Eleven Years of Proposals That Became Reality
"Let's open a creator economy room on an audio-based SNS." "Let's do a StoryPoll." "Let's do racing chart videos." These proposals all became real.
There were three proposals I once put on the table.
"On the audio-based SNS, let's open a room on creator economy and engage with readers there."
"Let's try something that integrates surveys with content delivery — a StoryPoll. Looking at the data, there seems to be real demand for it."
"Let's produce short racing chart videos to tell our IT company growth histories."
All three happened.
Accepted proposals are rarer than you might think.
During the same period, plenty of others didn't go anywhere. The bespoke 3040 economics media proposal. Know/edge, a personalized service designed to fight algorithmic filter bubbles. The "Presidential Election User's Manual" I pitched directly to the early days of Publy. All of them exist only as documents now. Rejection became familiar — but each time something came back rejected, I went back with something else.
FactPL happened. I raised the idea of "a vertical newsletter on IT and startups" with the editor-in-chief — that was how it started. This was 2020, when almost nobody in Korea knew what a newsletter even was. I was a founding member involved from the design stage: format, homepage, content structure. It reached 20,000 subscribers with a 40% open rate. The biggest outcome of any proposal that went through.
Completion wasn't the end.
Making something always generated another proposal. Running FactPL, I kept feeling frustrated that readers only received. I wanted to know what they were curious about, where they were connecting emotionally. Integrating surveys with content seemed like it would work. Looking at the data, there was a clear reaction point. That became the StoryPoll proposal. It went through, ran, and readers participated.
When Clubhouse was blowing up in early 2021, I set up a creator economy room. Everyone was trying to figure out how to use the platform. That was the first time I understood what meeting readers through voice — rather than text — actually felt like.
The racing chart video came from the same logic. IT company growth histories visualized as competing, moving bars — they spread far better than static graphs.
Honestly, I don't know what the difference is between what worked and what didn't.
Sometimes it was timing. Sometimes it was whether there was someone to work with. Sometimes just luck. Writing the bespoke proposal gave me a much deeper understanding of what vertical media was — and that probably influenced the FactPL proposal later. Things that didn't work also accumulated somewhere, in ways I couldn't always see at the time.
What made it possible to keep making proposals was probably that rejection wasn't that frightening. A journalist calls people they've never met every single day and asks them questions. Rejection was just part of the routine.