Before COKODIVE Was a Store, We Were Korean Teachers
COKODIVE began with a community of overseas Korean learners. In 2016, Erica and I started sharing Korean lessons online. After about a year of teaching and creating content, requests from our students to help them buy things in Korea led us to start COKODIVE. In 2018, we both left our day jobs to focus on it full time.
Before we packed our first orders, we were teaching Korean.
Both of us had jobs. Alongside that work, we taught students overseas through online Korean lessons, free live classes and social media content, including a Korean word a day.
That was how we first got to know the people who would help shape COKODIVE.
Our students gave us the idea
As we spent time with that community, the requests started coming in. Students wanted help finding and buying things in Korea. They would tell us what they were looking for and ask whether we could get it for them.
Many of those requests were for K-pop albums and merchandise. They showed us how much demand there was among fans overseas and sparked our interest in K-pop.
Helping our students and customers get the things they were looking for felt rewarding. That sense of purpose encouraged us to build COKODIVE into a business.
I built the online store and created the Instagram account you now know as COKODIVE. I told our students about the service we wanted to build and asked them to support us as we got started.
Erica took charge of operations and customer service. She helped customers understand what was happening with their orders, so buying from another country felt less uncertain.
After work, we came home to more work
For a while, we kept our day jobs and worked on COKODIVE after coming home.
We took requests for the products customers wanted, ordered them in Korea, had them delivered to our home and packed the orders ourselves.
Looking back, it feels as though we rarely slept more than four hours a night for about a year.
It was tiring. But we relied on each other, and we enjoyed building it together. Those evenings at home were the beginning of COKODIVE.
In 2018, we made it our full-time work
Erica left her job first. I followed, and in 2018 we were both working on COKODIVE full time.
What had started with students asking for help became the work we chose to commit ourselves to: building a global K-pop shopping platform for fans overseas.
The part of our beginning I want you to know
When you live outside Korea, finding something you love is only part of the experience. You also want to know what you are ordering, what happens next and where to ask a question.
Erica was thinking about that from the beginning, while I was building a way for our community to shop.
That is why I wanted to tell you this story. Before COKODIVE became a platform, it was two people listening to their students and trying to help.
HAPPY REVIEWS ☺️