[INTERVIEW] Lifestyle startup helps millennials, Gen Z find their true self – The Korea Times

“Meet me” offers various routine tasks including home decorating and running / Courtesy of meet me

By Lee Gyu-lee

A working mom stumbled across a website that offers a program that requires her to devote 40 minutes of her time every morning to follow a set of self-development tasks. A friend introduced her to the platform, called “meet me,” after seeing her struggling to balance work and family life. The online program invites participants to set aside 20 minutes to keep a journal and another 20 minutes to work out right after getting up in the morning.

“She didn’t look so happy at first… because it’s hard for working moms to have their own time. But (after the program), she told me that this allowed her to dedicate 40 minutes of her morning to fully focus on herself,” Lee Yong-bok, CMO and one of the three co-founders of the lifestyle startup “meet me” said during an interview with The Korea Times, Tuesday, at the company’s facility in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul.

The concept of a “ritual lifestyle,” or committing oneself to a specific task or activity in day-to-day life, has been growing in popularity, especially among the MZ generation ― born between 1980 to the early 2000s.

The three co-founders and former co-workers at the vacation rental platform Airbnb ― Son Ha-bin, 37, Kim Eun-ji, 35, and Lee, 32 ― strive to use ritual to guide people on a journey to find their true self by making small changes in their daily routines.

“When you get through just a few questions with someone, you realize not a lot of people know themselves well,” Son, co-founder and CEO, said. “Not many people can answer me when I ask if they are fully satisfied with their life and why and how they are not satisfied.”

Co-founders of “meet me,” a self-development service startup, Lee Yong-bok, from left, Son Ha-bin and Kim Eun-ji pose for a photo. Courtesy of meet me

Under the slogan, “nice to meet me,” the company offers various ritual lifestyle programs ranging from yoga, running and home decorating to writing journals after listening to music or writing lyrics, along with counseling or therapy programs.

Before opening its own space called “meet me home” this May, it mostly operated online programs. The company now has about 50 offline and online programs and attracted about 3,000 users since it started in August last year.

“Therapies help you figure out your trauma and get to know yourself, but if you can’t keep that attitude in your daily life, it’s pointless. So we came up with programs that will help us to look into ourselves through our daily routines, like eating, reading and doing physical activities,” Kim, co-founder and CSO, said.

Yoga studio space at “meet me home,” located in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul / Courtesy of meet me

Each ritual program runs for a certain period, usually four weeks. Every day, the users complete the ritual at a given part of a day. The crucial part is to reflect on oneself and focus on emotion while doing the activity. Then, the users freely share their thoughts or personal stories with the rest of the group.

“Anything can be a ritual program. There are a lot of ways to find and meet me, other than therapy. It can be listening to music, meditating, other therapeutic activities or writing,” Kim noted. “There’s no answer. It’s only important that we figure out our needs and desires to steer in that direction as we live our lives, so we try to share different ways to help people do that.”

One might say the programs it offers are no different than other social gathering communities based on hobbies or interests. But the co-founders emphasized that the rituals are different from hobbies, because they go a step further than just physically doing the activities.

“Ritual is a way to take care of yourself every day. For example, listening to music is a hobby, but when you write down what comes to your mind while listening, it becomes a ritual,” Son said. She added that a ritual is about putting oneself at the center of those activities. “Hobbies can be used as a sidestep… like watching TV to get your mind off of things that give you a hard time. It can make you feel good at that moment, which isn’t bad. But it’s also not going to solve your problem.”

A “ritual maker” of the aroma meditation program at meet me / Courtesy of meet me

The co-founders explained that their common backgrounds and experience at their previous job helped them come up with the idea to start this business.

Kim, who was the head of Airbnb’s Seoul office, said she went through her own soul-searching phase during her 20s.

“I’ve lived up to other people’s expectations like I felt like I would be a failure if I don’t get a job at some large corporation. But in my mid-20s, I was doing everything that my parents told me would make me happy, but I wasn’t,” she said. That’s when she had an epiphany to quit her job at a big-name petrochemical company and go on an adventure.

“I’ve tried a lot of things, like getting counseling and going on trips overseas for programs to learn how to live happily,” she said, adding that she also has freelanced and worked at social ventures, and ran her own business before working for Airbnb.

“Airbnb’s corporate culture encourages and respects diversity, and after working there for a while we got to know each other very well and I also had a chance to think about how I want to build my future,” Kim said.

Interior of a meet me home office / Courtesy of meet me

And as Airbnb’s business took off in Korea and its office grew into an established corporation, the co-founders started to feel the need to find their own project.

“As a business grows, it’s inevitable and necessary to establish a functional process… but I think there are different types of people an organization needs depending on its phase of growth, and we were fit for the starting stage: getting our hands on shaping the business,” Son said.

And this led her to pitch her idea for “meet me” to her co-workers, Kim and Lee, and establish the startup together.

“I’m the type of person that really easily draws in influences. And when I’m in a positive environment (like Airbnb), the speed I take things in gets much faster, which made me realize the importance of a community,” Son said. “And since I love making changes to myself, and other people… I started to think about my next move to engage in life-changing work.”

For Son, the life-changing experience is to go on a journey of self-discovery. She took this chance to create a community that has a positive influence.

A “ritual maker” of a ritual program that invites users to listen to music and write in a journal every day / Courtesy of meet me

Creating a warm, encouraging environment for users is one of the keys to running the platform. To do that, “ritual makers” are hand-picked by the company to lead each program and act as an inspiration among the group.

“We know having a daily routine like mediation, yoga or writing is good, but it’s hard to keep it up by yourself. So we thought of how people can continue their daily rituals, and came up with the idea to create a community, led by a ritual maker,” Kim said.

“This ritual maker, who has already been doing the ritual on their own, can inspire and lead others. Participants might hit a bump while trying to keep up, and when they do, ritual makers can encourage them ― like a cheerleader ― and get them through difficulties.”

And the endless encouragement brings positive changes in the participants and gets them to be more engaged in the programs.

“A lot of positive feedback was about how they could follow along with the ritual routines with meet me, and about how we have such warm communities that make them want to come back,” Son explained.

Ritual room at the meet me home / Courtesy of meet me

“(The program’s) priority isn’t on completing the tasks… here, we try to focus on the fact we are taking part rather than focusing on what we didn’t do. As we praise each other about even small things, that can lead them to do it again,” Kim said. “We’re all doing it for our own good, so it shouldn’t come to feel like a burden or coercion.”

Lee shared a story of a middle-aged man who joined her program, whose ritual is to walk 10,000 steps daily and share journals with the group. At first, he didn’t take part at all, because he felt uncomfortable sharing his personal stories and how he felt that day, like other people in the group.

”So I told him he can just share the screenshot of his steps and nothing else, and he completed his task 100 percent the next week,” she said. “And people cheered him on and applauded him even for the screenshots, which made him begin sharing his stories. He felt a sense of achievement and belonging in doing it together and started to show changes.”

Although its membership is growing, based largely on word of mouth, the co-founders said most of the users are women in their 30s to 40s. To reach a wider range of platform users, the co-founders said they are focusing on two things: making ritual programs as accessible and simple, and as diverse as possible.

One of the two chefs who operates a kitchen on the second floor of meet me home / Courtesy of meet me

“If it is something special, it won’t last, because most people live to have a busy lifestyle. So it has to be something that would make use of the free or remaining time of a day,” Son said. “Not a lot of people even acknowledge the concept of knowing themselves. They don’t know why they should, as if they are trying to avoid facing such topics… we need to awaken our senses and be keen on learning about ourselves.”

To promote interest in the platform, meet me is teaming up with different companies, from beer and cosmetic brands to event planning agencies.

“Ritual can be combined with any lifestyle-related thing, so we are getting offers to collaborate from all sorts of fields, which we have been carrying out together,” Son said.

The company’s newest addition “meet me home,” which takes up four of the five stories of a building in Seongsu-dong, is another way to open up its doors and invite new users.

The rooftop area of the building offers a space for people to spend their time in relaxation. / Courtesy of meet me

Each floor of the facility has a space for different services: restaurants, counseling and ritual rooms, a yoga studio, and rooftop resting area. It is open to the public to freely walk in and get a glimpse of the company’s philosophy.

Son explained that the facility is the visualization of its platform. “As our service often requires human contact, many users expressed that they want to meet face-to-face with their groups. Then we came across this space,” she said. “Like what we pursue, this space intends for people to comfortably be themselves and enjoy our philosophy.”

When asked about the future direction of the company, the co-founders said they hope to cover everything that can help people to be themselves and live their authentic lives.

“The first step in doing so is to find out what ‘being myself’ is, so we started with mental wellness. Without it, we won’t know what we like or who we are,” Son said.

Kim added, “’Finding one’s true self’ is such a vague concept and has different approaches. But regardless of that, there is a clear difference between trying to find it and not trying. Of course, it’s not like your whole life will turn upside down from this, but the changes will be valuable.”