make the design look better and different from any regular app.

",{"_1250":1328,"_1252":1329,"_27":1337,"_1267":1264},"Stockify(e-commerce)",[1330],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1331,"_1261":1336,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1332],{"_15":1333,"_17":1334,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1335,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},434,"Stockify-27789","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/3af3b47c-e6e6-45de-ab9e-e249d2b35249-Stockify.jpg",[1333],"

An e-commerce business platform where users can easily manage their businesses with the help of AI. It's a dashboard designed using modern analytics in such a way that user can easily track their sales, inventory and other stuffs by looking at the overview.

",{"_1250":1339,"_1252":1340,"_27":1348,"_1267":1264},"DiaFit(HealthTech)",[1341],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1342,"_1261":1347,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1343],{"_15":1344,"_17":1345,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1346,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},431,"Diafit-42676","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/9c02cdc3-29ce-4c3f-973e-f1c198fd2a85-Diafit.jpg",[1344],"

It's an AI-powered diabetic assistant app to monitor and to provide guidance for any diabetic patient. We designed a 3d device for this project as well, which made our work look better and more engaging.

",{"_1250":1350,"_1252":1351,"_27":1359,"_1267":1264},"It's a Wrap!",[1352],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1353,"_1261":1358,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1354],{"_15":1355,"_17":1356,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1357,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},430,"1-65900","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/10ba1476-6ba2-43a4-8d9d-af10b37ced8b-1.png",[1355],"

Now that you have got to know about our projects, it's time to share the things that we've learned from getting featured. First of all, believe that you don't need client projects to prove your skills because it is a waste of time to wait for client projects. Instead try to create your own opportunities to prove your skills. Focus not only on the visuals but also on the user experience and story telling. Share your workflow, ideas, thought process, all the challenges you faced and the solutions you got and try to connect with people through your work. Moreover, keep posting regularly. Because we didn't stop after one project. We kept posting regularly. We maintained the consistency and that's what we believe that helped us get noticed by behance curators.

So if you are a designer with zero projects in your hand, don't be disheartened. Just focus on dedicating yourself and try to producing the best output using the resources you have. You don’t have to wait for client work to start building your portfolio. Find a niche that excites you. Create your own projects and share your ideas. Put your vision out there. And most importantly keep up with AI. Since AI is growing rapidly, so learning how to use AI properly in creating your projects not only gonna boost your overall work progress but also help you stand out from others.

At potential, we've proven that with the right approach, anyone can gain recognition quicker than ever before. Becase we know it's not just about talent, it’s about using the right strategic thinking to rise above the crowd.

",{"_15":722,"_17":1219,"_27":1361,"_82":1362,"_42":1363,"_44":52},"How I Got Featured on Behance with ZERO Projects (And What Designers Can Learn From It)","Behance Case Study, Feature, How to Feature in Behance, UI/UX Design, Potential, Potential AI, Agrilo, Finly, DiaFit, Stockify","2025-09-25T11:15:11.156Z","2026-06-02T06:10:12.568Z",{"_15":1164,"_17":1165,"_19":1166,"_21":1167,"_23":1168,"_25":11,"_27":1169,"_29":1366,"_46":1367,"_48":1381,"_50":1382,"_75":1388,"_77":1434,"_42":1170,"_44":52},{"_15":1172,"_32":1173,"_17":1174,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":1175,"_44":52},[1368,1372,1376,1377],{"_15":1190,"_53":1369,"_27":1370,"_42":1371,"_44":52},"Backend","show backend blog","2025-07-17T06:08:57.991Z",{"_15":1218,"_53":1373,"_27":1374,"_42":1375,"_44":52},"Frontend","show frontend blog","2025-07-17T06:09:18.147Z",{"_15":1231,"_53":1232,"_27":1233,"_42":1234,"_44":52},{"_15":1164,"_53":1378,"_27":1379,"_42":1380,"_44":52},"Development","show development blog","2025-07-17T06:07:33.093Z",[],{"_15":52,"_53":54,"_27":55,"_56":57,"_29":1383,"_63":1384},{"_15":59,"_32":60,"_17":61,"_35":-5,"_27":-5,"_36":-5,"_37":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":-5,"_40":-5,"_41":-5,"_42":62,"_44":52},[1385,1386,1387],{"_66":67,"_32":68},{"_66":70,"_32":71},{"_66":73,"_32":74},[1389,1407,1427],{"_1250":1390,"_1252":1391,"_27":1406,"_1267":1264},"Before Rebranding",[1392,1398],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1393,"_1261":1397,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1390},[1394],{"_15":1395,"_17":1390,"_35":1264,"_36":1264,"_27":1264,"_32":1396,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},282,"https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/91142d83-484b-4ac0-9475-5341e6efdb92-2nd Version of Home page.png",[1395],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1399,"_1261":1404,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1405},[1400],{"_15":1401,"_17":1402,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1403,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},221,"Nazir-45290","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/28d9b8b9-42ac-4b57-b5cf-26fcff238a9b-Nazir.webp",[1401],"Our Hero, Nazirul","

When we first launched our website, I created the logo for Potential myself, and to be honest, the quality wasn’t great. Our website was decent, but it didn’t stand out.

Everything changed when our Design Team Lead, Nazirul, joined the company. (Our Design Team Lead, Nazirul) As soon as he joined Potential, He started transforming everything of Potential

",{"_1250":1408,"_1252":1409,"_27":1426,"_1267":1264},"Rebranding our website",[1410,1418],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1411,"_1261":1416,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1417},[1412],{"_15":1413,"_17":1414,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1415,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},285,"FinalLogo-26156","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/9750774c-fe7b-4e88-8e3b-49af2f120648-FinalLogo.jpg",[1413],"Our New Logo",{"_1255":-5,"_29":1419,"_1261":1424,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1425},[1420],{"_15":1421,"_17":1422,"_35":1264,"_36":1264,"_27":1264,"_32":1423,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},286,"Potential Business Card","https://potential-website-media.s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/PotentialAi/media/d705ea5b-a2d8-4895-b660-b9e927c0f5f8-Back.png",[1421],"Our New Business Card","

Rebranding our website required a lot of time and effort because we didn’t want just a “decent” website; we needed one that was truly eye-catching.
We decided to create 3D motion graphic videos for our previous projects, which turned out to be a huge endeavor.

Creating a motion graphic video involves a lot of steps.

First, we need to prepare high-quality UI/UX designs for the project.
Next, we need to assemble a 2D motion graphic team to create an eye-catching video.
Finally, we need to create a 3D motion graphic video, which requires a well-prepared 3D environment and footage from step 2.
On average, it took 3-4 weeks to complete one video, which means it took over 3 months to prepare all the portfolio videos.
But we’ve done it!

I’m extremely proud of our design team, motion graphic team, and both the frontend and backend teams for coming together to create such a beautiful, eye-catching website.

I’m quite sure that no Korean company invests as much in their website as we do.
Please stay tuned to our blog for more exciting updates about our journey.
Thank you for reading this blog.
See you soon!

",{"_1250":1428,"_1252":1429,"_27":1264,"_1267":1264},"Here is our result",[1430],{"_1255":-5,"_29":1431,"_1261":1433,"_1263":1264,"_1265":1264},[1432],{"_15":1172,"_17":1174,"_35":-5,"_36":-5,"_27":-5,"_32":1173,"_38":-5,"_37":-5},[1172],{"_15":683,"_17":1435,"_27":1436,"_82":1437,"_42":1438,"_44":52},"Rebranding Potential: Our Website, Before & After | Potential (포텐셜)","How we rebranded Potential's brand and website over three months — the before, the after, and what we learned along the way.","website rebranding, brand redesign, 브랜드 리뉴얼, 홈페이지 리뉴얼, agency rebrand, visual identity, website redesign, Potential","2026-06-15T07:37:08.794Z","message","Blogs retrieved successfully","total"]

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