Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of great lessons here.

(1) Billion-dollar companies are often built on products that consumers don't know what they want, until they see and experience it.

Plenty of MP3 players pre-dated the iPod. But the iPod changed the market and put Apple back on the game board.

The iPod had an experience, the form-factor, the capacity, and the horizontal integration -- being able to buy music directly on iTunes -- and once you experienced it, you realized that this was just better.

(2) Find your blind spots and fix them.

A wide variety of dolls, covering the full palette of skin colors, opened up a huge market for all the girls that didn't just want an Industry Standard Barbie Available In One Skin Tone.

Rhianna had the same problem -- she could never find makeup that worked with her skin color. So she introduced her own makeup brand -- marketed as being for all women -- which is now valued in excess of three billion dollars.

We see this a lot in Japan, by the way -- Silicon Valley companies come here, and engage in what I would say are aggressive levels of cultural ignorance.

(3) Recognize the context around your customers.

MGA recognized that Kids These Days spend a lot of time on YouTube, so they built a product designed to be YouTubed.

Glock is a great example of this. The founder, Gaston Glock, didn't come from a gunsmithing or firearms manufacturing background.

To create the first Glock pistol, Gaston put together a cross-functional working group, including metallurgists, plastic-manufacturing specialists, and members of the Austrian police and military that would actually use the design.

Focusing on how the pistol would be used -- from both a tactical and logistical standpoint -- they created something which was a total departure from everything else on the market. A completely integrated safety system. Tool-less takedown and reassembly. Easy maintenance. Most companies require a unique magazine for each different type of pistol -- Glock magazines are totally interchangeable within the same feed mechanism.

Today, Glock is the biggest pistol brand, and every other pistol manufacturer carries Glock-inspired design.

Being able to look at problems from the outside is powerful.

> We see this a lot in Japan, by the way -- Silicon Valley companies come here, and engage in what I would say are aggressive levels of cultural ignorance.

Any concrete example of this? I'm working in Tokyo right now and I see Japanese companies pretty much engage in anything SV throws this way (stuff like apple, slack, uber eats, github etc etc).

Sure!

Apple is a bit of an exception because they created a completely new market -- the smartphone. Japanese companies move slowly, and are hobbled by design-by-committee, so their response to new market entrants is... leisurely.

I'm not sure how that will play out long-term. We'll see where Apple is in twenty years. And Macs are very uncommon, compared to Windows PCs.

SV tech tends to show up at startups, often started by Westerners that have moved here.

That's a common pattern, and if you're in the foreigner bubble, it can be hard to notice.

But in the rest of Japan?

Slack? I'm not sure I actually know any Japanese companies that use it, and the market statistics don't show a lot of grip outside of the US/EU.

Uber Eats is doing well! Especially with COVID-19.

But that's after Uber fell totally flat launching here in Japan. And it remains to be seen if they can hold on to their lead.

It took Uber years of flailing around when they first arrived here, during which they ignored advice like "Japanese taxis are super safe" and "Thumbing your nose at regulators here isn't going to work like it does in the US."

Line totally dominates Japanese instant messaging. It's the WeChat of Japan. Facebook didn't really understand Japanese privacy needs until recently, and I don't see them un-seating Line.

Apple Pay is a second-rate payment system in Japan, and doesn't work if you have a foreign credit card. Japanese banking is... complicated. I once had a gym that outright refused to take my monthly payment on a credit card -- until they realized that my bank and their bank didn't have a "relationship".

Never in the US was I told that, in order to pay for a service, Wells Fargo first needed to take USAA out for dinner and a movie.

Anyhow, Meetup never caught on here, because they didn't understand the market. Gap is around, but they never felt like a major player in the fashion space. None of the education offerings in the US have any traction here.

OpenTable? Nope. You use TableCheck if you want a reservation somewhere.

Overall, I don't see any of the companies on this list[1] having any traction at all here, outside of major players which (a) have invested billions; and (b) took years to understand the local market well enough to adapt their offerings.

And even then... Google still has to to advertise in Japan, and I strongly suspect that Google Maps plays second fiddle to Norikae.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_the...

Apple is a bit of an exception because they created a completely new market -- the smartphone.

I have a drawer full of WindowsCE and PalmOS phones that disagrees with you.

Apple improved on the smartphone significantly but they didn't even come close to creating the market. Smartphones had been around for half a decade before the iPhone launched.

I'll do you one better -- I have a blue Handspring. :)

Mercedes created the first motor vehicle.

Ford created the first one that people actually bought and used in real numbers.

WindowsCE and Palm did not create the smartphone market.

Apple did, by introducing the right product at the right time.

> Apple improved on the smartphone significantly but they didn't even come close to creating the market. Smartphones had been around for half a decade before the iPhone launched.

Pre-iPhone smartphones weren't mass market devices. I remember them well. They were handheld PCs with a phone, marketed as productivity devices.

iPhone was a leisure device. A music player, a phone and an internet browser in one device. They entered a niche market and turned it into a mass market.

Pre-iPhone smartphones weren't mass market devices.

I'm not arguing with that. I'm saying that there was already a market and what Apple did was help to grow it. They didn't create "create a completely new market". The iPhone didn't even have that big an impact on smartphone sales to start with - https://www.statista.com/statistics/191985/sales-of-smartpho... - the growth in 2006 (year before the iPhone launched) is bigger in percentage terms than the following three years combined.

My Symbian based touchscreen smartphone disagrees with your wanton generalisation.

I think it depends on the person and their viewpoint. I personally view the iPhone 2G or 3G and iOS 1 or 2 as the start of the smartphone. Obviously technically there were previous ones. I view the significant changes big enough that it marks the beginning of the smartphone for me.

Anecdotally, I had a Windows Mobile Phone and Symbian phone interview the 2006-2007 time period. I never thought of them as smartphones personally.

Those aren't necessarily examples of Western companies displaying "aggressive levels of cultural ignorance", just examples that they've not penetrated the Japanese market (which I don't disagree, can be caused by cultural ignorance).

The last game I worked on getting publishing deals for, you could easily look at it and say "hah, cultural ignorance".

But we rejected deals with publishers who wanted to just give us some cash and then start promoting the game in various Asian countries with no changes, because we understood that changes were needed and that unless we, in Europe, hired people who knew exactly what to change we needed a publisher who would dictate the changes.

In the meantime... the cost of adding Japanese language to the game and not blocking Japanese buyers on Steam was minimal, far less than money made from a fairly small number of Japanese gamers buying it despite not being adapted at all. We just didn't have the business case for doing a proper Japanese version with a big push to get users there.

True! I would still argue that, in many cases, SV companies actively resist understanding the local culture -- Uber and AirBnB fit into that category.

AirBnB fixed this -- after something like four years -- and Uber would be dead here without COVID buoying up UberEats. They (Uber) could have had a killer offering, had they built-or-bought relationships with taxi companies, because ride-sharing here is a total non-starter.

Gap does not make products for the local market. I used to buy jeans there because they sold exactly the same products in the same fit as in the US, and Americans are... larger.

And it's not like there's a shortage of people that can look at your product and say, "Nope, won't use it, here's why. Watch how I solve this problem right now..."

Socializing in Japan works very differently than in the US.

Meetup and Facebook would have had to introduce almost totally alien products to succeed here, so I think they were kind of doomed from the get-go -- although Instagram was an outscale hit here.

This problem works both ways, of course.

Uniqlo, as of the last time I checked, also doesn't re-size for the US market. But Americans come in more shapes and sizes, so they've still got a market.

As an aside, if I go to Uniqlo and try on the largest size dress shirt they sell, it fits beautifully around my waist and stomach, but the chest and arms look and feel as if painted on. Afterwards, it'll take a full fire crew and a gallon of baby oil to get me out of the damn thing.

Thanks for the extra examples!

I know far too little to judge around Japanese culture myself, so interesting to read :)

Nah, you have a valid point. :)

Sometimes companies just don't invest to expand into the market, or they aren't there yet -- it's not always just ignorance of the culture.

But I've seen the latter a lot, and particularly with SF people, that move here because they "love Japanese culture", and then complain endlessly about how Japan isn't SF. They don't last more than a few years, typically.

FWIW, Uniqlo does indeed resize for the North American market; a large on Asia is not the same as a large in America. At least, that was the case for some of the items I've encountered.

Interesting! That's changed in the past three years, then, but I'm glad to hear it.

It's 1.5 years since I was in Tokyo and I didn't have Apple Pay at the time - but isn't NFC Visa and MasterCard payments rolled out yet?

International Apple Pay is just standard NFC, so I would be surprised if it doesn't work on the credit card terminal

Payments in Japan are complicated.

Picture an iPad Pro screen full of nothing but different payment types -- all from competing vendors! -- and that's what the payment screen looks like at my local combini.

Some places will accept a NFC payment from my credit card, but still can't do ApplePay. Or they accept a wide variety of local NFC payments -- Suica/Pasmo, all the rest -- but not from credit cards. There's also a host of payment apps -- PayPay, LINE Pay, probably three or four others.

Plus JCB cards.

And a bunch of flavors in-between.

FWIW, Suica support is already rolled out in Apple Pay, so a lot of people just use that to pay for everything.

Uber trying to compete with Japanese taxis didn't work very well, at least until I left in 2016.

And what was Uber aggressive levels of cultural ignorance?

When Uber came to Japan, they pushed heavily on their three main points:

- Uber is convenient.

- Uber is safe.

- Uber is clean.

Japanese taxis are (a) everywhere; (b) probably about the safest form of transport that doesn't have armor plating; and (c) likely cleaner than a Blue Cross operating theater.

Moreover, ride-sharing is a non-starter in Japan. People in cities... don't own cars. People outside the city... already have a car.

> Moreover, ride-sharing is a non-starter in Japan. People in cities... don't own cars. People outside the city... already have a car.

I mean, you can make this exact point about the US, but Uber wasn't a non-starter there.

You can make it even more strongly about China, where owning a car is pretty expensive, but getting a license plate that allows you to drive the car is prohibitive to nearly everybody. But ride-sharing took off there too.

"People in cities don't have cars" is the problem that Uber solves. It's not something that threatens their business, it's something their business depends on.

People in US cities do have cars. They're parked everywhere in San Francisco, the streets of New York are filled with them.

And not just wealthy people -- if you live in Oakland, Queens, whatever, you likely know somebody with a car.

Tokyoites do not own cars. I know a single person in my entire social graph that (a) lives in Tokyo, and (b) has a car. He's wealthy enough to buy a new BMW 5-Series every three years.

Licenses are difficult to obtain. Plan USD 2000 plus six months of study and testing. The driving test is difficult.

People do have licenses, but they rent a car for longer journeys, and take a taxi (or use the excellent public transit system) for anything in-town. E-bikes are becoming a big thing as well.

Not to mention, Japanese culture is closed to strangers. The idea of letting a person you do not know into your car would be like walking into your friend's house with your shoes on: it's just not done.

> People in US cities do have cars. They're parked everywhere in San Francisco, the streets of New York are filled with them.

This is equivocation. The streets of Shanghai are filled with cars. But you'd be crazy to claim that people in Shanghai have cars. Just enough of them do to fill the streets. That's almost nobody.

Similarly, USD 2000 and six months is trivial compared to what it takes to get a Shanghai license plate. (Though a driver's license costs less money and probably a similar amount of time.)

You are cherry picking your examples. Uber eats didn't really become popular until the pandemic, I'm not sure if it will even sustain that after things go back to normal because a conbini is good enough most of the times. Uber's ride share never took off in Japan. Slack/Github are tech tools, they don't have much cultural influence because it's not used by general public. Look at iMessage vs Line for example. Or instagram vs Twitter. No lime/bird in Japan, Docomo is trying with Bikeshare since 2011 but it never took off.

> Uber eats didn't really become popular until the pandemic

Maybe it the place where I live (central Tokyo) but Uber eats was always huge even before the pandemic.

> iMessage vs Line

iMessage doesn't cater to Japanese needs but I fail to see why would iMessage be an example of aggressive levels of cultural ignorance.

> instagram vs Twitter

they are both SV companies with a huge userbase in Japan.

> Docomo is trying with Bikeshare since 2011 but it never took off.

Docomo is a Japanese company. I don't know why you included it.

Central Tokyo -- Meguro, Ebisu, Roppongi -- are where all of us foreigners live.

It's like living in Manhattan, Nob Hill, or Los Gatos.

You're pretty insulated from... everybody else.

I live on the edge of Tokyo. Uber eats was here occasionally before COVID. They did not effectively exist at all in pre-pandemic Saitama, Kanagawa, Osaka, or Sapporo.

Now -- Instagram and Twitter are both companies that succeeded here.

Instagram, because Japanese people love taking pictures. I have to wait to eat dinner every day because my wife wants to take a picture of whatever it is I cooked.

Twitter is used very differently here than in the US, but I think I'm right in saying that they're the #2 tweetiest nation on Earth.

> Maybe it the place where I live (central Tokyo) but Uber eats was always huge even before the pandemic.

Maybe we have different definition of "huge". I consider things as "huge" when it's become a part of local culture, which Uber eats is far from achieving in Tokyo, let alone Japan.

> iMessage doesn't cater to Japanese needs but I fail to see why would iMessage be an example of aggressive levels of cultural ignorance.

The east prefers info dense and all-in-one super apps. iMessage is only just starting to do that will Line did it years ago. Emoji was invented in Japan, and it's natural progression - stickers, were introduced much late in iMessage.

> they are both SV companies with a huge userbase in Japan.

In almost every other country Instagram/Facebook has almost 10x the user base to that of Twitter amongst teenagers, while Japan has more twitter users than Instagram - https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00785/ Here's US for comparison - https://www.statista.com/statistics/250172/social-network-us...

> Docomo is a Japanese company. I don't know why you included it.

I'm also comparing all companies who simply ape SV ideas to replicate in local markets but fail to take in the cultural context.

iMessage couldn't get share in Japan due to situation. Docomo (largest career) starts selling iPhone in 2013 (so iPhone 5s/5c) and LINE was already de facto standard at the time. LINE also supported feature-phones (that's majority in 2013).

IMO not adopting platform-depended messaging service is good.

Square.

Japan was their first international foray. There were visions of the serene design aesthetics of Square clearing the clutter from countless Japanese shops. It was going to be the perfect society to embrace Square’s vision and form for credit card based payments.

Guess who has a banking system that’s archaic and runs on faxes? And a society that largely eschews credit and credit cards?

It was not the glorious meeting of culture and technology they had envisioned.

The pre-launch research was poor. It was a vanity expansion.

I'd suggest Google Pixel as a example. Pixel 3 was first Pixel in Japan. At launch, they did much advertises but not sold well.

#3 makes a lot of sense to me. However, it seems like that could be tricky, because the context is always changing. For example, by the time your product comes out, you could have built it in the context of Snapchat but now everyone is using TikTok.

Context shifts at different speeds for different markets.

For teens, keeping up is tough. Fashion moves fast. Nobody is in fisticuffs over Beanie Babies in 2020.

For chefs? Professional and commercial kitchens have evolved they way they have for reasons. Think there was even a front-page article on this a few months ago, actually.

> The iPod had an experience, the form-factor, the capacity, and the horizontal integration -- being able to buy music directly on iTunes -- and once you experienced it, you realized that this was just better.

Well, no. I was given an iPod, used it once, and determined it was worthless. And heavy. By contrast, I intentionally purchased a $30 Zen Stone and used it all the time, to play music in my car. The iPod's form factor, interface, and relation to iTunes are all downsides. The Zen Stone operated like any other USB drive, and you could easily operate it without looking at it.

Yeah, no wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

All those things seem like downsides to me too, and as a consequence, i've never owned an iPod.

But clearly, empirically, lots of people love them.

donw writes as if the appeal of an iPod is universal, but maybe this is just another example of their second point - MP3 player manufacturers before Apple had assumed that people want a tiny electronic gizmo that is an almost forgettable adjunct to their PCs, just a way to shovel music from hard disk to ear. Whereas it turned out there was a significant market for a player that was an artifact in its own right.

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