Accumulating Small Wins Every Day:
Where Entrepreneurship Begins
Min-gi Kim, CEO of Ajungdang

Ajungdang’s recent growth has drawn considerable attention. What kind of company is Ajungdang, and how did it begin?

Ajungdang is a lifestyle solutions platform founded in 2021. It serves as a single access point for essential everyday services, ranging from internet subscriptions and home appliance rentals to budget mobile plans and moving services. The company was launched to offer fairer and more transparent benefits in markets with fragmented information and complex pricing structures, making it difficult for consumers to make rational choices. Four years after its founding, Ajungdang is growing rapidly and is projected to surpass KRW 200 billion in annual revenue this year.
Ajungdang began with a personal experience. While helping my father with delivery work, I noticed that the brokerage firm earned as much as the drivers working on site. Questioning this business model, I created a NAVER Café that connected customers directly with drivers. That small experiment eventually evolved into what Ajungdang is today. As reflected in its name, which means “making the world beautiful and just,” Ajungdang’s core value is to reduce information asymmetry and create an environment in which consumers can make informed and responsible choices.

If there is a defining experience that shaped your current perspective and attitude, could you share it with us?

As a student, I was not someone who particularly stood out. My grades were below average, and I even failed an early admissions track, which knocked my confidence. However, about two months before the college entrance exam, I studied with real focus for the first time. My scores improved far more than expected, and that experience taught me that effort can genuinely change outcomes. That minor achievement became my first “small win” and the moment that set my personal benchmark for taking on challenges.

What does the term “small win” mean to you, and how did that idea connect to entrepreneurship?

When I talk about small wins, I do not mean grand achievements. I mean modest successes, such as not putting off what needs to be done today and being able to say that I am even slightly better than yesterday. As these experiences accumulated, I developed a conviction that even an ordinary person like myself can influence outcomes with persistence. That belief became the foundation of my way of thinking.
Small wins also played a crucial role during the startup process. There was a lot of discouragement from people around me, but I believed that even failure would at least teach me something. The energy I gained from small daily progress was stronger than the fear of failure, keeping me from stopping or losing direction.
Ultimately, small wins are both the starting point and the driving force of my entrepreneurial mindset. Small successes make the next attempt easier and generate the energy needed for deep engagement. As small improvements and experiments accumulate, a sense of direction emerges, and that flow eventually leads to meaningful outcomes.

You are also a graduate of the 24th cohort of the Young Leaders Club (YLC1). What activities or programs from your YLC days left the strongest impression on you?

What I remember most are the internal competitions within YLC. They are like today’s business model contests.
Rather than simply presenting ideas, each team set up a hypothetical company and rigorously examined what would be required for the business to survive in the real market. That was when I first realized that a “good idea” and a “business that survives in the market” are fundamentally different things. No matter how innovative a technology or product may be, it has little meaning if you fail to understand customer behavior, the barriers that prevent purchases, and market timing.
This execution-oriented way of thinking became deeply ingrained in me through YLC. It now serves as the foundation for the action-driven entrepreneurship I practice at Ajungdang, focused on saving customers time and converting that value into tangible results.

• 1.YLC: A nationwide university student association supported by FKI. It aims to cultivate future leaders and contribute to society through a wide range of academic activities related to market economics and sound entrepreneurship.

What does YLC mean to you in your life?

YLC was the source of the background knowledge required for me to grow as a businessperson and the experience instilled within me tacit knowledge. What I learned there was not textbook economics, but the logic and intuition of how markets actually move. Because of that experience, I did not stop short at ideation for a good service, rather, I was able to analyze how to motivate customers toward spending within a given market structure.
YLC was more than a place of learning. It was where I first learned the language of business, and it helped me form a foundation for rapid growth at Ajungdang.

In a market with low entry barriers and rapid change, what were the key factors that allowed Ajungdang to maintain competitive?

Ajungdang endured in such an intense market thanks to attention to detail and a strong sense of survival. Because entry barriers are low, new competitors constantly emerge, and large platforms can enter at any time. That is why I search for “Ajungdang” on Google, Naver, and YouTube every day to monitor customer feedback in real time. I do not want to overlook even the smallest inconvenience.
At the same time, I focus less on asking how our company can succeed and more on asking how it could fail. That perspective helps us examine our structure more rigorously. For example, when the Naver Café algorithm changed, we quickly expanded into blogs and the Knowledge iN channel. When blog policies became stricter, we shifted to YouTube content to broaden customer acquisition routes. Whenever dependence on a single channel increased, we treated it as a warning signal and diversified into new platforms to strengthen our resilience. In the end, I believe the real advantage over latecomers is not flashy ideas, but being fast to respond and respecting minute details. These principles provide a stable foundation for both the speed and direction of our growth.

How is Ajungdang strengthening its competitiveness in the AI era?

I believe the key to strengthening Ajungdang’s future competitiveness lies in AI-driven efficiency. With an organization of more than 700 people, including customer service and operations staff, even small inefficiencies in work processes quickly translate into higher costs and variations in service quality. For this reason, we have formed a dedicated automation team and are restructuring our operations so that AI can handle repetitive tasks such as inquiry classification, customer responses, and internal operations. This allows our employees to focus more on fundamental problem-solving and improving the customer experience. AI-based efficiency is not merely about reducing costs. It is about building a foundation for delivering faster and more consistent service to customers. I believe these changes will accelerate Ajungdang’s growth and play an important role in strengthening our long-term competitiveness.

Ajungdang is expanding its business beyond home appliances and telecommunications into areas such as funeral services, insurance, and real estate. What is driving this continued expansion into new fields?

The core of Ajungdang’s growth has been providing complex everyday services in a more transparent and customer-friendly way. This principle has proven effective in existing areas such as telecommunications and water purifiers, and we see strong potential to extend it to other lifestyle service sectors with frequent customer touchpoints. When we achieve a certain level of success in one area, we look to apply that experience to other markets with similar structural issues and identify opportunities for improvement.
Fields such as funeral services, insurance, and real estate are a natural extension of this approach. The greater the inconvenience and information asymmetry that customers face in their daily lives, the clearer our role becomes.
Ultimately, this business expansion is not about simply broadening our scope. It is a process of realizing Ajungdang’s vision of setting a new standard for lifestyle services across a wider range of sectors.