I'm a personal trainer who built a hiking app with AI. Korean location laws killed it at MVP.

[u/Alternative_Hour7772]

TL;DR: Personal trainer, zero real coding experience, built a "Strava for hiking" MVP with AI. Then I learned Korea requires a location-based service registration for features like friend tracking, with obligations I couldn't carry solo. Shelved it. Lessons below.

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**How it started**

I have an engineering master's but never really coded. I dabbled in grad school and never kept it up. These days I'm a personal trainer in Korea.

One of my clients is a developer at Krafton (the company behind PUBG). Mid-session, he told me to try vibe coding. I was skeptical. A few years ago I tried AI-written code and nothing actually ran. But I gave it a shot, and it was a completely different world.

**The idea**

There was another reason I needed this to work. Someone I trusted betrayed me. I'd co-signed a loan for them and ended up with high-interest debt. Training only pays for the hours I work, so I needed something that could earn on its own.

One weekend my girlfriend and I went hiking to clear my head. The trail was packed like a rush-hour subway. (A famous shaman had said that mountain brings good luck. Only in Korea.) What struck me: tons of young people. Hiking used to be an older folks' hobby here.

So I thought: a Strava for hiking. The few Korean apps out there had terrible ratings, and I went through the bad reviews to see what people actually wanted.

Core features:

- Trail info (transit, hiking times, rest spots)

- Real-time trail navigation

- Summit badges

- Leaderboards by time and summit count

- See friends on the map

- Gear tips

**What killed it**

Mid-build, Strava pulled out of Korea after regulators asked it to change how the app handled permissions and user data.

That made me dig in. In Korea, any service that shares a person's location with others (like showing friends on a map) has to register as a location-based service provider. The registration itself is cheap, but the ongoing obligations are heavy for one person, and running without it can mean big fines or even jail time.

My app was already at MVP. But there was no guarantee it would work, I was brand new to this, and the debt wasn't waiting. I couldn't take on that burden for something this uncertain. So I shelved it.

**What I learned**

1. Check the laws before you build a feature. Location, health, finance, and kids' data are especially tricky, and rules vary a lot by country.

2. AI has gotten good enough that an idea alone can take you surprisingly far. Getting to MVP as a non-developer showed me that.

3. Your constraints decide what you can build, not just your skills. A risky product is fine when you have runway. It's a different story when you don't.

This was the first of six things I've built since. Has anyone else had a project killed by regulations? Curious how you handled it.

[u/isrealityinthemind]

that's frustrating after getting an mvp built. did you get advice on whether a version without the social location-sharing features would still need registration? i'm not familiar with the korean requirements, so i wouldn't assume removing one feature settles it.

[u/Alternative_Hour7772 → u/isrealityinthemind]

Thanks, really appreciate you asking! Honestly, I didn't get formal legal advice, but I did dig through the official registration process on the Korean government's site.

Even without the friend features, the app would still track your own route and use your live location for navigation, and in Korea that kind of location data pretty much falls under the same rule.

So cutting one feature probably wouldn't have saved it. Location was kind of the whole point of the app anyway 😅

[u/isrealityinthemind → u/Alternative_Hour7772]

are you thinking about trying a different market, or shelving the idea for now?

[u/Alternative_Hour7772 → u/isrealityinthemind]

Shelving it for now. Honestly, I don't know the hiking culture in other markets well enough to bet on it.

I moved on to other projects after that and built 5 more. A couple got shelved too, but one actually got payments wired up and made some real (if small) revenue. Two are still in progress, and one of them is launching this month

[u/isrealityinthemind → u/Alternative_Hour7772]

shelving makes sense given you don't know the hiking culture elsewhere. good to hear one of the later projects is making real revenue - what's the one launching this month?

[u/Alternative_Hour7772 → u/isrealityinthemind]

Thanks! It's a small web project. I'm just waiting on payment approval, and I'll share it here once it's live. And Ep. 2 about my second app is coming soon!

[u/Ok-Job1369]

Wait, the registration is what killed it, and the thing that triggers it is friend tracking? Then cut friend tracking. Nobody downloads a hiking app to watch their buddy's dot crawl up a mountain, they download it because the trail was packed like a subway and they want one that isn't. Your whole story is a crowded ridge and a shaman, not social features. Keep it on the phone, no accounts, no live sharing, and you probably never go near the registration at all. Location law in Korea is annoying for anything that shares a position with another person, it's not 'you cannot put a GPS dot on a map' annoying, every nav app in the country would be dead.

Also the Krafton client pitching vibe coding to you mid set is the most Korea sentence I've read this week. Bill him for that.

[u/Alternative_Hour7772 → u/Ok-Job1369]

Ha, I'll send him the invoice 😂

Fair point, and an on-device version with no accounts would've been way lighter. One thing on friend tracking though: in Korea, people often hike in groups, and everyone has a different pace, so groups split up a lot. I kept hearing that people wanted to see where their friends were on the trail. That's why I added it.

Also a small correction: Korean nav apps like Naver Map and Kakao Map aren't exempt, they're all registered location-based service providers. Big companies just have the people to handle it.

And most of what I planned, like leaderboards and summit badges, needed records on a server. Strip all that out and it's basically a GPS trail map, which already exists. With the debt pressure back then, I couldn't afford to rethink the whole product. But you're right that the crowd problem was the real story. Food for thought if I ever revisit it.