Joonggonara vs. Daangn: A Short Soliloquy (feat. the Benchmarking Trap)

Lately, more "intellectual" side-hustlers produce content for a living?. People who, between their main gigs, polish research snippets and turn them into high-quality content, growing an alter-ego persona. For someone as merely-browsing and unindustrious as me, their diligent and passionate attitude is simply enviable. Today, while eye-shopping, I came across a post that stuck with me, so I'm leaving a few personal thoughts.

Joonggonara in 2022, which started as a simple cafe in 2003 and incorporated in 2014,
compared with Daangn in 2022, which launched as a corporation in 2015 and is still growing --
I read that post and went: huh, what? Is this intentional? Is this a strategic hook to promote their Brunch channel? Or do they really believe it? What's going on? The writing is smooth enough... so why this simplistic a comparison? Minor things like UX convenience, then policy backdrops, then user types -- the generalization error of treating Daangn as the standard spans a full decade, and it casually slices up roughly 10 million users as of May 2021. Ouch. Is this viral marketing by Daangn? Judging by how much like a marketing expert they seem, probably not... but still, it feels like a lot of wasted potential.

Working with MZs -- especially Gen Z -- lately, one thing I've noticed is that they tend to learn via Brunch or YouTube, and more recently services like Subpul, rather than through books or formal training.
I think it's the seniors' fault, and the adults', the so-called old-farts' fault.
Shouldn't overdo it...



Not only in planning and marketing, but in everyday benchmarking or comparisons, the thing to watch most carefully is this.
If it's a study you do just for yourself to absorb, fine. But for a third party who will only see the result, you may -- unintentionally -- trap them in a frame you built. Especially now, when an individual doesn't stop at being just an individual, the need to check oneself is greater. When someone in the field (a new hire or an outsider) first encounters related knowledge opinions through a well-known, somewhat-recognized post, they often mistake it for knowledge, and this ends up causing a surprising number of issues in practice. Like youths learning history from YouTube, or elders getting their political news there. To use an example from service planning: around UI definitions like layer popups vs. popups, or policies like personal information protection, each person's "common sense" and standard differs slightly depending on whose post they read first. An era like the old days -- with a right answer, a theory, a fixed common sense -- seems to be over. And the gap between the group that accepts this and the group that doesn't seems to keep deepening.
The backdrop for this, I suspect, is that in a world without unchanging truths -- where technology changes very quickly -- everyone, from politics and history to workplace practice, has had to survive on their own and come up with their own criteria for thinking and acting. To use a more pragmatic analogy... when it comes to interpreting a given phenomenon, "version control" isn't happening between society, organizations, and individuals. On top of that, each person's version comes from a different source: someone references papers, someone else references a senior's deliverable, yet another references famous apps like Kakao and Toss or overseas cases. It's no wonder things stay hopeless.
Against this backdrop, agile is making a comeback, and behind that, objective decision-making methods like funnel analysis and data-driven approaches are hardening into a stable position.








Everything about software specs
"I want to see a good sample."
When we learned to program, we learned by looking at good samples, and this method was extremely useful. So when learning to write specs, we ask for samples. Then we copy the content of those samples over and adapt them to our own project. Writing specs this way is a 100% path to failure. Every project in the world is different, and the idea of writing one by looking at a sample is an absurdity. From a sample alone you can't see the hidden meanings of each item, the omitted content, or the writing process. It's no different from trying to copy a pianist's performance video after ten years of their practice.
In many cases, samples get in the way more than they help. The contents in a sample are valid only for that context. And if something is written incorrectly in the sample, the problem is even greater. You mistake it for correct and keep imitating incorrectly until it hardens into a bad habit. Generally, rather than looking at someone else's sample, bumping into the bare ground yourself while thinking hard is wiser. Yet most people cannot resist the temptation to look at a sample.
(From p.29, "Misconceptions about specs -- I want to see a good sample")