The record
- Based in
- Seoul, Korea. GMT+9, working globally.
- Structure
- One holding company, three products. Designed, built, shipped and supported in-house by the studio.
- Languages
- English, Korean and Japanese. Briefs accepted in all three.
- Disciplines
- Product design, engineering, consumer research and growth, all kept in-house.
- Funding
- Self-funded. Every product pays for the next one.
Where the models actually sit
Build
Specs, interfaces and copy are drafted against a house style guide, then read by a human before anything reaches a user. The review is the job, not the typing.
Verify
Thands checks employment records, business filings and receipts on its own, and only escalates the cases that are genuinely ambiguous.
Publish
Blogs, feeds and affiliate listings update themselves twice a day, every day, in three languages. Nobody logs in to press publish.
Operate
Every product has an agent on call in Slack. Status, deploys and fixes all start from one channel, from a phone if it has to be.
House rules
- Ship first
- Every project gets a launch date instead of a roadmap. A live product with gaps beats a perfect plan.
- Go narrow
- Each venture goes deep into one specific niche. Built to be used, not to look busy.
- Automate before hiring
- The studio scales by removing work, not by adding headcount. If a task repeats, an agent takes it.
- Keep the whole stack
- Design, code, copy, launch, support. No hand-offs means nothing gets lost in translation.
- Taste is the moat
- Models make the work cheap. What is left worth paying for is judgement about what to make.
Got something worth building?
Briefs in English, Korean or Japanese. Every brief is read by the studio, not a bot.