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Japanese growth hacking startup Kaizen Platform raises $5 million

Takeshi Hirano 2014.03.31

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Kaizen Platform, the startup behind the user interface A/B testing platform PlanBCD, announced today that it has secured $5 million from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan and Gree Ventures. With the funds, the company expects to add more engineers to help with platform development. Co-founder and CEO Kenji Sudo will be focused on launching the company’s international business, preparing to launch offices in San Francisco and New York. Sudo explained: We’ll use these funds to enhance our service so it can help companies grow their online businesses, rather than just serve as an A/B testing tool as it is now. We have invited Jun Ogawa (the former ad sales head at Google Japan) as country manager and Yugo Takino (former gaming platform head at GREE) as a product manager, which will allow me to focus more on launching our US operations. Beyond A/B testing As Kaizen’s interface improvement solutions combine a testing tool with crowdsourcing, and it has been embraced by many web app development companies in Japan. Their enterprise edition of PlanBCD has acquired more than 30 corporate users since its launch last August. And on online edition of their service has been…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Kaizen Platform, the startup behind the user interface A/B testing platform PlanBCD, announced today that it has secured $5 million from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan and Gree Ventures. With the funds, the company expects to add more engineers to help with platform development.

Co-founder and CEO Kenji Sudo will be focused on launching the company’s international business, preparing to launch offices in San Francisco and New York. Sudo explained:

We’ll use these funds to enhance our service so it can help companies grow their online businesses, rather than just serve as an A/B testing tool as it is now. We have invited Jun Ogawa (the former ad sales head at Google Japan) as country manager and Yugo Takino (former gaming platform head at GREE) as a product manager, which will allow me to focus more on launching our US operations.

Beyond A/B testing

As Kaizen’s interface improvement solutions combine a testing tool with crowdsourcing, and it has been embraced by many web app development companies in Japan. Their enterprise edition of PlanBCD has acquired more than 30 corporate users since its launch last August. And on online edition of their service has been adopted by 500 companies in 15 countries worldwide. According to Sudo, many of their users are non-internet companies who can’t pay much attention to typical growth hacking techniques for their websites. Kaizen aims to help both less-knowledgeable companies as well as experienced users improve conversions and user acquisitions. He explained:

However well you can run an ad promotion, you can’t expect conversions without improved content on the landing page. We’re planning to build a dashboard feature that helps users understand which part of their websites should be improved for better conversions by showing them metrics.

He gave me a quick look at the dashboard, which lists improvement points with numerical indicators, essentially empowering webmasters to ask crowdsourced workers to make an improvements with just the press of a button.

While things have been good for Kaizen so far, their business still has a problem to resolve. They have about 400 crowdsourced workers who can help with client work, but they still need more. To address this need, they are exploring the possibility of finding workers in more remote areas.

Through partnerships with local governments, we would like to provide work opportunities for people like university students, especially in remote areas.

Corporate websites are often being updated and promoted, especially during new seasons or when new products are released. So if Kaizen can introduced a better version of its platform, it should be an invaluable tool for website maintenance and improvement not only in Japan but also around the world. Let’s stay tuned and see how they do!

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CNet Japan Startup Award nominees: PlanBCD, Talknote, Wantedly

Mona Nomura 2013.12.09

The quality of start-ups nominated for Tuesday’s CNet Japan Startup Awards is high, and Japanese entrepreneurs are seeking to solve problems on par with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This is part six of our preview of the nominees. The rest can be found here. PlanBCD, Kaizen Platform Inc. PlanBCD is one of the few startups — globally — attempting to bring high-converting designs to the masses. The closest corresponding product from the US is Optimizely, founded by an ex-Googler 1. While Optimizely’s core product is technology-reliant, PlanBCD is taking a different approach. Users post a job to PlanBCD’s dedicated network of designers, UI/UX specialists who they call ‘Growth Hackers’. These Growth Hackers pick a job they would like to take on, and the user chooses their favorite, which is then tested for 28 days. Payment is based on performance 2. Its human factor sets Kaizen Platform aside from similar products: Optimizely uses Amazon’s Analytics SDK and Google’s UI optimization tool, Content Experiments. We expect that PlanBCD is a product that will stay on our radars for awhile. Wantedly Wantedly is a social recruiting tool based on Facebook. The CEO and founder Akiko Naka’s ethos aligns with the product, aspiring to connect…

The quality of start-ups nominated for Tuesday’s CNet Japan Startup Awards is high, and Japanese entrepreneurs are seeking to solve problems on par with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This is part six of our preview of the nominees. The rest can be found here.

PlanBCD, Kaizen Platform Inc.

PlanBCD is one of the few startups — globally — attempting to bring high-converting designs to the masses. The closest corresponding product from the US is Optimizely, founded by an ex-Googler 1. While Optimizely’s core product is technology-reliant, PlanBCD is taking a different approach. Users post a job to PlanBCD’s dedicated network of designers, UI/UX specialists who they call ‘Growth Hackers’. These Growth Hackers pick a job they would like to take on, and the user chooses their favorite, which is then tested for 28 days. Payment is based on performance 2.

Its human factor sets Kaizen Platform aside from similar products: Optimizely uses Amazon’s Analytics SDK and Google’s UI optimization tool, Content Experiments. We expect that PlanBCD is a product that will stay on our radars for awhile.

Wantedly

Wantedly is a social recruiting tool based on Facebook. The CEO and founder Akiko Naka’s ethos aligns with the product, aspiring to connect potential employers with talent through the social graph. She believes opportunities found through friends (and mutual friends) create better cultural fits and happier work environments.

“Invest in people, not ideas” is a saying repeatedly spoken by VCs and investors in the US. It is apparently working well in Japan, as Wantedly reports they have over 1,800 clients and more than 61,000 users.

Talknote

If I were still living in America, it would be very easy to dismiss Talknote as just another Yammer clone. But here on the ground in Tokyo, it’s clear why Talknote acquired so many customers. There are many archaic infrastructures out there and the restaurant industry is certainly one of them. Countless establishments still have no website and even accept fax requests for reservations or food deliveries. Haruo Koike, the CEO and founder of Talknote, is the perfect person to push this industry forward, as he has been in the restaurant business for 10 years.

Disruption starts with little baby steps like these, and it will be exciting to track Talknote’s progress. There’s also a part of me that wishes an American start-up would take Koike-san’s approach, as the food industry in the US could use a big change as well.

Talknote’s Facebook page is also very engaging, and I love how the CEO uses and supports products in the start-up community.

Fitting, as Google is known for its thorough A/B testing, the most well known, Marissa Mayer’s 41 shades of blue test. ↩
There’s nothing online that describes their growth hacker acquisition strategy – the closest I found was this job-share posting found here. Since the founders are ex-Recruit, I’m assuming they have techniques unavailable for public knowlege. ↩

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Kaizen Platform’s A/B test service wins BDash Camp Osaka pitch event

Rick Martin 2013.10.08

This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013. The highlight of day two of B Dash Camp Osaka was the startup pitch event, with a number of quality entrants from Japan and around Asia. The grand prize winner of the event was Kaizen Platform, whose CEO Kenji Sudo pitched their PlanBCD service. He was awarded a Microsoft Surface 2, a Sony Xperia Tablet Z, as well as return invite to the next B Dash Camp The service is a little tricky to wrap your head around, but its primary function is to help developers improve the user interface of their web service. The front page of their site boasts “Growth Hackers are ready to optimize your site.” But of course it can be costly for companies to hire growth hackers for such improvements, but PlanBCD proposes a crowdsourced solution and useful tools for short-term A/B testing. You will need to set a budget for your site improvement, and then add some javascript to your site’s headers. After that you wait for suggested improvements from growth hackers, and you can A/B test the ones you like best. The results can then be reviewed on a handy…

Kaizen Platform CEO Kenji Sudo

This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013.

The highlight of day two of B Dash Camp Osaka was the startup pitch event, with a number of quality entrants from Japan and around Asia. The grand prize winner of the event was Kaizen Platform, whose CEO Kenji Sudo pitched their PlanBCD service. He was awarded a Microsoft Surface 2, a Sony Xperia Tablet Z, as well as return invite to the next B Dash Camp

The service is a little tricky to wrap your head around, but its primary function is to help developers improve the user interface of their web service. The front page of their site boasts “Growth Hackers are ready to optimize your site.”

But of course it can be costly for companies to hire growth hackers for such improvements, but PlanBCD proposes a crowdsourced solution and useful tools for short-term A/B testing. You will need to set a budget for your site improvement, and then add some javascript to your site’s headers. After that you wait for suggested improvements from growth hackers, and you can A/B test the ones you like best. The results can then be reviewed on a handy dashboard.

Sudo says that they will be looking to expand globally, with the goal of becoming a sort of Github for growth hackers. But they still need to look at reducing their tool’s cost.

Kaizen Platform Inc. just raised seed funding worth $800,000 from GREE Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and CyberAgent Ventures back in August, with the intention of stepping up its system development and marketing. And it wouldn’t surprise us at all to see them attract more investment very soon.

You can check out their demo video below to learn more about PlanBCD, as well as some of the slides from the pitch (in Japanese).

news

Japanese UI improvement platform planBCD raises $800,000

Takeshi Hirano 2013.08.20

See the original story in Japanese.PlanBCD is a platform that helps developers to improve the user interface on their web services. Kaizen Platform Inc., the Tokyo-based startup behind the service, announced today that it has raised seed funding worth $800,000 from Gree Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and CyberAgent Ventures. With these funds, the company plans to intensify its system development and marketing efforts. The service provides developers with an A/B testing environment, especially useful for improving web content and interfaces, comparing the performance of multiple available options. It helps you test and optimize processes like sign-ups, purchases, or landing pages. Unlike other conventional services, planBCD allows you to conduct this time-consuming, trial-and-error process by only embedding a single-line of JavaScript on your website. The video below shows more details about how it works. In the closed beta version, they’ve seen examples where users have improved conversion rates on their websites by 130% to 170%. [T]here’s a big barrier to optimizing user traffic for clients unless they improve user interface on their websites. The most remarkable part of the service is that PlanBCD gives you ways to crowdsource the UI and UX improvement process, something which is often difficult to assign…

See the original story in Japanese.PlanBCD is a platform that helps developers to improve the user interface on their web services. Kaizen Platform Inc., the Tokyo-based startup behind the service, announced today that it has raised seed funding worth $800,000 from Gree Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and CyberAgent Ventures. With these funds, the company plans to intensify its system development and marketing efforts.

The service provides developers with an A/B testing environment, especially useful for improving web content and interfaces, comparing the performance of multiple available options. It helps you test and optimize processes like sign-ups, purchases, or landing pages. Unlike other conventional services, planBCD allows you to conduct this time-consuming, trial-and-error process by only embedding a single-line of JavaScript on your website. The video below shows more details about how it works. In the closed beta version, they’ve seen examples where users have improved conversion rates on their websites by 130% to 170%.

[T]here’s a big barrier to optimizing user traffic for clients unless they improve user interface on their websites.

The most remarkable part of the service is that PlanBCD gives you ways to crowdsource the UI and UX improvement process, something which is often difficult to assign someone in your company. The accumulation of A/B testing results will be stored on the service, helping you hand the process over to someone else if necessary.

The service is a combination of an easy-to-implement environment and crowdsourcing features. Kaizen was launched back in March of 2013 by Kenji Sudo. He previously worked at Japanese human resource company, Recruit, supervising the company’s ad-tech services. Sudo explained:

At Recruit, I was involved in ad optimization services for online advertising. But I learned that there’s a big barrier to optimizing user traffic for clients unless they improve user interface on their websites. But if we help them improve their websites, it hurts our overall business efficiency to the point where we can’t work on it. As a result, only rich companies can engage in the improvement process. So this was why we launched the testing service.

He notes that the service has acquired 200 crowdsourced workers for the UI testing operations, and they are appropriately ranked corresponding to their past testing performances.

The service’s pricing has three tiers according to the kind of workers you crowdsource your UI improvement tasks. It’s 100,000 yen ($1,000) a month for Standard, 200,000 yen ($2,000) a month for Professional, and 500,000 yen ($5,000) a month for Maestro. The service has a money-back guarantee so you will not be charged if you can’t see any improvement in your website performance. The charge is comprised of the monthly fee mentioned above plus a charge for how many times the embedded JavaScript test code is called.

The service is already used by many clients, including some enterprise companies. It’s a good indication that new business models comprising of a tool and a crowdsoucring service could be trending in the near future.

PlanBCD