This episode visits SSEHADA, the Seoul based platform operated by AbleCity that brings saju, the thousand year old East Asian four pillars tradition, onto modern software. Markus digs into the engineering behind it: true solar time calculated to the minute from the latitude and longitude of a birthplace, a proprietary algorithm built by ten masters working with data engineers, and a free tool suite that has drawn over 194,000 users. A story about what happens when technology respects a craft instead of flattening it.
Every culture has a way of asking the same question. Who am I, and what am I like? Some people reach for personality tests. Some reach for their star sign. And across East Asia, for something close to a thousand years, people have reached for saju, a reading built from the exact moment of a person's birth, expressed in four pillars of year, month, day and hour. It is one of the oldest continuously practised interpretive traditions in the world, and until very recently it lived almost entirely in the memory and judgement of individual practitioners.
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where I look for businesses doing something genuinely interesting, often in corners of the economy that do not get much attention. Today I want to talk about a company working at an unusual intersection: a centuries old cultural tradition on one side, and modern software engineering on the other. The company is called SSEHADA, and what they are doing with a very old practice is, I think, quite a bit more interesting than it first appears.
SSEHADA is operated by AbleCity, based in the Yeongdeungpo district of Seoul, and led by Kwon Jun Seok. The name itself is a lovely piece of branding. Sse-hada is a Korean word for that faint, hard to place feeling that something is off, or that something is about to happen. That prickle at the back of the neck. Their tagline translates as interpreting the subtle feelings in your heart like science, and that phrase tells you exactly where the company has positioned itself. They are taking something intuitive and treating it with method.
Let me explain what saju actually is, for listeners who have not come across it. It is a system of East Asian metaphysics, sometimes called four pillars of destiny, which reads a person's birth moment through the traditional sexagenary cycle: combinations of heavenly stems and earthly branches, layered with the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal and water. A trained reader takes those pillars and interprets the relationships between them. It is closer in spirit to a symbolic language than to a horoscope column. There is a body of classical text behind it, a vocabulary, and a long tradition of interpretation, and in Korea it remains woven into ordinary life in a way that outsiders often underestimate. People consult it at turning points. It comes up in conversation. It has a cultural presence somewhere between astrology and a family tradition.
Now here is where SSEHADA gets engineering minded, and here is the part I find genuinely impressive regardless of what anyone believes about the tradition itself. The accuracy of any saju reading depends entirely on getting the birth chart right, and getting the birth chart right depends on time. Not clock time. Solar time.
Standard time zones are a modern administrative convenience. They are wide, they have straight edges, and they do not correspond to where the sun actually is above your head. Korea runs on a single time zone, but the sun reaches its highest point at meaningfully different moments in Seoul and on Jeju. If a chart's hour pillar hinges on the true position of the sun, then using the clock on the wall introduces an error, and that error can push a birth into the wrong pillar entirely.
SSEHADA calculates what is called jin taeyangsi, true solar time, to the minute, using the latitude and longitude of the birth location. Most practitioners, by their account, skip this. It is fiddly. It requires actual astronomical calculation rather than a lookup table. And for a person sitting across a desk from a client, it is the kind of correction that is easy to wave away. A software platform has no such excuse, and SSEHADA has clearly decided that if you are going to build the thing properly, you build it properly. They describe the underlying system as a proprietary computational algorithm designed by ten masters working alongside data engineers, which is a collaboration I would very much like to have watched.
That combination is the actual story here. Not the readings. The pairing of traditional expertise with computational rigour. There is a real and difficult problem in taking any craft that lives in expert judgement and encoding enough of it into software that the result is faithful rather than flattened. Anyone who has tried to systematise a specialist's knowledge, in any field, knows how much of it turns out to be tacit and how easily the nuance disappears the moment you try to write it down. Ten practitioners and a team of engineers sitting in a room negotiating that translation is a serious undertaking, and the fact that the output is precise to the minute suggests they took the fidelity question seriously.
The platform offers a range of readings: signature saju analyses, compatibility readings between two people, yearly outlooks, naming services for new babies, which is a long standing tradition in its own right. There is also a set of free tools, including daily horoscopes and dream interpretation, and those free tools have brought in more than a hundred and ninety four thousand users.
I want to sit on that number for a second, because it is the commercially interesting part. Nearly two hundred thousand people arriving through free tools is a very healthy top of funnel, and it points at something specific about the business. This is a cultural practice that has traditionally been mediated by an individual. You went to a person. You sat down. You paid what they asked, and the experience was as much about that person as about the reading. Moving it onto a platform changes the economics completely. It becomes accessible at three in the morning. It becomes available to someone who would feel awkward walking into a shop. It becomes something you can try before you commit to anything.
That accessibility question runs through a lot of what I cover on this show, in industries that could not be more different from this one. Legal advice, medical information, financial planning, all of them were historically gated behind a professional and a fee and an appointment, and all of them have been changed enormously by platforms that let people explore first and engage properly later. SSEHADA is doing the same thing for a tradition that has been consulted in Korea for centuries. The tradition is not new. The access model is.
There is a preservation angle here as well, and it deserves a mention. Interpretive traditions like this one have historically been passed down person to person, master to student. That is a beautiful transmission method and a fragile one. When a practice is encoded into a system that thousands of people can use, and that system is built with practitioners rather than around them, something gets carried forward that might otherwise thin out with each generation. Whatever you make of the practice itself, the cultural artefact is real, and building software that respects its internal logic rather than reducing it to a novelty is a meaningfully different choice from the alternative.
I would also note the audience they have built. This is a service used heavily by younger people, and particularly by young women in Korea, which cuts against the assumption that traditional practices are the preserve of older generations. That pattern shows up elsewhere too. Interest in tarot, astrology and folk traditions has grown among younger people across a lot of countries, and the platforms serving them tend to be the ones that treat the material with care rather than irony. SSEHADA's whole positioning, precision and method and a proper algorithm, is a bet that the audience wants it done properly. The user numbers suggest that bet is landing.
So what is the takeaway for you, listening to this, probably running something quite unrelated to Korean metaphysics? I think it is this. There is a version of technology that arrives at an old practice and simply replaces it, usually badly. And there is a version that arrives, asks what the practitioners actually do, finds the place where the old method was compromising out of practical necessity, and fixes precisely that. SSEHADA found that the honest calculation of solar time was being skipped because doing it by hand was tedious. That is a small thing, and it is exactly the right thing for software to solve. Find the compromise the craft made because the tools were not good enough yet, and remove it. That pattern is available in almost every field, and most of the time nobody has bothered to look.
If any of this has caught your interest, whether you came for the cultural history or for the engineering, go and take a look at SSEHADA. The free tools are a perfectly good place to start, and the way they explain their own methodology is worth reading on its own terms.
That is all from me. My thanks to the team at SSEHADA and AbleCity for building something thoughtful in a space where thoughtfulness is rarer than it should be. If you enjoyed this one, pass it along to someone who likes finding the engineering hidden inside unexpected places.
I am Markus J. Diplama, this has been The Next Biz Thing, and I will see you next time.
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