Swankivo

The three products you named each had a sharp, different target. Zendesk for support teams, Jira for engineering orgs, Linear for startup product teams. What's missing from your post is who your target is.

Who is the real target of the thing you're building? Not "we want to be an alternative to these tools," but the people who won't be satisfied by anything except your service. Put the other way around: who exactly are the people using those three tools today and still feeling the friction?

Only once you've pinned that down can you even start discussing marketing strategy, open source vs closed source included.

Hundreds of SaaS companies disappeared in Korea too. They don't even make the news. The examples that do come up now and then, Wrtn, Liner, Qanda, those are the ones that survived, so the press writes them down. A friend's company took a huge valuation cut and ran a round on very bad terms. In the end an existing investor re-upped one last time and that was the lifeline. It's not that the strong survive, it's a market where whoever survives is strong.

We're also building our own model, for slides that actually look designed, and the hardest part was defining what "looks designed" even means. In the end we settled on a verbal definition of roughly "image-heavy" and "looks like a magazine spread," and then had no choice but to have humans label by feel.

That was manageable for us. Video sounds genuinely hard though: more senses involved, and I'd guess the variance is far larger.

I'm working on generating slides with our own model, and one thing general LLMs can't do is leave empty space.

Whitespace is the core of design that actually feels good, but they keep trying to add "distinctive design elements," and you end up with that AI-flavored excess everywhere.

They only know how to add. What LLMs seem unusually bad at is taking things away.

Fair point. I don't know the cost of higher education in the US or the UK well.

In Korea tuition itself is much cheaper, scholarships cover a much wider range of students, and the interest on student loans is noticeably lower. That may be why there is a bit more room to breathe.

That said, I agree that to survive in the Korean job market you also need concrete skills. I just think that for those skills to be learned deeply and then developed further, you need the ability to question and to doubt.

Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity. Starting a company is just a means. When there is something you are curious about, or a problem you want solved, a startup is one of the ways to go after it.

I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.

Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.