I was dumb.  There was once a thriving forum here.  In an attempt to make some money from the traffic I announced I would charge members a monthly charge to use it.  This was met with protest, as many people had contributed a lot of time helping others on the forum.  I analyzed this to mean that people would not pay to use the site because I’m just a guy, not a business.  But I was wrong. It was just a dumb thing to ask users to pay for.

I also didn’t want the responsibility of moderating the large forum, keeping up with posts, resolving user conflicts and teaching people manners.  At the end of 2006 I moved the forum to a friend’s site where it lives today: http://korean.paperwindow.com/forum/

Over the following months zKorean got pushed aside and I didn’t do very much with it.  I worked on other projects.

In early 2008 I came up with a long list of products to build within zKorean.  My plan was to build in a large number of features and charge a monthly fee.  The plan included limiting the dictionary to 5 searches per day.  I figured if I changed the site and its wording to reflect a corporate feel, it would give me a legitimate face, and people wouldn’t question it.  Or if they did, it would be less: "this is some big company. It won’t help if I complain". 

That’s hiding behind a corporate facade, which is just using a company name to take the blame instead of me.

Why charge money? Because I don’t have the luxury of doing zKorean as a hobby.  Improving the dictionary, the features, the style all takes a lot of time and effort, all at the expense of other things I could be doing.  Building zKorean is part of building a future for my family.  The better I make zKorean, the more customers we get, the more money we make, and the more I’m willing to invest time in the enterprise.  I’m an entrepreneur.  If I’m not working on zKorean, I’m working on another web project.  There is no rest.

Over time I broke my long feature list into phases.  I figured if the first phase made money then I’d invest time to build second phase. But if the first phase didn’t make money then my development of the site would stop indefinitely.  It was a gamble.  I was betting on you to prove the site was worth paying for.

You would decide if zKorean was worth keeping alive.

In October 2008, I launched the new corporate style site.  I adopted a fake name (Daniel Weber) when answering customer email and tried to give the impression that zKorean had been bought up by some company.  The launch was successful. There were a handful of complaints, and the new features brought in some income for my wife and I, and I decided to work on phase 2 and make zKorean rock even more.  Suzy spent two months and recorded all the Korean words in the dictionary (tens of thousands) and now zKorean’s services are the best they’ve ever been.  We are happy where zKorean is going, and will continue to develop new features and improve the tools and dictionary.

Then yesterday, I got rid of the silly corporate facade and went public. Why?

My next post will deal with why and why I’m telling you all this private stuff.