See the original article in Japanese Hitoshi Nakamura, the CEO of Toreta Inc., has released a new app for the food service industry called Toreta. Nakamura is best known as the founder FrogApps, which operates Japanese food photos sharing app, Mill. Our readers may recall that we previously spoke with Nakamura about his decision of stepping down as the CEO of FrogApps. And now, his new endeavor has been revealed [1]. Toreta is an iPad app that lets restaurants easily manage their customers’ reservations. It’s somewhat unique in that it targets restaurants as its users, and not customers. Reservation data is managed on the cloud, with features such as voice-recoding, hand-written notes, and the ability to send confirmation messages via SMS. You can get an the idea of how the service works in the introduction video above. The biggest advantage to using the app is that restaurants can shorten the time required to take and manage reservations. Nakamura further explains: Mill was a service for end users, but Toreta was designed and developed as a B2B service. As I have been in the restaurant busness, I have seen a lot of inefficiency and issues. With these issues in mind, the…
Hitoshi Nakamura, the CEO of Toreta Inc., has released a new app for the food service industry called Toreta. Nakamura is best known as the founder FrogApps, which operates Japanese food photos sharing app, Mill. Our readers may recall that we previously spoke with Nakamura about his decision of stepping down as the CEO of FrogApps. And now, his new endeavor has been revealed [1].
Toreta is an iPad app that lets restaurants easily manage their customers’ reservations. It’s somewhat unique in that it targets restaurants as its users, and not customers. Reservation data is managed on the cloud, with features such as voice-recoding, hand-written notes, and the ability to send confirmation messages via SMS. You can get an the idea of how the service works in the introduction video above.
The biggest advantage to using the app is that restaurants can shorten the time required to take and manage reservations. Nakamura further explains:
Mill was a service for end users, but Toreta was designed and developed as a B2B service. As I have been in the restaurant busness, I have seen a lot of inefficiency and issues. With these issues in mind, the solution I decided to work on is Toreta. A reservation book is one of the most important tools for restaurants when managing critical information. Mishandling the reservations could damage customers’ satisfaction. So Toreta aims to avoid that sort of situations.
Nakamura points out that human errors are inevitable when keeping track in a paper book. And existing solutions for reservation management are not ideal. The initial fee to start using Toreta is free, and users are charged 9,000 yen per month. The first month is free as part of a free trial.
He is also the owner of Butagumi, a restaurant located in Tokyo’s Nishi-Asabu area. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. FrogApps is the Tokyo-based startup behind the notable Japanese food photo sharing app, Miil. The company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura recently announced he would step down from his current position, and board member Hawk Takahashi will be appointed as the new head. Mr. Nakamura will stay on the board of directors and support the startup as it grows further. FrogApps was founded in September of 2010 and went on to introduce Miil in 2011 [1]. Subsequently the startup fundraised 20 million yen from CyberAgent Ventures in 2011, and 240 million yen from Lead Capital Management and Dentsu Digital Holdings in 2012. According to Mr. Nakamura’s blog post, the food photo app has surpassed 300,000 downloads and 50,000 daily postings and comments. So why the change at the top? What’s this we’re hearing about a new company co-founded by FrogApps and Mr. Nakamura? We spoke with both the ex-CEO Hitoshi Nakamura, as well as his successor, Mr. Takahashi. Why step down now? Nakamura: I’m better at creating something from scratch. I really like to create something in a form of a service or a product, and then find its value proposition for consumers or markets. I’m…
FrogApps is the Tokyo-based startup behind the notable Japanese food photo sharing app, Miil. The company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura recently announced he would step down from his current position, and board member Hawk Takahashi will be appointed as the new head. Mr. Nakamura will stay on the board of directors and support the startup as it grows further.
FrogApps was founded in September of 2010 and went on to introduce Miil in 2011 [1]. Subsequently the startup fundraised 20 million yen from CyberAgent Ventures in 2011, and 240 million yen from Lead Capital Management and Dentsu Digital Holdings in 2012. According to Mr. Nakamura’s blog post, the food photo app has surpassed 300,000 downloads and 50,000 daily postings and comments.
So why the change at the top? What’s this we’re hearing about a new company co-founded by FrogApps and Mr. Nakamura? We spoke with both the ex-CEO Hitoshi Nakamura, as well as his successor, Mr. Takahashi.
Why step down now?
Nakamura: I’m better at creating something from scratch. I really like to create something in a form of a service or a product, and then find its value proposition for consumers or markets. I’m feeling that I’ve already done for the app. However, we needed to form a more sound team to keep the service growing. […] From now on, our key focus is finding how we can further boost our business.
Looking back to when you first launched, how much has your business achieved to date?
Nakamura: I can’t say we have taken the path that I expected. We had a minimum milestone to achieve, and I believe we have passed it. For our users, we have acquired many influencers who can spread the word about food and gourmet. We assumed food-savvy people like dining around town, but the facts were different. Our users like dining at home. I’ve been involved in restaurant business for a long time, and that’s why I thought we wanted to start building a user base among restaurant addicts.
From left: ex-CEO Hitoshi Nakamura and new CEO Hawk Takahashi
Did you find the right sort of business model to accelerate your business?
Takahashi: We ran a promotion campaign using food photos, and that was well received by our users. In terms of reaching our target for our possible sponsors, our service is too small to compete against conventional big mass media. However, our user base is specifically filtered around foodies and gourmets. We’ve discovered unexpected insights from our users’ feedbacks.
Nakamura: For example, we got sponsorship from Morinaga Milk (TYO:2264) and promoted their chocolate condensed milk products using the app. The chocolate product is an old product, as old as a plain-type condensed milk, but has not been featured so much publicly. When we asked our users to post recipes using the chocolate milk product, we received a bunch of great recipe ideas that the milk maker had never expected. These recipes were subsequently featured on the Morinaga website.
Why did a milk company like the Miil app? Was it something like market research for them?
Takahashi: Our clients (potential sponsors) may not be satisfied with only spreading the words about their products. They want to create value through interaction with our users. We turned to see how to improve our service and explore more potential business models including using the app for our client to fill their market research needs. In the next year, we’ll be much working on projects in partnership with restaurant businesses.
Nakamura: We need switch ourselves from the investment phase to a monetization phase someday. In order to make the business more sound and more sustainable, I handed over my role to Mr. Takahashi.
I heard you will be launching a new business called Froggy. What’s that about?
Nakamura: I’ve been in restaurant business for a long time, and I’ve learned there’s no innovation in this space. The restaurant business is labor-intensive, and for workers the conditions are not always the best, possibly with long hours or little to no paid vacation. That’s something technology can solve, and it can make a great impact on the industry as well. I can’t disclose much about what I’ll be working on, but I believe there’s more room for services which can work both for restaurant owners and their customers. The new project might be integrated with the Miil app as well, and I hope both can help each other, like the two wheels of the same cart, for example.
My interview with them was unfortunately quite short, and they couldn’t disclose too much about future plans. I thought they were expecting to develop a service for driving customers to real restaurants, but I could be wrong. The new project seems to have a different business model from that of the Miil app, and that may be a clue as to what they’ll do next.
Disclosure: The author’s wife has a business relationship with FrogApps.
Available in both English and Japanese for both Android and iOS. ↩
frogapps 
Junya Mori
Takeshi Hirano
