Today we will introduce the award winning team of 2019 Fall E*5 KAIST, Dingbro. Dingbro is a startup servicing DoctorCha, which is the intermediary of vehicle management services and provides consulting service. Let’s meet Jaeyoung Jo, CEO of Dingbro!

Hello, I am Jaeyoung Jo, the CEO of Dingbro. Our team consists of 4 computer science students at KAIST and decided to create a startup to change the world with deep learning technology. For the past year and a half, we tried out different items and now we are trying to launch a car consulting service for drivers who have problems or curious about their cars.

Our team is made up of 4 CS students, and we wanted to make a name similar to DevSisters. We had to submit our team name urgently to participate in the startup support program, so we came up with ‘Dingbro’ by combining ‘coding’ and ‘brother’. We’ve been using the name since because it had positive reactions and we actually liked how it sounded.

Coding + Brother = Dingbro. It’s a very unique combination!

The members of Dingbro are both KAIST classmates as well as high school classmates. Since high school, we have been working on fun projects together. Most importantly, during our freshman year of college, we have been trading virtual money and went through huge amounts of gain and loss. We realized the taste of money, and going through the big crash of bitcoin, we decided that we should focus on technology and not luck. So during our sophomore year, we prepared a tech startup and started our business using deep learning technology that we’ve always been studying.

So, Dingbro was founded by high school friends who learned deep learning in college. I think there will be good synergy since the team gets along well. However, there seems to be a difference in the initial coding and deep learning service and the current service.

During the first year, we went around looking for industries and applications that deep learning can be used. At the same time, we looked at what directions in which other deep learning based tech startups were going. We realized that to start and succeed as a business solely based on deep learning, we must have the core technology or have the technology that can be widely used. This is because deep learning is highly dependent on the data produced by companies if they do not have their own data pipeline. Even if companies are in the same industry, data dependency is so high that the deep learning technology might be customized for 1 customer. We thought we might continuously accept one-time outsourcing if we became a deep learning SI company (even if this would make a lot of money).

Then we saw the case of ‘Carrot Market’, where deep learning created automation processes throughout the platform based on the data produced within the platform and service. We were impressed by the efficiency and conversion rate of the entire system significantly improving as a result. It might take time at this stage, but we wanted to create a service platform that could produce our own data. Through this process and expanding our service, we want to become the team that could best integrate deep learning and data analysis.

In the process, we met the CEO of Autopedia, Byunggun Kim, who was originally preparing the DoctorCha service. We realized how inefficient and fragmented the field of vehicle aftermarket was and felt the distrust between maintenance companies and customers that has been building up because most drivers are not familiar with cars. Even more, there was no service that could solve simple problems in cars, which led us to work with CEO Kim. We chose this field because we saw the potential in the text data that would be produced through consulting and the driving and maintenance data that would accumulate.

So Dingbro selected an item that incorporates deep learning into a service instead of fully basing the startup on deep learning technology. It seems the efficiency of current service will be improved if deep learning is applied to a service that produces its own data.

DoctorCha service is a service that provides consulting with a specialist technician with more than 15 years of experience for drivers that have problems with their cars. Through consulting, drivers will be guided with solutions and also be introduced to maintenance companies if necessary. Our service gives an estimated price for the specified car problem in the third-person perspective, so it can prevent over-maintenance or rip-offs by consulting before visiting service centers. We especially recommend our service to drivers with 1 to 3 years of experience who don’t know a lot of maintenance centers and are beginning to experience problems with their cars.

And after visiting maintenance centers, most drivers lose their maintenance records or don’t manage them separately, so they do not get full price when selling their cars or full reimbursement when their cars are over-repaired. DoctorCha automatically manages the maintenance records if you upload them, which helps prevent future disadvantage. Finally, our service monitors the history of consumables replacement from the maintenance records and informs users when they should replace consumables such as engine oil. We will launch a beta service on Android and iOS in April, so you’ll be able to see them soon.

I think it’s a good service for drivers who find it difficult to maintain their cars. I believe that Kakao Talk is also providing a similar service, but I think it would be better if there was separate app service.

In the field of car maintenance and management, Cardoc and Macarong are the most successful companies. In the case of Cardoc, it started in the field of external repair and is gradually expanding their service to engine oil and car inspection. The biggest difference between DoctorCha and existing services is that the platform can solve even the most trivial car problem. DoctorCha explains the cause of the problem and recommends solutions, estimated prices, and maintenance centers near the user based on data from 700,000 domestic maintenance cases and information of 30,000 maintenance companies. Our team has been driving a corporate car for a year and have faced a few problems. DoctorCha allows users to solve problems within 10 minutes on average, which differs from other services that only recommend one-way maintenance centers limited to the specific problem.

In fact last December, we found that users were highly satisfied with the 1:1 consulting service after running MVP tests that solved car problems of 1,600 users through the Kakao Talk Plus Friend channel. When we saw the test results, we were confident that we could maximize user experience through a car consulting solution. We believe that we can satisfy users by reducing the consulting costs through systematizing the consulting process, and build a competitive edge.

The fact that DoctorCha can solve the most trivial problems is appealing to customers. I think the service will be greatly improved by collecting and classifying more than 700,000 cases of data and using deep learning technology. Maximizing customer satisfaction at the minimum costs will be very important.

We’re facing a few difficulties, but the most difficult thing is verifying the maximum driver’s experience through our DoctorCha application and bringing in early users. Due to the limitations of the KakaoTalk platform, it became difficult to provide contents for consultation and maintenance records and retention. The DoctorCha beta service, which will be launched in April, offers these features, so we are aiming to maximize the user satisfaction of the end-to-end consulting process. In order to bring in early users, we are trying to target specific car communities. At the same time, we are planning a promotion for drivers in KAIST for quick feedback.

Since there are also a lot of employees who drive in KAIST in addition to students, it would be really helpful to analyze them.

If you’re really interested in startups, I recommend to try it when you’re an undergraduate. There are a lot of reasons for this, but firstly, it’s easy to get rid of the solution-drive logic. I learned this from Professor Juho Kim’s HCI class, when he mentioned that KAIST students are so highly skilled that they tend to focus on technology when trying to solve a problem. Our first business item was an In-game 3D advertisement platform, but indie game developers did not seem to face the problems that we originally targeted. I think we first started because we thought it would be cool to develop the solution. Through starting a business, you can verify that the problem you’re trying to solve is actually a real problem. If you get used to this, you can improve your judgement when doing research or a project even if it’s not a startup.

The second reason is because there is no better environment to start a business as an undergraduate than KAIST (Although you shouldn’t start a business just because the environment is good). If you want to start a hardware startup, you can do woodwork, metal CNC manufacturing, 3D printing, circuit board manufacturing at the IdeaFactory. There are also many opportunities to create your product in the initial prototyping stages. If you want to start a software startup, you can participate in Madcamp or Hackathons that the CS department holds, where you can learn and meet skilled team members. Especially, teams developing deep learning algorithms can use free GPU clusters at the IdeaFactory, so there is no need to worry about borrowing cloud resources. If you need an office or a place to live, you can use the W8 Startup Studio space and live at the Startup village. Professor Min-Jun Park especially supported the students. Our team enjoyed all the benefits mentioned above. I hope students use the opportunities if they have ideas they are thinking about.

If you go through starting a business alone, you will face a lot of trial and errors. In the case of our team, we participated in the 2018 and 2019 E*5 program and learned a lot. The E*5 program is a competition where you can see what it’s like to create a startup in KAIST and physically learn in fields by making your own results. E*5 is the first gateway to start a business where you will go through 3 stages and get sharp feedback from the best venture capitalists, Startup KAIST professors, and mentors.

When our team first participated in E*5, we thought the most important thing was to show a cool demo and great results. But we realized the more important thing was to see if the problem we were trying to solve is actually a real problem, and whether our solution could really solve the problem. To validate how much users are willing to pay for our solution, we noticed that it’s important to meet users in person and constantly improve our ideas. I hope you experience realizing your thoughts or ideas before it’s too late.

Starting a business as a student can be risky, but it’s actually safe because you’re still in school. As CEO Jaeyoung Jo said, there are many startup support programs like E*5 KAIST, so apply if you’re interested in startups! The entry barrier to starting a business is not too high, so students can challenge themselves and receive coaching from mentors to develop their ideas into a startup item.

In fields of optimizing routes, expecting demand of ride-hailing in the mobility industry, data optimization is doing well. However, there is no company that fully utilizes data in the maintenance field. When consulting car maintenance, you can see that drivers voluntarily give more information than what is needed to solve the problem. DoctorCha might seem like a simple consulting service in the beginning, but will become a precise mobility marketing platform. At the same time, if maintenance consulting data is accumulated, we can provide Maas(Maintenance-as-a-service) to car startups like SOCAR to bring the B2B maintenance segment to our company. Our goal now is to make the DoctorCha service come to mind of users whenever they have a problem with their cars.

I believe that if DoctorCha becomes a mobility marketing platform and work with other car systems, it will succeed in the car maintenance field. I hope for the success of Dingbro in the future! So far we have met with the CEO of Dingbro, Jaeyoung Jo.