Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

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Lancers CEO Yosuke Akiyoshi on obstacles facing crowdsourcing in Japan

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.19

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 See the original article in Japanese We conducted many interviews about consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses at the recent Infinity Ventures Summit. Today we have a conversation from that event that we had with Yosuke Akiyoshi, the CEO of Lancers, a leading startup in Japan’s crowdsourcing space. The Bridge: Here I’ve been interviewing many people from the C2C businesses. One of the hot topics among those people lately is Crowdworks’ recent fund raising. Akiyoshi: Looking back on the five years since we launched our crowdsourcing business, the space has really changed a lot. We target people with basic knowledge of the internet, and among those people, words such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘Lancers’ became better known. It took four years for the total number of users (workers who receive orders) to reach 100,000. The number rapidly grew to 200,000 this October, and 220,000 last month. It could surpass 300,000 early next year. But some users still feel they don’t fully understand the system. So, we need to better educate them. In that sense, the 1.1 billion yen (raised by Crowdworks) means a lot in developing the industry. The Bridge: You announced…

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

See the original article in Japanese

We conducted many interviews about consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses at the recent Infinity Ventures Summit. Today we have a conversation from that event that we had with Yosuke Akiyoshi, the CEO of Lancers, a leading startup in Japan’s crowdsourcing space.

The Bridge: Here I’ve been interviewing many people from the C2C businesses. One of the hot topics among those people lately is Crowdworks’ recent fund raising.

Akiyoshi: Looking back on the five years since we launched our crowdsourcing business, the space has really changed a lot. We target people with basic knowledge of the internet, and among those people, words such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘Lancers’ became better known. It took four years for the total number of users (workers who receive orders) to reach 100,000. The number rapidly grew to 200,000 this October, and 220,000 last month. It could surpass 300,000 early next year. But some users still feel they don’t fully understand the system. So, we need to better educate them. In that sense, the 1.1 billion yen (raised by Crowdworks) means a lot in developing the industry.

The Bridge: You announced today that Lancers will have partnership with GMO Epsilon Inc.

Akiyoshi: GMO Epsilon offers payment services, and lots of work opportunities will arise due to the implementation of the service. Many of such work orders will be placed on Lancers.

The Bridge: The fast-growing aspects of crowdsourcing tend to get a lot of attention. But many services struggle to build a solid culture for C2C and B2C businesses. What kind of issues do you face?

Akiyoshi: Users are increasing, and I don’t see any problem with that. The problem lies on the side of the companies. Currently, there are a core group of companies who are accustomed to the system. But the goal is for any company to use the system. And there are issues that need to be overcome.

The Bridge: I see.

Akiyoshi: First, direction. When a company places an order, it needs to divide the work. But many companies get stuck at this point.

The Bridge: For example, for a web-design work order, work needs to be divided into coding, writing, and programming, with an order made for each. We plan to solve this issue by holding seminars for companies and dividing up the process control of the system. Also, product managers who can understand and handle the process are needed. We aim to implement more training to increase the amount of such product mangers. We need to enlighten companies.

The Bridge: When you enlighten companies, so to speak, which advantages of Lancers do you emphasize?

Akiyoshi: We tell them the overall advantages in speed, cost and resources.

The Bridge: What about users who receive orders? How do you educate them? I heard you often visit local areas.

Akiyoshi: I have already visited about 15 regions. I realized it is important to have face-to-face communication and to solve such issues. … There are few jobs in local regions. Businesses in Tokyo take jobs from the local. There are few useful communities where you can find opportunities, unlike Tokyo.

The Bridge: How long do you think it will take for crowdsourcing to be accepted as a new kind of work style?

Akiyoshi: It depends on how we measure the success, although we have set a metric. Right now, there are about 200 workers who can make a living just from their Lancers work. We’d like to increase that figure to 10,000 by 2017. But it will take much longer to completely change people’s way of working.

The Bridge: It will certainly take a while. So what number or metric do you currently care about the most?

Akiyoshi: Focusing on improving the users’ experiences, we pay attention to the repeat customer rate. Of course we look at the number of the work orders and the member total at the same time.

The Bridge: Thank you for your time.

I got the impression that more workers understand the concept of crowdsourcing these days. But there are still lots of obstacles that get in the way of companies using crowdsourcing. It’s not only about speed and cost, but quality needs to be considered. And it requires more understanding from companies about how to use the system and handle the process control. That knowledge is not open enough, and it becomes an obstacle.

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Japanese classifieds site Jmty.jp looks for light at the end of the tunnel

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.06

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 See the original story in Japanese. One of the trending sectors on the Japanese internet these days is the C2C (consumer to consumer) market. This includes small-sized e-commerce platforms, flea market apps, and crowdsourcing platforms too. But in Japan, the market is not easy to grow without significant effort. In contrast with the US, many C2C players in Japan may be poorly perceived in the eyes of Japanese users, where consumers are more likely to buy from a publicly recognized company. At the venue of Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Kyoto, we saw many of the key players in the C2C sector. I had a chance to speak with Takahiro Kato, the CEO of Jmty.jp (pronounced as Jimoty). The company provides local classifieds and forums for local communities, including listings for jobs and second-hand items. The company was launched back in 2011 and raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Infinity Venture Partners (IVP), and additional funding of 150 million yen (about $1.5 million) from KDDI, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and IVP back in 2012. It also raised money from Fuji Startup Ventures last August. The story so…

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

See the original story in Japanese.

One of the trending sectors on the Japanese internet these days is the C2C (consumer to consumer) market. This includes small-sized e-commerce platforms, flea market apps, and crowdsourcing platforms too. But in Japan, the market is not easy to grow without significant effort. In contrast with the US, many C2C players in Japan may be poorly perceived in the eyes of Japanese users, where consumers are more likely to buy from a publicly recognized company.

At the venue of Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Kyoto, we saw many of the key players in the C2C sector. I had a chance to speak with Takahiro Kato, the CEO of Jmty.jp (pronounced as Jimoty). The company provides local classifieds and forums for local communities, including listings for jobs and second-hand items.

The company was launched back in 2011 and raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Infinity Venture Partners (IVP), and additional funding of 150 million yen (about $1.5 million) from KDDI, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and IVP back in 2012. It also raised money from Fuji Startup Ventures last August.

The story so far

The Bridge: What has happened with Jmty in the last three years?

Kato: We surpassed 1.4 million monthly visitors and 11 million monthly page views back in November. And we surpassed 1 million monthly visitors back in September.

The Bridge: So you mean your users have been rapidly increasing in the last few months?

Kato: Our service was recently featured on Mezamashi TV, a popular morning TV show. I know typically most TV appearances give only a momentary boost but not a sustained increase. However this recent feature brought us many long-standing active users.

The Bridge: Is there any improvement in user activity?

Kato: 20% or 30% of the items presented on our website are unwanted articles that users want to give away for free. When you post a message about this kind of item, you will usually get a comment from other users within 24 hours.

The Bridge: Craigslist is a very similar business to yours. Do you know how large their business is in the US?

Kato: It is said that they still have 60 million monthly visitors with 2 billion monthly page views. That’s really huge.

C2C is different in Japan

A classified platform needs to diversify its business to scale. And I thought acquiring 1.4 monthly visitors in three years was not such a big number. I asked him further about the potential of opportunities in the Japanese C2C market.

The Bridge: Compared to Craigslist, your business is still quite small. Is your growth slower than you expected?

Kato: Craiglist needed five years to surpass 10 million monthly visitors. I know several similar cases in China too. So this speed of growth is within our expectations.

The Bridge: Do you want to see a steeper increase? I think completely open C2C platforms face many obstacles in the Japanese market. For example, many users expect the operators of these platforms to assure the quality of the items they will buy on the platform.

Kato: It’s a fact that we get inquiries from some users asking how we will be responsible for a possible defective purchase. That’s why we added a notice all across our website that we will take no responsibility for any possible defects from trades between users.

The Bridge: So you need to educate users more?

Kato: By adding many notices, it encourages users to police themselves in a way. If you set up a hotline to receiving reports of defective items, many users will kindly tell us who the offending users are.

The platform was launched by Hirofumi Ono, the co-founder partner of Infinity Venture Partners. I asked him where in Jmty’s business he might find some potential to scale up.

The Bridge: When you launched Jmty.jp back in 2011, there was a big rise in classified platforms in mainland China. 58.com (NYSE:WUBA) had recently IPOed. Did these happenings have any impact on your decision to launch?

Ono: When we launched it, we thought it had lots of potential. We saw China’s 58.com and Baixing.com were rapidly growing. We actually asked Baixing.com about the key is to their success.

The Bridge: Did you get some useful advice from them?

Ono: They say it takes a long time to grow. Many C2C services in China have been running since 2005. We were also aware that we divided our topics into too many segments. Jmty.jp has many segments by region as well as by category, and that was intended to result in more accurate message postings.

But a classifieds site has to give users a simple way to interact since all users are not always so savvy. We believe that our service requires simplicity rather than pursuing an experience where topics are focused on special/niche purposes.

The light ahead

There is still a the long way to go in terms of growth for Jmty. And at the end of the interview, I asked Kato how they might emerge from this seemingly endless tunnel.

The Bridge: Will you keep making efforts to increas content topics?

Kato: We will continue to focus on diversifying content that may better suit our users. Regarding posts about jobs or second-hand items, these can be curated a minimal effort.

The Bridge: Can you share any figure on how many trades and transactions you’re facilitating?

Kato: A six-digit number has been already posted, and we’re receiving about 700 new posts every day.

The Bridge: Your service targets average people, so you will need to promote it using mass media, right?

Kato: We received investments from Fuji Startup Ventures, the investment arm of Fuji TV. So we’re planning to do something using television.

The Bridge: I know you will need a long time to achieve your goal, but how do you plan to sustain your business long term? Is there any funding plan?

Kato: We are a six-person team, and currently looking for the next funding opportunity. We hope to get funding from a business entity, rather than a pure investment firm, and partner with them to grow our business together.

The Bridge: Thank you for the time and your great insights!

The key to succeed with a service like this likely depends on how they can increase number the user-generated submissions. We’ll keep our eyes on their progress, so stay with us!

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Japanese mobile captcha startup Capy wins IVS Launchpad, has more plans ahead

Rick Martin 2013.12.05

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 Last week I had a chance to catch up with the folks from Capy in an office they’re working out of in Shibuya. The founder of the up-and-coming Japanese startup and CEO Mitsuo Okada first developed the concept behind his secure captcha service while studying at Kyoto University. Capy’s value proposition, for those unfamiliar with it, is that it’s less frustrating than the twisted letter solution of convention captchas, replacing it with a sort of sliding image puzzle that robots cannot complete (see below). While talking with Okada and his colleagues last week, I happened to mention that I’d be attending the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Kyoto. “Oh, we’ll be there too,” said Okada. Skip to a week later where Okada pitched his captcha technology in front of a packed hall at the Westin Hotel Kyoto. They were one of 12 startups that took to the stage, but Capy was judged to be the best of them all. We first interviewed Okada about Capy way back in August, so they aren’t a newcomer to us. But among Japanese startups, the company does stand out in that…

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

Last week I had a chance to catch up with the folks from Capy in an office they’re working out of in Shibuya. The founder of the up-and-coming Japanese startup and CEO Mitsuo Okada first developed the concept behind his secure captcha service while studying at Kyoto University. Capy’s value proposition, for those unfamiliar with it, is that it’s less frustrating than the twisted letter solution of convention captchas, replacing it with a sort of sliding image puzzle that robots cannot complete (see below).

While talking with Okada and his colleagues last week, I happened to mention that I’d be attending the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Kyoto.

“Oh, we’ll be there too,” said Okada.

Skip to a week later where Okada pitched his captcha technology in front of a packed hall at the Westin Hotel Kyoto. They were one of 12 startups that took to the stage, but Capy was judged to be the best of them all.

We first interviewed Okada about Capy way back in August, so they aren’t a newcomer to us. But among Japanese startups, the company does stand out in that it has taken a pretty global approach from the very beginning, initially launching the business in the US [1].

Even though conventional captchas can be frustrating, I’ve always admired the elegance of reCAPTCHA which makes us of user input not as a security precaution, but also as a means of digitizing books. Two birds with one stone. But Capy will be able to do something similar as well, and I think that’s why it has such great potential.

capy-awards — Okada-san all smiles on stage after winning IVS Launchpad

Websites that use Capy can repurpose its validation screen as a space to advertise, and that’s especially useful given how precious space is on a typical smartphone screen. Capy will have free and premium versions, the free version being ad-supported, and with the premium version, a publisher can use whatever image they want. Right now, the company is focusing on developing the premium version. In addition to advertising, there are other purposes for which Capy images could be used. They’re hoping to attend SxSW next year, and so I expect that many of the things they are currently working on should be ready for showtime by then.

Okada tells me that currently Capy is providing 50,000 captchas per day across three or four clients here in Japan. This is the perfect test market he says, because Japan is very closed. They still have improvements they want to make in user interface and experience, but I’m told they still need more engineers. Currently they are still just a team of four with only two engineers.

Their mentor and angel investor is security expert William Saito, with series A funding last May. I expect that a lot more eyes will be on Capy after their win at IVS Launchpad. So look forward to hearing more from them in the next year or so.

Capy is incorporated in Delaware. ↩

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How can Yahoo Japan fend off emerging e-commerce challengers?

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.04

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 See the original story in Japanese. The Japanese e-commerce market has a volume of $83 billion, but that accounts for only 10% of the country’s entire retail market [1]. Users in Japan have shifted to browsing on mobile, and that’s where the Japanese e-commerce industry will move as well. On day one of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013, we heard from Yahoo Japan’s Takao Ozawa, whose title within the Internet giant is the head of ‘shopping company’. He shared some thoughts about how e-commerce companies can give users ways to discover new things to buy [2]. E-commerce giant Rakuten is said to be have over 100 million items on its platform, which helps you understand how important discovery and recommendation technologies will be for the e-commerce industry in the future. This session was moderated by Hirofumi Ono, of Infinity Ventures Partners. In a response to his queston about how e-commerce platforms should communicate or suggest possible purchases to customers, Ozawa noted that there are three keys: curation, search, and recommendation. He elaborated: Yahoo (Japan) is a search technology company. We’re actually using Google’s engine though. When you try…

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

See the original story in Japanese.

The Japanese e-commerce market has a volume of $83 billion, but that accounts for only 10% of the country’s entire retail market ^[1]. Users in Japan have shifted to browsing on mobile, and that’s where the Japanese e-commerce industry will move as well.

On day one of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013, we heard from Yahoo Japan’s Takao Ozawa, whose title within the Internet giant is the head of ‘shopping company’. He shared some thoughts about how e-commerce companies can give users ways to discover new things to buy ^[2]. E-commerce giant Rakuten is said to be have over 100 million items on its platform, which helps you understand how important discovery and recommendation technologies will be for the e-commerce industry in the future.

This session was moderated by Hirofumi Ono, of Infinity Ventures Partners. In a response to his queston about how e-commerce platforms should communicate or suggest possible purchases to customers, Ozawa noted that there are three keys: curation, search, and recommendation. He elaborated:

Yahoo (Japan) is a search technology company. We’re actually using Google’s engine though. When you try to find something with a keyword like ‘TV’ on our platform, it gives you back few relevant results. This was fortunately fixed. Compared to other recommendation platforms, we have more capability to assess what pages or sites our users have browsed, and which ones can give them more relevant recommendations. We all know Amazon is very good at recommendation. But Yahoo Japan might provide better results since it has such an enormous number of active users in this country.

Yahoo News is also optimizing its interface for mobile browsing, and that may represent another chance to drive traffic to the e-commerce channel by inserting recommendations between articles. Our readers may recall news curation app Gunosy found success inserting ads between news headlines or articles.

Speaking to the recent trend of emerging ‘instant’ e-commerce platforms such as Stores.jp and Base, he encouraged retailers using these platforms to use Yahoo Shopping too, and that prompted a big laugh from the audience.

I think what Stores.jp and Base are providing are functions. I expect to give retailers ways to automate setting up a shop on Yahoo Shopping when they do that on both Stores.jp and Base. We’re a media platform, which is better at acquiring users. I think the combination of function and media will make for the best business results.

I’m skeptical if Yahoo Japan is serious about partnering with the emerging e-commerce platforms, but it is interesting to see how the platforms will generate a strong lead for their merchants.

According to the Japanese ministry of economy, trade, and industry. ↩
A serial entrepreneur who launched a second-hand book and video marketplace EasySeek, established a professional baseball team at Rakuten, and invested in many emerging startups like Star Festival, Nanapi, and Tokyo Otaku Mode. He sold his social marketing agency Crocos to Yahoo Japan back in August of 2012, and joined YJ Capital (the investment arm of Yahoo Japan) to help cultivate its investment and e-commerce businesses. ↩

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Japanese fashion commerce site Muse＆Co passes $1M in monthly sales

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.04

See the original story in Japanese. This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 On day one of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Kyoto, I had a chance to speak with Hirotake Kubo, the CEO of Japanese fashion flash-sale commerce site Muse&Co. The startup was launched back in 2012, and raised 350 million yen (approximately $3.4 million) from several Japanese investment companies including Infinity Venture Partners back in May. According to Kubo, their monthly sales are now almost double what they were a half year ago, and have reached 100 million yen ($1 million). The Bridge: Your company has grown rapidly in the last half year. What happened? Kubo: We were only providing flash sale services, but it might not have been interesting enough for users. So we added curated content about fashion, and this helped us improve our conversion rate among our users. The Bridge: Adding curated content is not such a unique strategy to build a userbase. What was the key? Kubo: A list of items recommended by other users will not have such a great impact. So we used celebrities and asked them to recommend their favorite items on our site….

See the original story in Japanese.

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

On day one of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Kyoto, I had a chance to speak with Hirotake Kubo, the CEO of Japanese fashion flash-sale commerce site Muse&Co. The startup was launched back in 2012, and raised 350 million yen (approximately $3.4 million) from several Japanese investment companies including Infinity Venture Partners back in May.

According to Kubo, their monthly sales are now almost double what they were a half year ago, and have reached 100 million yen ($1 million).

The Bridge: Your company has grown rapidly in the last half year. What happened?

Kubo: We were only providing flash sale services, but it might not have been interesting enough for users. So we added curated content about fashion, and this helped us improve our conversion rate among our users.

The Bridge: Adding curated content is not such a unique strategy to build a userbase. What was the key?

Kubo: A list of items recommended by other users will not have such a great impact. So we used celebrities and asked them to recommend their favorite items on our site. But consumers are very smart and will only buy items if they are good. So we carefully choose people who recommend good items, and we’re not so much focused on selling our products through that effort.

The Bridge: This kind of editorial operation is expensive I’m sure. How are your finances doing?

Kubo: I think they’re reasonable. Our editorial flow is not complete. We’re outsourcing the work, and managing it at all times with consideration of how to get better results for our money.

The Bridge: Can you share any specific growth figures?

Kubo: Our userbase keeps growing 15% every month. We have 30,000 monthly downloads of our mobile app and 40,000 new visitors on desktop. The growth rate more than doubled that of half a year ago.

The Bridge: What about the number of brands on site, and the number of users?

Kubo: We’re serving almost 1,000 brands to 400,000 users right now.

The Bridge: How much more sales you can expect to see?

Kubo: Our competitors are making around 5 billion yen ($50 million). So we can probably reach 400 million yen ($4 million) on a monthly basis.

The Bridge: Any idea on how to achieve that milestone?

Kubo: I have something in my mind, but I can’t disclose it. One thing I can share is that we’re looking to get our service out of the flash commerce business. Flash commerce helps us trigger potential customers, but we need to keep providing them with trending items at all times.

The Bridge: Thanks for talking with us!

Fashion magazine-style curated content can go a long way to helping users find things they like where a simple text search will not work. So I believe some media entities will launch e-commerce platforms in the near future, which may give consumers better accessibility to a wide variety of eye-catching items.

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This Japanese startup wants to open source its DNA amplifier

Rick Martin 2013.12.04

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 At Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto, we saw a few new startups pitching at the Launchpad event. One of the most notable was the very last to come on stage, as Shingo Hisakawa, the founder of hardware startup Tori Ningen [1], pitched a DNA amplifier device. This amplification step is a sort of prerequisite, I understand, for many biological experiments. Shingo posited the problem that DNA sampler devices typically cost $4000 to $10000. But his company wants to reduce that by 1/10, and then offer it open source. The details of how the device actually works were relatively complex (and I won’t venture to summarize it based on a simultaneous translation). But the results of a test sample, after they are processed, can be viewed in a Chrome browser, so it doesn’t require any special software. The hardware itself can be viewed below, and at the end of the video above. In my view, this was the most passionate pitch, the founder proclaiming that ’the internet is part of our own DNA, and we should use it to leave a legacy behind. They have already has started selling…

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

At Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto, we saw a few new startups pitching at the Launchpad event. One of the most notable was the very last to come on stage, as Shingo Hisakawa, the founder of hardware startup Tori Ningen [1], pitched a DNA amplifier device. This amplification step is a sort of prerequisite, I understand, for many biological experiments.

Shingo posited the problem that DNA sampler devices typically cost $4000 to $10000. But his company wants to reduce that by 1/10, and then offer it open source. The details of how the device actually works were relatively complex (and I won’t venture to summarize it based on a simultaneous translation). But the results of a test sample, after they are processed, can be viewed in a Chrome browser, so it doesn’t require any special software. The hardware itself can be viewed below, and at the end of the video above.

In my view, this was the most passionate pitch, the founder proclaiming that ’the internet is part of our own DNA, and we should use it to leave a legacy behind.

They have already has started selling domestically here in Japan, but they want to bring it overseas as well. In fact, they are already selling in Malaysia, and hope to open a factory in China.

Update: I previously referred to the device as a DNA sampler, which is incorrect.

He used to make aircraft, hence the name ‘Tori Ningen’, or ‘bird person’. He says the company is comprised of himself, his wife, and his cat. ↩

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Hairmo: Another Japanese startup that wants to match stylists and models

Rick Martin 2013.12.04

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 One of the early pitches at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto was Hairmo.jp. What this startup proposed was not a unique solution: matching aspiring hair-stylists (or hair-stylist assistants) with models to style for practice. “We are not the first,” they said, “but none of the others have been successful.” Our readers may recall that we have already featured a few of them. They pointed out two issues facing any startup in this space. Customer’s level of trust in beauty salon assistants is low. (i.e. Some might even lie and say they are stylists assistants when they are not.) Difficulty in making reservations in a smooth manner. Hairmo claims to have cracked this problem, since they are funded by a company that already has a large network of hair salons, so by using this network they aim to solve this problem by implementing a sort of ‘authorized’ mark for stylists. The other problem is reservation, which they hope to simplify with an easy calendar, and a streamlined confirmation and payment process. Hairmo already has 5000 users, having benefitted from some TV features. “We want our assistants to…

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

One of the early pitches at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto was Hairmo.jp. What this startup proposed was not a unique solution: matching aspiring hair-stylists (or hair-stylist assistants) with models to style for practice. “We are not the first,” they said, “but none of the others have been successful.” Our readers may recall that we have already featured a few of them.

They pointed out two issues facing any startup in this space.

Customer’s level of trust in beauty salon assistants is low. (i.e. Some might even lie and say they are stylists assistants when they are not.)
Difficulty in making reservations in a smooth manner.

Hairmo claims to have cracked this problem, since they are funded by a company that already has a large network of hair salons, so by using this network they aim to solve this problem by implementing a sort of ‘authorized’ mark for stylists.

The other problem is reservation, which they hope to simplify with an easy calendar, and a streamlined confirmation and payment process.

Hairmo already has 5000 users, having benefitted from some TV features. “We want our assistants to become full stylists,” they proclaimed.

It will be interesting to see how they fare in this competitive area. But if you’d like to try them out, you can get their app over on the App Store.

Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

Lancers CEO Yosuke Akiyoshi on obstacles facing crowdsourcing in Japan