Independent research · Market entry
USFK-Pay
Using a U.S. Army base in Korea as a bridgehead to find a Korean fintech’s way into the U.S.
- Role
- Sole researcher · interview design · fake-door testing
- Period
- 8 months, 2023 – 2024
There is one place you can meet American users without leaving Korea: a U.S. Army base. I was inside one as a KATUSA soldier, and I turned that access into a research design.
Method
The smaller the sample, the stricter the procedure has to be. Everything from recruitment to coding was documented.
- 01Individual recruitment
Recruited one by one, including the executive officer and unit commander
- 02Semi-structured interviews
~30 minutes each, recorded, transcribed and coded
- 03AS-IS / TO-BE analysis
Comparing the current payment experience against alternatives
- 04Fake-door test
Measuring real demand for a product that did not exist
The conclusion
The entry point was transit, not transfers or cards
Taken together, the interviews and the fake-door tests pointed at transit payment as the friction they hit most often and could least avoid.
It answered “where do you enter?” rather than “what do you build?”
Treating the recruitment poster as UI
The first poster drew almost nothing. I treated that as a usability problem rather than a failure — having soldiers read it aloud and watching where they stalled.
Three competing CTAs collapsed into one action
The strongest benefit reads first
Feature lists rewritten as benefits
Research artifacts
