Joining HealingPaper

Our team has joined HealingPaper — known as 강남언니 (UNNI) in Korea. I’m leading AI product. Here’s what we learned getting here.

What we found

At softly, we spent over three years building AI products — five pivots in total. The last one landed us in Korea’s aesthetic medicine market, where we built an AI agent to automate clinic consultations.

The agent worked — to a point. Fully automated customer support looks like the easiest AI application — because it’s easy for humans. Paradoxically, that makes it one of the hardest for AI. The knowledge that clinic staff use to handle patients isn’t written down anywhere. It lives in their heads — how to read anxiety, how to nudge without pushing, how to read between the lines of a vague question.

To get better, the AI needed data. To get data, we needed clinic contracts. And each contract took months. We were running out of time to reach the next step.

While we were struggling to get there, we witnessed something else. Patients couldn’t find the right clinic. Sponsored influencer reviews, unverified content, and marketing budgets drowned out actual quality. The best clinics didn’t win. The best marketers did.

Why HealingPaper

Two things happened at the same time. We were running out of moves, and the data we needed to build a defensible product was out of reach. And we got connected with a team sitting on exactly what we lacked.

HealingPaper had spent years building a platform with deep data on procedures, pricing, and outcomes — scaling across Korea, Japan, Thailand, and China. They were also building CRM software for clinics — the same space we’d been struggling in.

We needed a platform with real data. They needed AI to accelerate what they’d been building for years. That’s why we joined.

I’ll be working on making it easy for anyone with an aesthetic concern to find the right doctor and clinic. Simple to say, hard to build.

Thank you

Building softly was the hardest thing I’ve done. Every pivot, every failed experiment, every hard conversation led us here.

Thank you to everyone who crossed paths with us — the customers who told us what was broken before we could see it ourselves, the investors who bet on us early, and the founders who picked up the phone when things were falling apart.

And to the team. Especially those who couldn’t stay until the end. What you built got us here. I haven’t forgotten.