I went looking for a Korean hair salon and found out the website didn't exist

DANA — 단아 — started the way a few of my projects have: I wanted to use something, went looking for it, and slowly realized it wasn't there.

What I wanted was simple. I wanted to find a Korean hair salon. Not a complicated request, and not a rare one — there are Korean salons and Korean-run shops all over the U.S., serving communities that have been here for decades. I just wanted a place to look them up.

There wasn't one. No site that gathers them, introduces them, or tells you anything useful about them. The businesses exist; the directory does not.

What people do instead

In the absence of a website, the information still moves — it just moves the slow way. You ask someone at church. You ask a coworker. You ask in a group chat and wait to see if anyone answers. If you're lucky, someone who's lived in the area a long time knows a name, and you go on that.

This works, and I don't want to be dismissive of it — community knowledge is genuinely valuable, and a recommendation from someone you trust beats any rating out of five. But it has a specific failure mode: it only works if you already know people.

If you just moved for school or a job, if you're the first person in your family in that city, if you're somewhere without much of a Korean community — you have no one to ask. The information network is real but you're not connected to it, and there's no front door.

Why the general options don't cover it

The obvious response is: use a map app, search "hair salon," read the reviews. And for a lot of needs that's completely fine.

But it doesn't answer the questions that made me want a Korean salon in the first place. Can I explain what I want in Korean, precisely, without translating a description of my own hair? Has this stylist worked with hair like mine, and do they know the cuts and perms I'd be asking for? These are exactly the things a general listing has no field for. You end up guessing from the shop name and hoping.

So the gap isn't really "these businesses aren't on the internet." Many of them are. The gap is that nobody has organized them around the thing that makes them relevant. That reframing is what turned this from a complaint into a project.

What DANA is

A place to discover and book trusted Korean salons across the U.S. — wherever you live, not just in the few cities with a big enough community that word of mouth does the job for you.

The name is 단아 (dan-a), which describes something neat, poised, quietly put-together. It felt right for a directory about looking after yourself, and it's short enough to say out loud without explaining.

Booking matters as much as the listing does. A directory that only tells you a place exists still leaves you making a phone call in a language you might be nervous using, during hours you might be at work. Being able to just pick a time removes the last piece of friction — which, for a lot of people, was the piece actually stopping them.

The part I'm working on now

DANA started as a website, and it's currently becoming an app as well.

The reason is that the web version made something clear: this is a phone activity. Nobody researches a haircut at a desk. You think about it on the subway, in bed, in the ten minutes between two other things — and you want to reopen it later without hunting for the tab you left it in. Booking, in particular, is something people do standing up.

That's the current build, and it's genuinely in progress rather than finished. I'd rather say that plainly than describe it as though it's already done.

What I keep learning from this one

• "There's no website for this" is a real answer, not a search failure. My first assumption was that I was bad at searching. I spent a while being annoyed at myself before considering that the thing simply didn't exist.
• Community knowledge has an entry requirement. Word of mouth is excellent for people already inside the network and useless for everyone else. Newcomers are exactly the people who need the answer most, which is a strange thing to leave to chance.
• The gap is usually organization, not existence. These businesses are findable in the sense that they're technically online. They're not findable in the sense that matters. Those are very different problems, and only the second one is worth building for.
• Build for the version of yourself who didn't know anyone. That's the actual user. Not me now, with a recommendation in hand — me a few years ago, in a new city, with nobody to ask.

You can look at DANA here. If you run a Korean salon, or you've hit this exact wall in your own city, tell me about it — that's the input this project needs most right now.

More project origin stories and bugs in the build log, or on Instagram.