Hi, this is Chaehyun from the Bay Area. I'm the one who seeded Around The Corner, and I wanted to share this myself rather than let it just fade away.
From March 2023 to October 2025 — two and a half years — I'm grateful to the 2,600 people from California who joined us, and to everyone who explored, supported, and believed in it along the way. I saw what good groundwork for a long run looks like, and what it takes to carry healthy momentum forward.
Originally, I created Around The Corner to be a slow place where people could exchange long-form writing — capture their thoughts, log their history — and ultimately use that to reach people who were ready for a quality conversation over coffee. Over time, the platform drifted toward event discovery and dating — honestly, never what I set out to build.
Of course, if we pursued it, I still believe Around The Corner could continue. Plenty of social networking and dating apps have already shown a proven playbook for sustaining a business like this. But making it thrive as a self-sustaining platform would mean being ready to commit the next ten years to it. After a careful think, I've decided to wind Around The Corner down. I want to build something I can genuinely be part of while flowing with my life, and that deeply aligns with why I have to do it.
Around The Corner showed me what healthy compatibility and chemistry in relationships actually looks like — what makes two people fit. I want to find that same fit more often in daily life, starting with one of our most basic needs: housing.
Nest & Key applies that same mechanism, now pointed at finding the right match between people and the homes they live in. Social media and real estate look nothing alike on the surface, but how they connect people behind the scenes is nearly identical. I find that pretty interesting.
Visit Nest & Key
— Chaehyun
@baek.chaehyun on Instagram