About three months into building the Korean version, I showed the product to a financial analyst at a Korean institutional investor. He scrolled through the interface for maybe thirty seconds, then said something like: "we already have Bloomberg for data, what I need is something I can hand off."
The "hand off" part is what stuck. He needed a PDF or an Excel file, something he could email to a manager. The graph query interface I was showing him was not the answer.
I kept working on the project for a few more weeks anyway. The pipeline was running. I told myself I was still gathering information.
Some background: 2asy.ai tracks tariff policy changes and how they propagate to specific companies. The basic idea is that you can crawl policy and trade news, figure out which companies sit in the affected supply chains, and make that queryable. The entity resolution work is the hard part of it, which is mostly what the ER API does. When I decided to do a Korean-language version, it looked tractable because I'd done most of that infrastructure already. Mainly crawl pipeline work and some frontend localization to do on top.
By the time I showed the analyst that demo, I'd had a few other conversations in the same vein. Different people, similar answer. Korean institutional finance and compliance people I was talking to wanted a deliverable they could hand to someone else, not a tool they'd query themselves. The B2B buyers I'd built the international version for had already decided to integrate vendor risk data programmatically. Most of the Korean buyers I was reaching hadn't made that decision, or weren't the decision-makers who would.
I paused it. I kept the crawl pipeline and the entity resolution work because those are directly reusable if a reporting-oriented distribution path shows up. But I stopped maintaining it as an active product and turned off the scheduled jobs.
Looking back, I'm still not entirely sure when I made the decision versus when I just stopped maintaining it. Somewhere around week twelve those converged.
I build er-api, a multilingual entity resolution service, and 2asy.ai, a trade intelligence graph. More at hannune.ai.
Top comments (0)