Our Story
Gather! Share! Belong!
For years, if you wanted to find a Korean restaurant, a hair salon, or a doctor who spoke Korean — anywhere from LA to Las Vegas to New York — there was really only one place to turn: a Korean-language directory like RadioKorea. It's been the go-to for a long time, and it works, if you read Korean.
But that's exactly the problem. If you're a Korean-American who doesn't read Hangul fluently, or you're one of the millions of people around the world who fell in love with K-pop, K-dramas, K-beauty, or Korean food — there's nowhere for you to go. You're locked out of your own community's directory, or locked out of a culture you love, over a language barrier that never needed to exist.
Damoyuh was also born from something closer to home: growing up watching our parents and halmonis run restaurants, salons, and clinics with zero digital support behind them. I kept running into this same gap from both directions — the language wall, and the tools our community never had — and I kept waiting for someone to fix it. Nobody did. So I decided to build it.
Damoyuh — 다모여, which loosely means "everyone, gather here" — is our answer: a platform built bilingual from the ground up, so a business owner, a longtime community member, and a K-culture fan halfway across the world can all find the same great Korean business, in whichever language feels like home.
A note from our founder
I was born and raised in Los Angeles — Koreatown was part of my childhood long before it became trendy. I watched it grow, shift, struggle, and thrive, but one thing never changed: Korean business owners always worked harder than anyone, and were still underrepresented online.
My own path wound through Oahu, Hawaii, then Washington state, before I came back to LA for high school and college at UCLA, where I started out pre-med. Partway through, I knew I needed a reset — so I moved to Korea and started over at Seoul National University as a business major. It gave me a perspective I didn't know I needed.
Over the following decade, I worked in corporate finance, spent time in Korean entertainment (YG included), and launched a few startups. Through all of it, one thing stayed with me: our community needed better digital tools, and what we had hadn't kept up.
I first cofounded Ktownly with a business partner to serve LA's Koreatown specifically. Over time, I realized the Korean-American experience couldn't be boxed into one zip code — so I stepped away to build something bigger: a space reflecting the full diversity of Korean communities across the U.S., and eventually the world. That's Damoyuh — bringing together Korean businesses from LA to New York, Seoul to Toronto, all in one place where everyone — 다 모여 — can belong.
I'm building this alone right now, mostly at night and mostly on caffeine, alongside studying for the California Bar. I've put real time and money into this that I don't always have to spare, because I believe our community deserves better than being an afterthought. Along the way, I'll be sharing what I'm learning too — how I use AI to build a real product as a non-engineer, and some basic legal and business knowledge from my law background. (I'm not yet a licensed attorney, so none of this is legal advice — just things I wish someone had told me plainly.) If you're a fellow founder, a small business owner, or just curious how something like this gets built, I hope some of it is useful to you too.
No banner spam, no 1997 layout. Just a modern space that respects where we came from, and builds where we're going.
You might not always see my face, but I hope you'll feel my intentions in every detail. This isn't about me. It's about us.
Thanks for being here from the beginning.
— Jae C.
Founder, Damoyuh
How to help· 함께하는 방법
If you want to help this grow, the simplest way is: claim your listing, leave a review, tell a friend. That's what actually builds this community.
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