Positioning
Don’t Panic Korea guides foreigners through unfamiliar systems in Korea, visa, housing, banking, phone, healthcare, and administration, so that nothing feels like an emergency. The “DON’T PANIC” spirit of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the product’s tone itself: instead of piling up information, it walks through each step calmly and warmly.
Market & problem
Information foreigners need to settle in Korea is scattered across government notices, aging blog posts, and community answers. Even the same question (“what do I need for a studio lease?”) has a different answer depending on visa status, nationality, and region, and search alone rarely surfaces the answer that fits a specific situation. Getting a rule, amount, or deadline wrong can cost money or immigration status, so accuracy matters more here than in most content categories.
Target & personas
- Foreigners who just arrived or are about to arrive in Korea, taking their first steps on visa, housing, or opening a bank account
- International students, working holiday makers, and expatriate employees, each following different procedures by visa status
- Residents already living in Korea who hit a wall on something specific, like phone plans, healthcare, or paperwork
Value proposition
- Situation-aware AI guide, describe a situation in plain language and get a calm, step-by-step answer. It doesn’t invent uncertain details, points to official sources instead, and every result carries a note that it’s AI-generated and may be wrong.
- Human-reviewed structured guides, organized into 10 settling-in and daily-life topics (arrival, visa, housing, money, phone, health, transport, admin, daily, work) and published as static pages.
- Honest disclosure, features that don’t exist yet are never presented as if they work; they’re labeled as in progress instead.
Business model
Not yet decided. The service is still in the stage of gathering interested users, and monetization will be considered once enough guide content exists.
Tech & operations
- Next.js 15 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS v4, deployed on Firebase App Hosting (SSR) — the only Next.js service in the family.
- The AI guide is stateless: it tries a free-tier model first and falls back to a paid model if that fails.
- Guide content is managed as a nine-field structured skeleton, with a pipeline that includes translation and back-translation verification.
- Published and indexed in English, while Korean stays as the source-of-truth copy and is excluded from search indexing.
Roadmap
Currently at a search-first home page, an AI guide, and a nine-field content system. Next up: filling in real guide content, adding Japanese, and building a user question pipeline, in that order.