Task management tool ‘Jooto’ targets Japanese businesses

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See the original story in Japanese.

While startups and freelancers tend to be more agile and flexible, they might fall behind in task management if team members work at different locations or have communication issues. There are a wide range of business tools out there for messaging or knowledge sharing, but we still find ourselves taking notes or writing on post-its and sticking them around the office. Of course, you can’t share updates with team members efficiently in this way.

To address this problem, a new task management tool emerged earlier this year, featuring a beautiful graphical interface and drag-and-drop operability. It’s called Jooto. The development team has been improving the app based on feedback from test users since its launch of its closed beta back in January. The official launch was earlier this month.

While the app is unique in its own right, the team behind it is also worthy of mention. They have their design and operations team in Singapore, system development in Hanoi, but they have chosen to target the Japanese market only. Interestingly their marketing team is not based in Tokyo, but instead on the remote island of Ishigaki, at the south-western end of the Japanese archipelago.

Tomoko Devidal, the head of Nano Marketing who manages the app’s marketing efforts, told us why they operate in this way:

Since our app Jooto is developed for multilingual use, our global expansion is not so challenging from an engineering perspective. But since every startup has limited resources, we have to narrow our marketing focus. The app was developed by Skipforward in Singapore, a place where we couldn’t see a huge market opportunity. That’s why we decided on Japan as our initial target.

Despite the fact that they’ve not yet localized it to languages other than Japanese and English, they received some attention from internet users in Korea because of the highly intuitive user experience.