I Named My Company “Heart” — Yet I Didn’t Know My Customers’ Hearts
A confession from the founder of MAEUM.io — the story of how I couldn’t recognize what was right in front of me. My company is named “Heart,” yet for a long time I never looked at my customers’ hearts at all.
A confession from the founder of MAEUM.io — the story of how I couldn’t recognize what was right in front of me.
I run an AI company called MAEUM.io.
The company’s name means “heart.”
I named it with the intent of building technology that understands the human heart and moves it.
At least, that’s what I meant when I founded it.
But if I’m going to be honest:
For a long time, I was completely indifferent to the work of winning my customers’ hearts.
No — “indifferent” isn’t quite right. It’s more accurate to say I was looking in an entirely different direction.
I was like someone who can’t recognize the letter in front of him even with the tool that spells it in his hand.
There’s a trap almost every startup founder falls into at least once.
“If my technology is good, if my product is excellent, people will naturally come.”
I thought that too. At 26, building and running six AI products by myself, I obsessed only over “better features,” “faster speed,” “more accurate results.”
I fixed bugs, improved performance,
added new features.
But something was strange.
The more features I added, the better the technology got —
it’s not that customers were leaving, but there was no sense that any hearts were moving.
It just felt like they were using it out of necessity.
Why was that?
Then I suddenly remembered the Oticon case I’d read about a while ago.
Oticon is a Danish hearing-aid company. They discovered that 80% of people with hearing loss don’t buy hearing aids. So they asked:
“Why don’t you buy one?”
The answer that came back was always the same. “Too expensive.” “Too uncomfortable.”
So Oticon improved the technology and lowered the price. And yet sales didn’t budge.
The real reason lay somewhere else entirely.
People simply hated the word “aid” itself.
The word “aid” symbolized frailty — young people feared being seen as disabled, and older people didn’t want to look old.
And crucially, they themselves didn’t know this.
Who would ever write on a survey, “I don’t want a hearing aid because it makes me look old”? That was the realm of the unconscious.
After discovering that story, Oticon renamed the product a “personal hearing device” and redesigned it to look like an earphone.
The result? 73% of buyers were purchasing a hearing aid for the first time in their lives. Twice the industry average.
This case
shows me, all too clearly,
that even after founding a company called “Heart,”
I had failed to see my customers’ hearts at all.
I looked only at the technology. Only at the features. Only at the data.
But why customers used my product, why they hesitated, what lay in their unconscious —
I never once seriously asked.
That the company’s name is “Heart”
could not be more ironic.
There’s no secret trick to winning a person’s heart.
I’m only now learning that.
Instead, there’s one thing I’ve come to know for certain.
You cannot win a person’s heart with technology. You can win it only with sincerity.
Sincerity is not words. Sincerity is not mere emotion.
Sincerity is an attitude.
The posture of listening to someone all the way to the end, the act of keeping small promises, the effort to think from the other person’s position, the patience to let them realize things for themselves.
When these are repeated,
an invisible asset called trust accumulates between people.
An asset you can’t buy with money, can’t replace with technology,
that only comes into being with time.
The “Palantir of East Asia” that I’m pursuing
must be not a company of technology,
but exactly this — a company of trust. I’ve only now come to understand that.
Going forward, I intend to do two things at MAEUM.io.
First, I listen to the customer. Not just to data, but to a person’s voice. I listen even to what they don’t say.
Second, I live up to the name. I’ll prove why the company is called “Heart.”
I’ll compete not only with technology, but with heart.
I’m still only 26. Ten billion won before 30, fifty billion before 35, a hundred billion to a trillion before 40.
These goals still hold.
But now, the way I move toward them has changed.
I resolve to get there by winning people’s hearts.
That’s all. And I don’t say it lightly.