Soul, Korea market version

Context & problem

Soul is a Gen-Z social app with 100M+ registered users overall, built on interest-based matching and community mechanics. For its Korea market version, I adapted the matching and the community mechanics.

The question for a market version is how much of that social model carries across: matching people on interests and personality has to make sense to a new audience before anything else does.

Discovery & insight

I approached it from the mechanics outward. How people get matched, and which communities they land in, are what make Soul feel like Soul, so that is where a market version works or doesn’t.

Strategy & bets

The bet was to adapt what Soul already had, the interest-based matching and the community mechanics, and change how they meet a Korean user. Language matters, but the matching and the communities are where the product’s character lives.

Solution

The images below show the mechanics the Korea version started from, in Soul’s public app: an avatar as your identity, a personality quiz, the “planet” that groups people with similar answers, and a feed organized around interest circles. They come from a public write-up of the app in China.

Two screens: question 1 of 7 of the personality quiz with two answer cards, and the planet view, a dark circle of user dots with an online count, matching entry points below — How Soul works, in the app in China. Avatar, the personality quiz and the planet it places you on, the feed. · Source: innovationiseverywhere.com, 2022

Execution

er studio, the studio I co-founded, was part-time and advisory, alongside my roles at Microsoft and Dow Jones. Soul’s Korea market version was one of my projects there.

Validation & results

For a matching app entering a new market, the signals I judge the work by are whether new users finish onboarding, get a match they reply to, and come back to their communities. To me, a match counts when it turns into a conversation.

Reflection

Soul taught me to treat matching rules and community structure as part of localization, alongside language. Who you get matched with, and which communities you see first, decide whether an app feels like it was made for you.