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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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Japanese corporate communication platform Talknote raises $2 million

talknote

Takeshi Hirano 2013.10.21

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Talknote, the startup behind the corporate communication platform of the same name, announced today it has raised 200 million yen (approximately $2 million) from Japanese investment company Lead Capital Management. Prior to this funding, it had raised an undisclosed sum of investment from CyberAgent Ventures back in March of 2012. The platform was initially launched as an instant messaging tool for restaurants back in February of 2010, but switched to become a corporate communication platform for businesses in general back in June of 2011. It had over 5,000 corporate users as of last March, but since then its growth has accelerated surpassing 10,000 accounts this month (see chart below). We asked the Talknote founder and CEO, Haruo Koike, about their possible exit options, and he explained: We obviously aim for an IPO exit. A merger or acquisition will be not included in our options. Google Apps has 5 million corporate users worldwide, and Kanjo Bugyo (Japan’s dominant corporate accounting software) has 500,000 users. … This space is fiercely competitive and not many platforms can survive. But I think the ones that stand out can grow to such a level. The company has plans…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Talknote, the startup behind the corporate communication platform of the same name, announced today it has raised 200 million yen (approximately $2 million) from Japanese investment company Lead Capital Management. Prior to this funding, it had raised an undisclosed sum of investment from CyberAgent Ventures back in March of 2012.

The platform was initially launched as an instant messaging tool for restaurants back in February of 2010, but switched to become a corporate communication platform for businesses in general back in June of 2011. It had over 5,000 corporate users as of last March, but since then its growth has accelerated surpassing 10,000 accounts this month (see chart below).

We asked the Talknote founder and CEO, Haruo Koike, about their possible exit options, and he explained:

We obviously aim for an IPO exit. A merger or acquisition will be not included in our options. Google Apps has 5 million corporate users worldwide, and Kanjo Bugyo (Japan’s dominant corporate accounting software) has 500,000 users. … This space is fiercely competitive and not many platforms can survive. But I think the ones that stand out can grow to such a level.

The company has plans to enhance its messaging feature enabling users to communicate with their clients as well as their colleagues. He added:

We think a communication platform for colleagues is the only first step of our concept. We will introduce an API and encourage other developers to integrate it with their systems. For example, this may enable users to share their daily sales updates with their employees, which can be done automatically every day.

Talknote is expecting to acquire 100,000 corporate users in the next three years.

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Japanese corporate communication platform Talknote has more than 5,000 clients

Takeshi Hirano 2013.03.27

See the original story in Japanese. Talknote, a Tokyo-based startup providing an in-company social network platform for sharing among colleagues, announced that it has acquired more than 5,000 corporate users. The startup was launched in February of 2010, pivoted to a communication tool for business in 2011, and raised funds from CyberAgent Ventures in March of 2012 [1]. They’ve been seeing good numbers lately with 1,400 corporate users coming on board in the last two months, and company’s CEO Haruo Koike says the service will be reaching a growth rate of 1,000 users a month very soon. It was more than three years ago when I met with Haruo for the first time to discuss the original version of Talknote. At that time it was intended for chatting in closed groups, but the shift to target enterprise users has yielded good results. The CEO’s eccentric background has really helped the rapid growth of the company. He has been running several restaurants since he was young, and I still remember how he emphasized the importance of feature phone-optimization for web services, making them easier to use at working sites like restaurants where adoption of digital services can be very slow. And…

See the original story in Japanese.

Talknote, a Tokyo-based startup providing an in-company social network platform for sharing among colleagues, announced that it has acquired more than 5,000 corporate users. The startup was launched in February of 2010, pivoted to a communication tool for business in 2011, and raised funds from CyberAgent Ventures in March of 2012 [1].

They’ve been seeing good numbers lately with 1,400 corporate users coming on board in the last two months, and company’s CEO Haruo Koike says the service will be reaching a growth rate of 1,000 users a month very soon.

It was more than three years ago when I met with Haruo for the first time to discuss the original version of Talknote. At that time it was intended for chatting in closed groups, but the shift to target enterprise users has yielded good results.

The CEO’s eccentric background has really helped the rapid growth of the company. He has been running several restaurants since he was young, and I still remember how he emphasized the importance of feature phone-optimization for web services, making them easier to use at working sites like restaurants where adoption of digital services can be very slow. And he has apparently done a good job of bringing such businesses onto his platform. Haruo tells me that internet companies and IT business account for only the 20% of the entire user base. The rest are restaurants which were accustomed to fax or feature phone-based e-mails for their internal communication.

talknote_usergrowth — The Growth of Talknote subscribers (corporate accounts)

Most users have learned about our service by word of mouth from restaurant owners whom I know, and they’ve decided to use the service not because of better usability than other tools but because those owners find the value that Talknote may help them get away from conventional analog communication tools.

When I saw it for the first time, I thought it was just a Yammer clone and would be a new group chat tool for high school girls. But what Haruo is proposing is not developing an innovative system but evolving ways of communication in places slow to adapt to digital. It will be long journey to make this happen.

Compared to the other businesses, people working in the restaurant industry can be very digitally challenged, they don’t want to use anything even if it’s a bit complicated. I’ve been working here for 10 years, and that experience helps a lot in developing the service.

We often follow cutting edge technologies or business models in the tech space. But this conversation reminds me that this is just the tip of the iceberg when building new services or new businesses. Talknote is expecting to acquire 10,000 users by the end of this year. We hope they’ll have a big impact on digitally challenged businesses with their product.

The amount of funds raised was not disclosed. ↩

talknote