news

In conversation with co-founders of Japan’s curated fashion site for young women

4meee!

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.06.15

See the original article in Japanese. 4meee! (obviously pronounced ‘for me’) is an e-commerce and curated fashion site for young women. Our readers may recall the team was featured at a recent demo day event of Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan. Since its launch back in April, the site has acquired more than 1 million page views mainly from teenage girls and women in their 20s. The service was launched back by three female co-founders at a startup called Rocket Venture, all of whom are in the same generation with their users. I recently had a chance to talk with the co-founders: CMO Yoshimi Kuwayama, CTO Tomomi Kuwayama, and director Arisa Sakanashi. What are differentiators? Yoshimi Kuwayama and Tomomi Kuwayama are twin sisters and have been working on entrusted web developments for their clients since they were attending a university. They co-founded Rocket Venture with CEO Makoto Tatsukawa who had been collaboratively working with the Kuwayama sisters. Prior to joining the team, director Arisa Sakanashi have been working with an e-commerce company for two years after graduating from a university. As curated content site focused on young women, we’ve seen competitors like ‘Mery‘ or ‘@Girl Times‘ in this space. But…

4meee1 — From the left: Tomomi Kuwayama (CTO), Arisa Sakanashi (director), and Yoshimi Kuwayama (CMO)

See the original article in Japanese.

4meee! (obviously pronounced ‘for me’) is an e-commerce and curated fashion site for young women. Our readers may recall the team was featured at a recent demo day event of Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan. Since its launch back in April, the site has acquired more than 1 million page views mainly from teenage girls and women in their 20s.

The service was launched back by three female co-founders at a startup called Rocket Venture, all of whom are in the same generation with their users. I recently had a chance to talk with the co-founders: CMO Yoshimi Kuwayama, CTO Tomomi Kuwayama, and director Arisa Sakanashi.

What are differentiators?

Yoshimi Kuwayama and Tomomi Kuwayama are twin sisters and have been working on entrusted web developments for their clients since they were attending a university. They co-founded Rocket Venture with CEO Makoto Tatsukawa who had been collaboratively working with the Kuwayama sisters. Prior to joining the team, director Arisa Sakanashi have been working with an e-commerce company for two years after graduating from a university.

As curated content site focused on young women, we’ve seen competitors like ‘Mery‘ or ‘@Girl Times‘ in this space. But Yoshimi Kuwayama told us there’s some uniqueness including their four-panel comic strip style interface:

Our site is full of content generated by young women who are in the same generation with our users. So all articles on our website were written by these trend-conscious women. That’s why their real voices have been coming together here.

Addressing people’s inconvenience

In addition to the content they provide, the app has adopted a particular mechanism in order to retain their users better.

Firstly, the app allows users to post articles as well as read them using mobile. Sakanashi explained:

Young girls these days are surprisingly good at entering characters using smartphones. Unlike other curation content sites expecting users to post articles via desktop, we had to optimize our site for posting on mobile since we target such a demographics.

Moreover, when you find something you want to buy on the website, you can easily reach an e-commerce site through a link in the article. Tomomi Kuwayama explained why this is so important:

Fashion magazines feature many cute items but more than a few of them are less obtainable since they are certainly not yet on sale or stylist belongings. When you find something you want on our website, you can buy it right away.

Pursuing women’s usability

Tomomi Kuwayama explained young women are very sensitive and unlikely to miss any sense of incongruity:

If we look at e-commerce sites, we can find some products which are likely be described by male writers despite the fact that they target female users. I think we can figure out because the words that make women feel good are different from those attracting men.

Sakanashi added:

For example, if you talk about a celebrity woman, male people want to write about her style or appearance while female consumers want to know about her lifestyle or her accessories.

Yoshimi Kuwayama explained that female users are good at sharing ideas once they can find a perspective they can agree with:

Our website has a profile page where every user can introduce herself like her blog. This feature helps us motivate our users to keep posting their articles. Interesting articles are rapidly spreading via Twitter.

Working at startup

Their team is comprising of five full-time workers and three female interns. Some of our readers may recall a recent report that 27.9% of Japanese parents having new graduates will complain if their children choose to be hired by a young startup. So I wondered if they had no hesitate in working at this company which launched as recent as last December. In a response to my question, Sanakashi explained:

We can experience developing from scratch and every employee’s opinion is respected at startup. We can shape up our idea and get feedback in a short time, which suits me very well.

They are planning to introduce a mobile app in the future with the aim of supplanting positions of Yahoo Japan for female smartphone users.

news

Japan’s growth hacking startup Kaizen Platform appoints new CFO

Kaizen Platform

Takeshi Hirano 2014.06.13

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Kaizen Platform, the startup that operates web app A/B testing service PlanBCD, announced on Wednesday that it has changed its corporate identity and invited former investment banker Yuichi Shigeie as CFO. Prior to joining the team, he’d been working with JP Morgan for 13 years and also running the company’s investment banking operations as an executive director. Coinciding with this, Fidelity Growth Partners Japan’s David Milstein and Gree Venture’s Tatsuo Tsutsumi also joined Kaizen’s board of management. Our readers may recall Kaizen Platform fundraised $5 million from these investment companies back in March for business expansions to the US market. The company also changed its corporate logo at this time. The co-founder and CEO Kenji Sudo told us a bit about what triggered them to invite the new CFO: We’re exploring funding opportunities from the global market. Furthermore, I expect him to better manage our team in Tokyo since I’ll be mostly based in the US from now on. We are professional in engineering but he has a background totally different from what we have. That’s why I believe his unique perspective will help us a lot gain…

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Kaizen Platform, the startup that operates web app A/B testing service PlanBCD, announced on Wednesday that it has changed its corporate identity and invited former investment banker Yuichi Shigeie as CFO. Prior to joining the team, he’d been working with JP Morgan for 13 years and also running the company’s investment banking operations as an executive director.

Coinciding with this, Fidelity Growth Partners Japan’s David Milstein and Gree Venture’s Tatsuo Tsutsumi also joined Kaizen’s board of management. Our readers may recall Kaizen Platform fundraised $5 million from these investment companies back in March for business expansions to the US market.

The company also changed its corporate logo at this time. The co-founder and CEO Kenji Sudo told us a bit about what triggered them to invite the new CFO:

We’re exploring funding opportunities from the global market. Furthermore, I expect him to better manage our team in Tokyo since I’ll be mostly based in the US from now on. We are professional in engineering but he has a background totally different from what we have. That’s why I believe his unique perspective will help us a lot gain our management level.

It will be interesting to see how they fare in the US market and successfully gain funding from outstanding investors in the global market.

news

Japan’s digital marketing startup Showcase Gig fundraises from Loyalty Marketing

Junya Mori 2014.06.13

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig, the startup behind ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced ‘order’), announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japan’s largest reward program operator Loyalty Marketing. Since its launch back in July, the startup has been providing a suite of CRM solutions for small-sized retailers, comprising of two iOS apps, one for consumers and the other for merchants. The consumer app has a mobile wallet feature that enables payment by credit card prior to picking up a product at the shop. Check out the video below to see how it works. Loyalty Marketing provides a reward and loyalty program called Ponta and gives over 60 million consumers in Japan discounts or rewards at about 22,500 retail stores from 103 brands. The company collects an enormous amount of consumer behavior data using the reward platform and helps brands roll out their better marketing efforts. Since before the funding at this time, Showcase Gig and Loyalty Marketing have been working together in developing a gamification app called Ponta Time. In addition, the ‘O:der’ app has adopted a payment gateway service from Loyalty Marketing for enabling…

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig, the startup behind ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced ‘order’), announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japan’s largest reward program operator Loyalty Marketing.

Since its launch back in July, the startup has been providing a suite of CRM solutions for small-sized retailers, comprising of two iOS apps, one for consumers and the other for merchants. The consumer app has a mobile wallet feature that enables payment by credit card prior to picking up a product at the shop.

Check out the video below to see how it works.

Loyalty Marketing provides a reward and loyalty program called Ponta and gives over 60 million consumers in Japan discounts or rewards at about 22,500 retail stores from 103 brands. The company collects an enormous amount of consumer behavior data using the reward platform and helps brands roll out their better marketing efforts.

Since before the funding at this time, Showcase Gig and Loyalty Marketing have been working together in developing a gamification app called Ponta Time. In addition, the ‘O:der’ app has adopted a payment gateway service from Loyalty Marketing for enabling users to pay on mobile.

Showcase Gig unveiled that they have surpassed over 100 merchants using their app this month. They primarily target female consumers in their 30s, but they think their user demographics will become more diverse as they get more various merchants. In order to better understand market needs, the company will need to learn more about consumer behaviors to keep providing appropriate services.

Showcase Gig’s CEO Takefumi Nitta told us Loyalty Marketing’s Ponta platform can collect detailed consumer profiles as well as typical sales records, allowing them to markedly define the demographics of different behavioral types of consumers. The two companies will work closely to develop a smash-hit service in the O2O (online-to-offline) space.

news

Japan’s wheelchair startup Whill raises over $10,000 on Kickstarter in six hours

Takeshi Hirano 2014.06.12

See the original story in Japanese. Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Our readers may recall our advisor Kiyo Kobayashi spoke with CEO Satoshi Sugie at their office in Silicon Valley. The company launched a kickstarter campaign with its goal of $30,000, so you can gain opportunities like the privilege to attend their driving test and obtaining a t-shirt of their design if you invest. If you invest more than $10,000, you can obtain the Kickstarter version of the wheelchair product. The project already surpassed $10,000 in as short as six hours since its launch at noon today (Japan time). The team won the top prize at the Launch Pad session at Infinity Venture Summit 2014 Spring which took place in Sapporo back in May, where Takao Ozawa, one of judges at the session, promised that he would definitely buy it. [1] Post by Takao Ozawa. I wondered why they launched this Kickstarter campaign at this time, since typical crowdfunding projects are used for fundraising to develop a prototype but they have already completed it. In a response to my question regarding that point, Sugie explained it’s a topical gimmick to attract consumers in…

See the original story in Japanese.

Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Our readers may recall our advisor Kiyo Kobayashi spoke with CEO Satoshi Sugie at their office in Silicon Valley. The company launched a kickstarter campaign with its goal of $30,000, so you can gain opportunities like the privilege to attend their driving test and obtaining a t-shirt of their design if you invest.

If you invest more than $10,000, you can obtain the Kickstarter version of the wheelchair product. The project already surpassed $10,000 in as short as six hours since its launch at noon today (Japan time).

The team won the top prize at the Launch Pad session at Infinity Venture Summit 2014 Spring which took place in Sapporo back in May, where Takao Ozawa, one of judges at the session, promised that he would definitely buy it. ^[1]

Post by Takao Ozawa.

I wondered why they launched this Kickstarter campaign at this time, since typical crowdfunding projects are used for fundraising to develop a prototype but they have already completed it.

In a response to my question regarding that point, Sugie explained it’s a topical gimmick to attract consumers in the US market. It is interesting to see how much a crowdfunding project can help a startup like them market or promote their product.

Takao Ozawa is the COO at YJ Capital, the investment arm of Yahoo Japan. ↩

news

In conversation with WordPress.com parent Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

Masaru Ikeda 2014.06.11

See the original story in Japanese. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and the head of the WordPress project, visited Japan last week. He visited Tokyo on a promotion tour in the APAC region, following Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore. After attending their meet-up event with the local WordPress community where we spoke with him, he planed to visit Osaka, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. He explained: We have an office in SoMA, San Francisco, but I’ve not been there in the past four months. When you are in San Francisco, feel free to visit our office. But I may or may not be there when you visit us. Because we can work anywhere in the world. I can tell our headquarters is where I am. When he visited Japan last time five years ago, he saw many people using i-mode with their feature phone handsets, which is totally different from the current situation where smartphones are well penetrated. When we asked about the state of the WordPress community here in Japan, he said the blogging platform is still only for early adopters, which is very similar to the state of the WordPress community in the US back in 2005…

See the original story in Japanese.

Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and the head of the WordPress project, visited Japan last week. He visited Tokyo on a promotion tour in the APAC region, following Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore.

After attending their meet-up event with the local WordPress community where we spoke with him, he planed to visit Osaka, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. He explained:

We have an office in SoMA, San Francisco, but I’ve not been there in the past four months. When you are in San Francisco, feel free to visit our office. But I may or may not be there when you visit us. Because we can work anywhere in the world. I can tell our headquarters is where I am.

When he visited Japan last time five years ago, he saw many people using i-mode with their feature phone handsets, which is totally different from the current situation where smartphones are well penetrated. When we asked about the state of the WordPress community here in Japan, he said the blogging platform is still only for early adopters, which is very similar to the state of the WordPress community in the US back in 2005 or 2006. He added:

If you compare the state of the community to a baseball game, it’s still one inning. So we want to more penetrate WordPress in Japan. That’s why we want to hire good people from Japan. That’s one of biggest reasons why I visited Japan this time.

Among their 250-person team, about one-third of them are committed to user support while the rest of them are engineers, designers and administration staff. ‘Working from everywhere’ is certainly one of their uniquenesses, so only 15 people are working in their headquarters in San Francisco. They have no Japanese employee other than Naoko Takano, their ‘globalizer‘ personnel based in Tokyo.

English would be one of obstacles when typical Japanese people work with them. However, Matt told us with laughter that “You will need to read English but no need to speak in English.” (since internal communication in his company is entirely web-based.) It is obvious that Matt is eager to hire more people from Japan to better serve the local WordPress community comprising of more than a few WordPress users.

Our readers may recall Automattic raised 160 million dollars from VC firms. In a response to my question that he has no intention to let his company go IPO or be acquired by a big company, he explained:

We raised a larger amount of money than typical IPOs. We want to control our company by ourselves and have no need of an IPO for now. WordPress became eleven years old two months ago. The money raised this time is to prepare for our next ten years.

We understand that the company plans to use the funds to intensify system developments, especially for mobile optimization for iPhone and Android handsets. In a view of that, his intention hiring Japanese engineers is quite natural since Japan is more advanced in mobile than any western countries.

It is told that websites using WordPress as their platform account for over 20% in all sites in the world. With a limited number of 250 employees, they have generated such a big traffic share larger than that from internet giants like Facebook and Google. It will be interesting to see how their future employees from Japan and the rest of the world will bring WordPress beyond a blogging environment or a content management system to an entirely new concept.

news

Tokyo Otaku Mode starts selling custom order replica samurai swords for global fans

tokyo otaku mode

Takeshi Hirano 2014.06.08

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo Otaku Mode, the startup behind the Japanese subculture site of the same name, started accepting custom orders for replica Japanese samurai swords last week, where you can order your preferred design of a sword from over 580,000 combination patterns by choosing its nine components such as hilt binding and blade types. This was made possible in collaboration with Kyoto-based replica sword producer Kotoya. According to the company, this is the first time that e-commerce retailers accept custom orders for authentic replica swords in the world. A sword is available for $279.99 including shipping fee. The product will be delivered in about three weeks after placing the order. In our recent interview with the company, they explained that high-ticket items are selling well on their e-commerce channel because of their user demographics. Replica swords are as expensive as nearly $300, but it will be relatively easy to sell these items to their users since they have many big fans of Japanese anime like Rurouni Kenshin and cosplay performances. The company’s co-founder Takuya Akiyama shared that they have already received many orders from outside Japan. On a related note, he told us that these replica…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo Otaku Mode, the startup behind the Japanese subculture site of the same name, started accepting custom orders for replica Japanese samurai swords last week, where you can order your preferred design of a sword from over 580,000 combination patterns by choosing its nine components such as hilt binding and blade types. This was made possible in collaboration with Kyoto-based replica sword producer Kotoya.

According to the company, this is the first time that e-commerce retailers accept custom orders for authentic replica swords in the world. A sword is available for $279.99 including shipping fee. The product will be delivered in about three weeks after placing the order.

In our recent interview with the company, they explained that high-ticket items are selling well on their e-commerce channel because of their user demographics.

Replica swords are as expensive as nearly $300, but it will be relatively easy to sell these items to their users since they have many big fans of Japanese anime like Rurouni Kenshin and cosplay performances. The company’s co-founder Takuya Akiyama shared that they have already received many orders from outside Japan.

On a related note, he told us that these replica swords can be smoothly delivered to anywhere in the world by reporting as a ‘toy sword’ to customs. When their users receive their sword, they will be able to share a picture of themselves wearing it, which will help promoting its sales as well. It will be interesting to see how they fare from now on.

news

Japan’s deli food delivery company Okan raises from CyberAgent Ventures and Oisix

Junya Mori 2014.06.05

See the original story in Japanese. Our readers may recall we told you that Tokyo-based startup Okan has launched delivery service for Japanese deli foods for corporate customers. [1] The company announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum from Japanese investment firm CyberAgent Ventures and food delivery company Oisix (TSE:3182). With the service Office Okan, corporate customers will receive Japanese deli once a month, since the deli lasts about a month. These can be refrigerated, and users can buy it by dropping coins to the collection box on the fridge and prepare it in about minutes. The service was launched in close beta back in November and subsequently officially launched back in March. The company plans to use the funds to strengthen their operating foundations including improving service operations as well as intensifying system development and marketing efforts. They also plan to explore sharing logistics and sales channels with Oisix for more efficient operations. Okan was previously known as Chisan. ↩

See the original story in Japanese.

Our readers may recall we told you that Tokyo-based startup Okan has launched delivery service for Japanese deli foods for corporate customers. [1] The company announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum from Japanese investment firm CyberAgent Ventures and food delivery company Oisix (TSE:3182).

With the service Office Okan, corporate customers will receive Japanese deli once a month, since the deli lasts about a month. These can be refrigerated, and users can buy it by dropping coins to the collection box on the fridge and prepare it in about minutes. The service was launched in close beta back in November and subsequently officially launched back in March.

The company plans to use the funds to strengthen their operating foundations including improving service operations as well as intensifying system development and marketing efforts. They also plan to explore sharing logistics and sales channels with Oisix for more efficient operations.

Okan was previously known as Chisan. ↩

news

CyberAgent Ventures now accepting startups to pitch at Rising Expo 2014 in Tokyo

Junya Mori 2014.06.03

See the original story in Japanese. Japanese startup-focused VC firm CyberAgent Ventures announced on Monday that it has started accepting applications to pitch at Rising Expo 2014 in Japan, the company’s annual startup conference which will take place in Tokyo on August 8th. Some of our readers may recall that the company held Rising Expo 2013 last September, where mobile live-broadcasting app TwitCasting won the top prize. Unlike the event’s past editions, CyberAgent Ventures is hosting local preliminary rounds in four Asian cities (Jakarta, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo) prior to the main event. If you want to apply, your business should be already live and you should be exploring funding worth more than 100 million yen ($1 million). Startups passing the preliminary screening process will be invited to pitch to major Japanese VC firms and business executives.

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese startup-focused VC firm CyberAgent Ventures announced on Monday that it has started accepting applications to pitch at Rising Expo 2014 in Japan, the company’s annual startup conference which will take place in Tokyo on August 8th.

Some of our readers may recall that the company held Rising Expo 2013 last September, where mobile live-broadcasting app TwitCasting won the top prize. Unlike the event’s past editions, CyberAgent Ventures is hosting local preliminary rounds in four Asian cities (Jakarta, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo) prior to the main event.

If you want to apply, your business should be already live and you should be exploring funding worth more than 100 million yen ($1 million). Startups passing the preliminary screening process will be invited to pitch to major Japanese VC firms and business executives.

news

Japan’s Crowdworks rolls out crowdsourcing platform for hardware manufacturers

Takeshi Hirano 2014.06.03

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based crowdsourcing service provider Crowdworks announced yesterday that it has rolled out a platform focused on hardware manufacturing, which aims to give crowdsourced workers a variety of jobs ranging from hardware planning, designs, testing, to sales. The new platform is called MakersWorks. They plan to match hardware manufacturers and construction companies with product designers and CAD engineers using the platform. The company also intends to help companies start developing their products on a mass production basis after prototyping in partnership with 3D printing companies and electronic manufacturing services providers. Through this platform, they expect to transact deals worth several million US dollars a month. We understand that crowdsourcing platforms have to provide their workers with a kind of jobs which are well standardized but less dependent on individual skills. However, hardware manufacturing typically requires engineering expertise dedicated to every task. So it will be interesting to see how the company can enhance their crowdsourcing capability to fit the manufacturing industry.

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based crowdsourcing service provider Crowdworks announced yesterday that it has rolled out a platform focused on hardware manufacturing, which aims to give crowdsourced workers a variety of jobs ranging from hardware planning, designs, testing, to sales. The new platform is called MakersWorks. They plan to match hardware manufacturers and construction companies with product designers and CAD engineers using the platform.

The company also intends to help companies start developing their products on a mass production basis after prototyping in partnership with 3D printing companies and electronic manufacturing services providers. Through this platform, they expect to transact deals worth several million US dollars a month.

We understand that crowdsourcing platforms have to provide their workers with a kind of jobs which are well standardized but less dependent on individual skills. However, hardware manufacturing typically requires engineering expertise dedicated to every task. So it will be interesting to see how the company can enhance their crowdsourcing capability to fit the manufacturing industry.

news

Japan’s Metaps acquires app ranking and analytics site App Data Bank

Junya Mori 2014.06.03

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Metaps, the company behind the app monetization platform of the same name, announced yesterday that it has acquired app ranking and analytics site App Data Bank. Since its launch back in 2011, App Data Bank has been publishing reports about app ranking and market analytics for mobile app developers. Through the acquisition, Metaps expects to create synergy with their primary business that helps developers monetize their apps in over 200 countries worldwide.

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Metaps, the company behind the app monetization platform of the same name, announced yesterday that it has acquired app ranking and analytics site App Data Bank.

Since its launch back in 2011, App Data Bank has been publishing reports about app ranking and market analytics for mobile app developers. Through the acquisition, Metaps expects to create synergy with their primary business that helps developers monetize their apps in over 200 countries worldwide.

translation