THE BRIDGE

Takeshi Hirano

Takeshi Hirano

Takeshi is a Japanese tech blogger and a co-founder of The Bridge, and is also the CEO for bootupAsia, Inc. He started his career as a web designer.

Articles

Star Festival raises $10M to expand innovative bento box business

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See the original story in Japanese. Star Festival, the Japanese startup behind Bento box delivery and catering service, Gochikuru.com, announced today it has raised 1 billion yen (or about $10 million) from Jafco, one of Japan’s leading VC firms. With these funds, the company will expand its service to areas all around the country. Currently their service is available only in the five urban areas of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, and Fukuoka. Since its launch back in 2009, Gochikuru has been providing a variety of meals from its partner lunch vendors. To date they have partnered with more than 210 lunch-box brands and served more than 3.2 million users. With these new funds, the company plans to add customer representatives and improve its logistics and distribution network. For example, it will provide lunch-box line-ups from famous Tokyo sushi brands to consumers living in the southern island of Okinawa. This is typically impossible because of the distances, but it can be done in partnership with local lunch vendors that can follow recipes provided by a particular sushi brand. It is really interesting to see the company cultivating a license/production business in the food market. There are great opportunities in this industry,…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Star Festival, the Japanese startup behind Bento box delivery and catering service, Gochikuru.com, announced today it has raised 1 billion yen (or about $10 million) from Jafco, one of Japan’s leading VC firms. With these funds, the company will expand its service to areas all around the country. Currently their service is available only in the five urban areas of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, and Fukuoka.

Since its launch back in 2009, Gochikuru has been providing a variety of meals from its partner lunch vendors. To date they have partnered with more than 210 lunch-box brands and served more than 3.2 million users.

With these new funds, the company plans to add customer representatives and improve its logistics and distribution network. For example, it will provide lunch-box line-ups from famous Tokyo sushi brands to consumers living in the southern island of Okinawa. This is typically impossible because of the distances, but it can be done in partnership with local lunch vendors that can follow recipes provided by a particular sushi brand.

It is really interesting to see the company cultivating a license/production business in the food market. There are great opportunities in this industry, one often overlooked by most in the startup space.

The Star Festival office
The Star Festival office

Japan’s Mixi unveils a mobile photo sharing app — but what’s so special about it?

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese social networking giant Mixi recently unveiled a mobile photo sharing app called Plannah. It is available for iOS in Japanese, English, and Korean, and an Android version will follow soon. The app is the forth production from the company’s innovation initiative, which has previously developed mobile app testing environment DeployGate and photobook printing service Nohana. Plannah allows you to share photos with your friends as albums. It shows you photos on calendar and helps you remember where and what you are doing and with whom. When I heard about the app for the first time, I had many questions – not about how to use the app or its concept, but rather, why bring out the app now when there are so many established alternatives? Our readers may recall a similar mobile photo app called my365. It allows you to see photos in a calendar view, but there’s no feature for sharing photos with friends. Beyond Japan, New York-based startup Kaptur has acquired 250 million photos from 60 million users and fundraised $2 million — but it is still figuring out how to monetize. Other similar apps include Linea, Albumatic, Familio and Cluster…

The Plannah development team at Mixi's Innovation Center
The Plannah development team at Mixi’s Innovation Center

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese social networking giant Mixi recently unveiled a mobile photo sharing app called Plannah. It is available for iOS in Japanese, English, and Korean, and an Android version will follow soon. The app is the forth production from the company’s innovation initiative, which has previously developed mobile app testing environment DeployGate and photobook printing service Nohana.

Plannah allows you to share photos with your friends as albums. It shows you photos on calendar and helps you remember where and what you are doing and with whom.

When I heard about the app for the first time, I had many questions – not about how to use the app or its concept, but rather, why bring out the app now when there are so many established alternatives?

Our readers may recall a similar mobile photo app called my365. It allows you to see photos in a calendar view, but there’s no feature for sharing photos with friends. Beyond Japan, New York-based startup Kaptur has acquired 250 million photos from 60 million users and fundraised $2 million — but it is still figuring out how to monetize. Other similar apps include Linea, Albumatic, Familio and Cluster — but none of these seem to be particularly hot according to my own research.

The team’s hypothesis is that the smartphone shift has reached not only tech-savvy users but the average consumer. One team member explained:

Since smartphones are now wide spread in the Japanese market, users now have more chances to shoot casual photos. But they are typically forced to use various apps for multiple purposes.

Some smartphone users these days have thousands of photos stores on their smartphones. For Mixi, if it can provide a service very much focused on sharing photos, it might cause a market disruption since the space currently has no dominant app right now.

We’re curious to see how they will fare moving forward. The team understands that the business model will be hard to nail down, but the key factor will be how long the app can ride the smartphone wave.

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Japan’s Stores.jp partners with major e-commerce portals to help merchants find traffic

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See the original story in Japanese. Recently we’ve seen fierce competition among two Japanese e-commerce platform builders, Stores.jp and Base. Now it seems both are moving past simple merchants acquisition, looking beyond to see what value they can add to their respective services. Bracket, the startup behind Stores.jp, yesterday unveiled a new feature that will help merchants promote their e-store on the platform, using partner e-commerce portals such as EC Navi, Kakaku.com, and Value Commerce. For merchants, if you use this promotion feature you will be asked to pay a 10% commission for a purchase made via this affiliated traffic. For merchants, products will be featured in search results on partnering portal sites, such as MSN Japan which is pictured below. The startup is exploring partnerships with many other e-commerce portal sites based on a revenue share model. The advent of these simple e-commerce platforms allows merchants to put up an online store far more easily than with conventional ASP-based shopping cart services. It has spurred an abundance of merchants to start e-businesses, but subsequently they have no way to attract new customers. The startup is trying to solve this problem, recently partnering with fashion giant Zozotown, which could be…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Recently we’ve seen fierce competition among two Japanese e-commerce platform builders, Stores.jp and Base. Now it seems both are moving past simple merchants acquisition, looking beyond to see what value they can add to their respective services.

Bracket, the startup behind Stores.jp, yesterday unveiled a new feature that will help merchants promote their e-store on the platform, using partner e-commerce portals such as EC Navi, Kakaku.com, and Value Commerce. For merchants, if you use this promotion feature you will be asked to pay a 10% commission for a purchase made via this affiliated traffic.

For merchants, products will be featured in search results on partnering portal sites, such as MSN Japan which is pictured below. The startup is exploring partnerships with many other e-commerce portal sites based on a revenue share model.

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The advent of these simple e-commerce platforms allows merchants to put up an online store far more easily than with conventional ASP-based shopping cart services. It has spurred an abundance of merchants to start e-businesses, but subsequently they have no way to attract new customers. The startup is trying to solve this problem, recently partnering with fashion giant Zozotown, which could be new partner site for them in the future, in terms of helping merchants drive traffic.

Bracket’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto explains how they plan to evolve their e-commerce platform.

As well as keeping the image of a simple-to-launch platform, we plan to give merchants many solutions to acquire customers. We have partnered with Zozotown, but we will not change into to a fashion commerce site — we will keep going beyond what we have been doing.

Some of our readers may be familiar with the startup’s competitor Base. Base recently launched an iOS app and an interface that curates featured shops. In contrast with Base, which has not yet partnered with other sites, Stores.jp unveiled a partnership with GMO Makeshop, an e-commerce platform from GMO, one of Japan’s leading internet companies. This could be an indication that the startup might be exploring a partnership-based business.

We’ll try to keep you updated about how these two companies’ business strategies compare in the future.

Japanese flea market app Mercari raises $500,000 from East Ventures

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See the original story in Japanese. Mercari, a flea market app launched by Japanese serial entrepreneur Shintaro Yamada, has been showing good numbers of late. Since the release of its Android app back on July 2nd, more than 50,000 users have put over 10,000 items up for sale using the marketplace. Kouzoh, the startup behind the app, introduced the iOS version of its app today, and also announced that it has fundraised 50 million yen (approximately $500,000) from East Ventures. Several hundred items submitted every day According to Yamada, they are struggling to acquire users but have started seeing good result in user activity. He explained: So far things are as we expected. In terms of user submissions, we saw lots of ladies clothes being posted, but we’ve seen also home appliances sold on the marketplace — so item posted vary. Several hundred items are submitted every day and the market is still small, but we’re seeing sound growth in deals between buyers and sellers on the platform. The startup itself might be best known for having a very high-profile management board. In addition to having ex-Zynga Japan GM Yamada as CEO, Hiroshi Tomishima (the founder at Bank of Innovation)…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Mercari, a flea market app launched by Japanese serial entrepreneur Shintaro Yamada, has been showing good numbers of late. Since the release of its Android app back on July 2nd, more than 50,000 users have put over 10,000 items up for sale using the marketplace.

Kouzoh, the startup behind the app, introduced the iOS version of its app today, and also announced that it has fundraised 50 million yen (approximately $500,000) from East Ventures.

Several hundred items submitted every day

According to Yamada, they are struggling to acquire users but have started seeing good result in user activity. He explained:

So far things are as we expected. In terms of user submissions, we saw lots of ladies clothes being posted, but we’ve seen also home appliances sold on the marketplace — so item posted vary. Several hundred items are submitted every day and the market is still small, but we’re seeing sound growth in deals between buyers and sellers on the platform.

The startup itself might be best known for having a very high-profile management board. In addition to having ex-Zynga Japan GM Yamada as CEO, Hiroshi Tomishima (the founder at Bank of Innovation) and Ryo Ishizuka (COO at Rock You Asia) are serving as the heads of engineering. They are a small team but their prominent skills and experience have contributed to the services solid operations to date.

Increased competition

When I spoke with Yamada, I found it interesting that he spoke about resources that we thought were lacking on our planet. He noted:

Any kind of resource is limited. You will need energy to create something new. If you have a PSP but don’t want to keep it, you will probably not be interested in selling it for a high price. But instead you likely need way to easily hand it over to someone else. We call it a sort of frictionless society. That’s what we want to help to make.

His concept is very similar to Craiglist in a way. There will be a way to share resources easily, rather than the complicated schemes often used on auction sites.

From my perspective, a flea market app is a form of C2C that everyday people — even less tech-savvy ones — can use without hesitation.

Yamada has previously involved in launching the Rakuten auction site. Based on the history of Japanese auction sites, he is predicting a high rise in flea market apps on smartphones.

It will be interesting to see if Mercari can get to the top of this increasingly competitive arena.

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How a Japanese startup plans to disrupt the CRM industry with a mobile solution

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig recently launched a suite of CRM (customer relationship management) solutions for small-sized stores. The service is called ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced “order”), and is comprised of two iOS apps, one for consumers and another for merchants. The merchants app allows you to market your business by issuing virtual coupons, and collect payments from customers before they visit your store. The app gives you several CRM features such as authenticating customers at the storefront for rewards, or distributing promotional coupons to customers’ smartphones. This solution will help you market your business without a point of sales terminal. As of now, the service is running at Fiat Caffe in Aoyama, Tokyo on a testing basis. The Android version of the consumer app will go live in early September. The service will be provided on a freemium basis. If you wish to use additional options such as the virtual stamp feature (for consumers to collect reward points), you will be charged 5,000 yen per month. Coinciding with the release of the Android app, these merchants services will also be available in early September. The below video will give you an idea of…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig recently launched a suite of CRM (customer relationship management) solutions for small-sized stores. The service is called ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced “order”), and is comprised of two iOS apps, one for consumers and another for merchants.

The merchants app allows you to market your business by issuing virtual coupons, and collect payments from customers before they visit your store. The app gives you several CRM features such as authenticating customers at the storefront for rewards, or distributing promotional coupons to customers’ smartphones. This solution will help you market your business without a point of sales terminal. As of now, the service is running at Fiat Caffe in Aoyama, Tokyo on a testing basis. The Android version of the consumer app will go live in early September.

oder_screenshots

The service will be provided on a freemium basis. If you wish to use additional options such as the virtual stamp feature (for consumers to collect reward points), you will be charged 5,000 yen per month. Coinciding with the release of the Android app, these merchants services will also be available in early September. The below video will give you an idea of how it will work.

For retailers serving customers in a limited space with few staffers, it would be difficult to set up a desktop PC for a CRM system. But this sort of app may be a better solution. I saw a demo of how it will work, and the app was very intuitive in its operation.

The startup’s CEO Takefumi Nitta is hoping to disrupt the CRM industry. In addition to online businesses, he has been involved in notable offline businesses too, producing Tokyo Girls Collection and mixiXmas [1]. Mr. Nitta explains:

There are many things that were not possible with feature phones several years ago, but we can do them with smartphones now. In my experience at mixiXmas, effective social marketing could motivate more than tens of thousands of users to act. For big merchants, that population may be small. But what’s about for small businesses? I intend to standardize these marketing processes and create a permanent consumer movement.

In the past, CRM solutions were intended for big merchants. But the high penetration of smartphones has drastically changed our environment. As some of our readers may know, here in Japan we have seen more and more Shopify-like commerce platforms such as Stores.jp or Base, typically helping small merchants run long-tail businesses online. Perhaps Showcase Gig can make its CRM solutions fit these same long-tail businesses.


  1. Tokyo Girls Collection is one of the biggest fashion events in Japan. Meanwhile, mixiXmas is a seasonal promotional campaign hosted by Mixi.  ↩

Japan’s livestreaming app TwitCasting to soon hit 3M users, is now winning fans overseas

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See the original story in Japanese. TwitCasting is a mobile livestreaming app developed by Tokyo-based startup Moi Corp. The company’s founding CEO Yoski Akamatsu has unveiled that the service recently surpassed 2.7 millions users and is expected to hit the 3 million milestone by the middle of next month. The company seems to be surprised by its rapid user growth. They ran a promotional campaign giving away special cushions to users. The campaign was intended to continue for a week, but the rewards were running out in about six hours. This was totally unexpected, as Akamatsu explains: We spent almost one month preparing the rewards. It feels like we spent three days to cook a stew, but someone came and ate it in just 10 minutes. ¶ The service’s main user base is teenagers, a group that was just on summer vacation which resulted in lots of activity. In addition, Japan is currently in the middle of the lower-house election campaign, and people are using the app for to livestream soapbox speeches by law-maker candidates. For users, it’s easy to find such speeches using the app. Interestingly, TwitCasting is picking up many users in overseas markets too. When Brazilian protesters…

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50,000 Brazilians viewed the protest using the app.

See the original story in Japanese.

TwitCasting is a mobile livestreaming app developed by Tokyo-based startup Moi Corp. The company’s founding CEO Yoski Akamatsu has unveiled that the service recently surpassed 2.7 millions users and is expected to hit the 3 million milestone by the middle of next month.

The company seems to be surprised by its rapid user growth. They ran a promotional campaign giving away special cushions to users. The campaign was intended to continue for a week, but the rewards were running out in about six hours. This was totally unexpected, as Akamatsu explains:

We spent almost one month preparing the rewards. It feels like we spent three days to cook a stew, but someone came and ate it in just 10 minutes.

The service’s main user base is teenagers, a group that was just on summer vacation which resulted in lots of activity. In addition, Japan is currently in the middle of the lower-house election campaign, and people are using the app for to livestream soapbox speeches by law-maker candidates. For users, it’s easy to find such speeches using the app.

Interestingly, TwitCasting is picking up many users in overseas markets too. When Brazilian protesters recently clashed after the Confederations Cup final, 50,000 users tuned in to the stream, hitting about 20,000 viewings at its peak. Some local news media such as Tarde or Info introduced the app as they reported the story. Akamatsu added:

A total of 900,000 Brazilians used our app during the Confederations Cup. Brazilians typically prefer Twitter to Facebook, but for us, about 80% of our users were using Facebook login. Perhaps people are using Facebook for more political activities? The protests are now over and Brazil has calmed down. But we’ll be thinking further about intensifying our global expansions.

Moi Corp. previously fundraised $634,000 from East Ventures and other investors back in May. Let’s keep an eye on the young company to see how they evolve.

Next-gen Japanese wheelchair startup raises $1M from 500 Startups and other investors

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See the original story in Japanese. Whill is a Japanese startup that is developing ‘Personal Mobility’, a next-generation wheelchair. The startup announced today it has raised $1 million from Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV), 500 Startups, Sunbridge Global Ventures, Wingle, and individual angel investors. The individual investors include 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Facebook engineer Eric Kwan. With these funds, the startup plans to start mass-production of its first model and start marketing it as well. The first lot of 50 machines will be exported to the US market using a direct sales channel, with shipping scheduled to start in early 2014. The startup was co-founded by young engineers who previously worked with top Japanese manufacturing companies like Nissan Motors, Sony, and Olympus. To date, there has been no shortage of buzz surrounding this young company and its brand new machine. Many of our Japanese readers may have learned about them on Campfire, a Japanese crowdfunding site. Their prototype was unveiled back in 2011, and was subsequently chosen by 500 Startups for their incubation program, and now raising a large sum of money this time around. According to the startup’s CEO Satoshi Sugie, the wheelchair industry has seen no remarkable evolution…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Whill is a Japanese startup that is developing ‘Personal Mobility’, a next-generation wheelchair. The startup announced today it has raised $1 million from Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV), 500 Startups, Sunbridge Global Ventures, Wingle, and individual angel investors. The individual investors include 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Facebook engineer Eric Kwan.

With these funds, the startup plans to start mass-production of its first model and start marketing it as well. The first lot of 50 machines will be exported to the US market using a direct sales channel, with shipping scheduled to start in early 2014.

The startup was co-founded by young engineers who previously worked with top Japanese manufacturing companies like Nissan Motors, Sony, and Olympus. To date, there has been no shortage of buzz surrounding this young company and its brand new machine.

Many of our Japanese readers may have learned about them on Campfire, a Japanese crowdfunding site. Their prototype was unveiled back in 2011, and was subsequently chosen by 500 Startups for their incubation program, and now raising a large sum of money this time around.

According to the startup’s CEO Satoshi Sugie, the wheelchair industry has seen no remarkable evolution since 1932 when the device was invented in Los Angeles. Shinji Asada, the director at ITV, pointed out that the target market for the company’s prototype has great potential:

We actually received other investment proposals from hardware startups. But Whill was different. They built a prototype and showed it to us when asking us to invest. This had a significant impact on our decision.

Regarding the market potential, it’s probably around 20 billion yen ($200 million) in Japan. Prior to using the device, we need to remove impediments in buildings. However, our interview conducted in the US indicated that there is a great need for this in the market. That’s why we decided to get involved.

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According to the Whill team, the development of hardware prototypes is much easier than what it used to be.

The prototype for the first model cost about 5 million yen ($50,000). But if a big company does the same thing, it will probably cost 10 times more. Behind this cost reduction there are many factors, such as a high rise of open source software and parts manufacturing using 3D printers. Some tech shops in the US can rent manufacturing machines in shared spaces. These changes made us possible to procure parts faster and cheaper.

The startup is based in Tokyo and San Francisco, but their factory is located in the Tokyo’s suburb of Machida. It took me a while to get to the location from the nearest train station, but the factory looked super fun — almost like a sort of secret base for children. It will be interesting to see how the company can evolve the world mobility market from this corner of the capital.

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Can a small Japanese startup ride the smartphone wave to e-commerce success?

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See the original story in Japanese. Thanks to the progress that companies like Rakuten and Amazon have made in the e-commerce market, we can now easily purchase quality items for better prices online. But in Japan, the online retail market still accounts for less than 10% of the nation’s overall retail market, which means there’s still lots of potential for further growth. One player out there is hoping to disrupt the Japanese market from a unique angle. Coach United is the Tokyo-based startup behind Cyta.jp, one of Japan’s leading marketplaces focused on private lessons. According to CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu, their newly launched smartphone-optimized interface will be a turning point for the company, capitalizing on Japan’s increasing affinity for all things mobile. They plan to create a new kind of business where instead of selling just products online, they focus on ‘service e-commerce’. Cyta.jp provides users with information about 140 different private lessons (such as language learning, music study, or qualification acquisition) which are available at 3,000 locations around the country. Unlike other marketplace services which typically connect potential students to lesson teachers, the startup assures the quality of the lessons they introduce on the website by checking into who will…

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Coach United’s CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu

See the original story in Japanese.

Thanks to the progress that companies like Rakuten and Amazon have made in the e-commerce market, we can now easily purchase quality items for better prices online. But in Japan, the online retail market still accounts for less than 10% of the nation’s overall retail market, which means there’s still lots of potential for further growth.

One player out there is hoping to disrupt the Japanese market from a unique angle. Coach United is the Tokyo-based startup behind Cyta.jp, one of Japan’s leading marketplaces focused on private lessons. According to CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu, their newly launched smartphone-optimized interface will be a turning point for the company, capitalizing on Japan’s increasing affinity for all things mobile. They plan to create a new kind of business where instead of selling just products online, they focus on ‘service e-commerce’.

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Cyta.jp provides users with information about 140 different private lessons (such as language learning, music study, or qualification acquisition) which are available at 3,000 locations around the country. Unlike other marketplace services which typically connect potential students to lesson teachers, the startup assures the quality of the lessons they introduce on the website by checking into who will teach or where it will take place. Since launching back in June of 2011, have served a total of about 20,000 users.

Shifting to Smartphones

Ariyasu explained the recent shift in their users’ preferences.

Smartphone access is rapidly increasing. It used to account for just 10% of all access, but it reached 45% back in June and has now surpassed desktop access.

Cyta.jp access statistics by browsing device (June 2012 - June 2013)
Cyta.jp access statistics by browsing device (June 2011 – June 2013)

As we reported several times before, smartphone access is increasing across many Japanese web services. Mr. Ariyasu believes in this trend, and is going to adjust his service accordingly.

We learned that people use smartphones during commutes and at home. Over the last two months, we’ve been focusing on developing a smartphone-optimized interface in order to provide [all] available features to smartphone users.

The startup isn’t selling physical products on side, but rather lessons in the form of a service. It requires a business strategy different from that of conventional online retailers. The company expects to standardize its strategy and expand business to other local community-based services. He adds:

We plan to allow users to book a local service using our website and consume it offline. These services include things like baby sitting, waterworks repair, and even decorative nail painting. Major e-commerce sites such as Rakuten or Amazon will not be able to sell these services online. But we believe consumers will want to buy them online.

This concept is somewhat similar to the group-buying service trends initiated by Groupon. It’s relatively easy to build a system that allows users to discover and find a service they may be interested in. However, in order to encouraging consumers to buy the service and give them a positive user experience, it probably requires a little more know-how. In fact, with group-buying services there have been difficulties in terms of how participating retailers delivered their services, often resulting in poor service quality.

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Cyta.jp has been trying to ensure quality by interviewing lesson teachers prior to hiring, or carrying out surprise inspections of lessons via ‘mystery shoppers’ (so to speak). It is through this extra effort that the company plans to be a leader in the service e-commerce industry.

Personally I was a little unsure if this quality assurance policy could co-exist with business scalability. But Ariyasu explained:

I don’t think a costly business is unscalable, it’s a bit of a misconception. In fact, group-buying businesses were using a bunch of people for sales, but their business were successfully scaled. Whether or not your business is scalable depends on the whether you can be persistently profitable, so you can receive funds and invest in the business to scale up when needed.

It will be interesting to see what kind of an impact Cyta can make. And it will be perhaps even more interesting to see if many other young startups follow in this sort of service e-commerce in the future.

8 entrepreneurs who quit to go their own way

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Read the original article in Japanese There are two common paths that people take to success: either you climb the ladder in a company, or you start your own company and scale it. And while it’s easy for employees to envision success in large companies, but can be harder to imagine a way to find success with your own startup. Two venture capital companies have put forth a solution to the latter problem with a new one day program called Spinout. Aspiring entrepreneurs make a business plan in a day, and them pitch a demo investors at the end [1]. On the program webpage you can see messages from eight entrepreneurs who decided to quit their corporate jobs to begin their own startup. I’d like to introduce those voices here since they are all inspirational. CEO of Nanapi, Kensuke Furukawa, formerly of Recruit Nanapi is a lifestyle how-to website. Furukawa started the company at the age of 28 and now he is 32 years old. I just thought I wanted to become a person who could start a company and scale it up. And I couldn’t do that while I was in a larger company, so I just quit to…

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Photo: Michelle Makar Parker

Read the original article in Japanese

There are two common paths that people take to success: either you climb the ladder in a company, or you start your own company and scale it. And while it’s easy for employees to envision success in large companies, but can be harder to imagine a way to find success with your own startup.

Two venture capital companies have put forth a solution to the latter problem with a new one day program called Spinout. Aspiring entrepreneurs make a business plan in a day, and them pitch a demo investors at the end [1]. On the program webpage you can see messages from eight entrepreneurs who decided to quit their corporate jobs to begin their own startup. I’d like to introduce those voices here since they are all inspirational.

CEO of Nanapi, Kensuke Furukawa, formerly of Recruit


kensuke-furukawaNanapi is a lifestyle how-to website. Furukawa started the company at the age of 28 and now he is 32 years old.

I just thought I wanted to become a person who could start a company and scale it up. And I couldn’t do that while I was in a larger company, so I just quit to start my own.

Founder and COO of OhMyGlasses, Ikuma Mutobe, formerly of Softbank and UBS Securities


ikuma-mutobeOhMyGlasses is an online glasses retailer. He started the company at the age of 26 and now he is 30 years old.

The biggest reason why I started my own company is I believed that I could run an online shop for glasses. You know you only have one shot in your life so I thought starting up my own company would give me the best chance.

CEO of Wantedly, Akiko Naka, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Facebook


akiko-nakaWantedly is a social recruiting website where users can find potential employees using Facebook. She started the company at the age of 26 and is now 28 years old.

I really like my life filled with unpredictable things. And I thought starting up my own company would certainly make my life interesting, so I just did it. It really can be unpredictable at times, but it’s also very exciting. You never know if you are going to fail or succeed, but looking at it long term I know it will be really fun. If you want to start something but are a little hesitant, just take action and you will see some results. You have to move if you want to make your world fun.

CEO of CFO, Daisuke Sasaki, formerly of Google


daisuke-sasakiCFO develops a personal accounting service. Sasaki started the company at the age of 31 and he is now 32 years old.

While I was doing marketing projects for SMBs, I figured out there are really few Japanese people who actually start their own businesses. It was a big problem for Japan, I thought. I figured it would be good if I could start my own business – and so I did. Working at Google was really fun but I started my own company to make things a little more fun.

CEO of Vasily, Yuki Kanayama, formerly of Yahoo Japan


yuki-kanayamaVasily is the developer of a fashion coordination app called iQon. He started the company at the age of 30 and is now 34 years old.

Entering into Yahoo Japan was an important step towards setting up my own company. I thought that to prepare for my own venture, it was crucial to learn more about enterprises, their resources and how they work.

CEO of CrowdWorks, Koichiro Yoshida, formerly of Pioneer and Reed Exhibitions Japan


koichiro-yoshidaCrowdWorks is one of the largest crowdsourcing sites in Japan. Yoshida started the company at the age of 37 and is now 38 years old.

The poem “The Road Not Taken” [provides a good lesson]. […] I felt that I didn’t want to take a path that someone already traveled. And taking the path that nobody has taken looked very exciting to me. Didn’t you think life had infinite possibilities when you were a student? When you become an adult, if you still want your life to have such infinite possibility, you have to create it via your own actions.

CEO of Bizreach, Swimmy Minami, former of Morgan Stanley


swimmy-minamiBizreach is a job recruiting site where you can search for executives. Swimmy started the company at the age of 32 and is now 37 years old [2].

I actually didn’t think I wanted to start my own company until I quit my previous job. When I was looking for a new job I didn’t understand what was going on in the internet space even though the ‘age of Internet innovation’ was happening [all around me].

I thought I could start a company that could solve problems and inefficiencies around me. Having a business that can impact society is great. If you can be a self-starter guy, you can do whatever you want and it doesn’t really matter whether you are an entrepreneur or employee.

CEO of UzaBase, Ryosuke Niino, formerly of Mitsui and UBS Securities


ryosuke-niinoUzaBase offers a software solution called ‘Speeda’. It is an information platform for corporate and industrial analysis tailored towards knowledge workers. He started the company at the age of 30 and he is now 35 years old.

I don’t want to live a life where I later regret that I didn’t try something. I was really nervous too, because family was the biggest concern as I could totally ruin their lives. But it was really exciting to create an awesome job and there was no other way that could instill such excitement in me.

If there are two ways and you can’t decided which to go, take the harder way. This is now one of our company’s core principals.


  1. The event will be held on July 28th, so if you’d like to apply you can do so here. It is somewhat similar to Incubate Camp, a two day business plan camp held by Japanese VC, Incubate Fund.  ↩
  2. Back in March we also featured Swimmy’s company LUXA, which at the time had raised 500 million yen, or about $5 million.  ↩

Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base introduces new iPhone app

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See the original story in Japanese. Base is an e-commerce platform provider startup from Tokyo. It was born out of Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. In contrast with their competitor Stores.jp, the Base team has been pretty quiet recently. But they have released a new iOS app today, which allows merchants to build and manage their online shops entirely on mobile. In addition, the company has added a new feature called ‘Base Curation,’ which has an interface resembling an online shopping mall, curating featured shops. It displays users’ shops which have been selected by the company’s management, and if you would to like them to feature your shop in the menu, you can make a request via the dashboard. I asked the startup’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka if the curation menu is a special business strategy for Base — but he said that this wasn’t quite the intention, explaining: Unlike other mall platforms (which have many tenant merchants), our service does not provide a way to find a specific shop on the platform. We want to see how we can encourage merchants to set up their online shop on our platform. When you launch…

base_iphoneapp01 base_iphoneapp02

See the original story in Japanese.

Base is an e-commerce platform provider startup from Tokyo. It was born out of Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. In contrast with their competitor Stores.jp, the Base team has been pretty quiet recently. But they have released a new iOS app today, which allows merchants to build and manage their online shops entirely on mobile.

In addition, the company has added a new feature called ‘Base Curation,’ which has an interface resembling an online shopping mall, curating featured shops. It displays users’ shops which have been selected by the company’s management, and if you would to like them to feature your shop in the menu, you can make a request via the dashboard.

base_iphoneapp04 base_iphoneapp05

I asked the startup’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka if the curation menu is a special business strategy for Base — but he said that this wasn’t quite the intention, explaining:

Unlike other mall platforms (which have many tenant merchants), our service does not provide a way to find a specific shop on the platform. We want to see how we can encourage merchants to set up their online shop on our platform. When you launch an app, it shows you a number of online shops where you can quickly jump in to purchase something you want, but you can also [just as] easily establish your own shop from the menu.

Placing pictures of products, changing design, inventory management, etc. – all these tasks can be completed with the smartphone app because we really want to give more people opportunities to build up their own “economic block”.

Base is not trying to be a big e-commerce portal, but a rather platform where people can easily repeat transactions, buying and selling items by leveraging their social connections, and accelerating long-tail businesses.

According to Mr. Tsuruoka, almost 60% of their purchasing traffic comes from mobile devices.

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Co-founder Kazuma Ieiri using the app

Of course, all these updates are very likely a direct result of Ieiri’s own philosophies. I asked him how they plan to compete against various competitors, including major e-commerce platforms, shopping cart ASPs, and other similar services. He answered me directly, not hiding his intentions of taking the fight to his competitors:

They are elephants or capybaras [1], but we are mere ants, in contrast. For ants, even if you join forces with capybaras, there’s no way you can defeat elephants. Therefore, you must dig up the ground so that you might trip up the elephants. Understand?

The Base team is expecting to see 500,000 downloads of their iOS app by the end of this month. Let’s stay tuned to see how they do!


  1. The capybara is the largest rodent in the world according to Wikipedia. Editor’s note: Ieiri’s metaphor is a little strange, but it seems capybaras might be a less obscure animal among Japanese people because it is cute, and has been featured in some TV commercials.