Today, my wife and I joined the Content Strategy class at Jeju National University. We were invited to discuss our restaurant’s website and content as guest speakers.

Before I forget, I’d like to summarize my presentation to the students.

• The idea to build a vegan sandwich shop was born when we started to ask serious questions about our lives.
• When working for a company, I wondered if I could be a valuable addition to society. I wanted to “escape competition through authenticity,” but there were lots of BS around my life. I worked for three companies to realize polishing my resume is not a path to wealth or happiness.
• We stopped looking for an ideal setting. Instead, we quit our jobs to create our “perfect environment.”
• We wanted to be the masters of our lives. We didn’t want to let competition and jealousy control who we were.
• We thought of many business models, but running a vegan sandwich shop was the only one that sparked our imaginations. With this idea, we dreamed of designing and providing a unique product, space, and content.
• Before we even knew how to bake sandwich bread, we came up with a set of principles. Five of the principles are 1. Don’t let others’ opinions affect our decisions. 2. Long-term thinking is the way. We focus on small yet constant growth. 3. Hard choices, easy life. No sourcing. We bake bread, make the sauce, and develop our website. 4. Life is short. Mastering one craft is enough. 5. Always creation over consumption.
• Our content has similar principles: 1. We publish writings on our own domain. We don’t rely on big-tech platforms to build an audience. 2. We don’t let metrics dictate our content. Original content should not be SEO-friendly. 3. Never stop creating and publishing. 4. Help others. We open-source our recipes and know-how. 5. We create content not for a million but for a hundred people.
• The cheesylazy.com website I built is simple but effective. Unlike bulky websites and platforms, our website is fast, privacy-friendly, and straightforward.
• Our future plans. We’re writing a “Too Small to Fail” e-book and planning to start a podcast interviewing small business owners.
• The problems we’re considering. 1. Can we be 100% free from Instagram? 2. How can we convince readers to subscribe to our weekly newsletter? 3. How to design a home page. 4. We have over 90 posts now. How can we organize them to be reader-friendly?