Everything I’ve learned about selling SaaS in Japan

As someone who grew up with the same ethos, I can completely relate to this. I also relate to the frustration in trying to explain your mindset.

I've always loved the two diametrically opposite sayings that Japan/The west grew up with:

Japan: "The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down." West: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease."

A very telling set of proverbs..!

As an American who did door-to-door sales for a little bit after college, I will say that this works in America too. The term used in sales circles is Jonesing, which comes from this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses

It's a common strategy employed by salesman to try and convince people to buy into the idea of a new product (or switching products) without doing actual research. Though, I will say it is odd to open with this in the pitch since you don't know how much the potential client knows about your product or competition.

The general term for this sort of thing is "social proof", and you see some amount of it in all cultures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

It's actually a pretty good heuristic most of the time -- hence its ubiquity -- but obviously it has a bunch of pathological corner cases, and it's open to exploitation by salesmen, politicians, cult leaders, and anybody else who does mind control for a living.

It goes both way. When a critical mass is using a product, even if it my not be optimal, at least you know it is somewhat useable and has a high probability of staying around. In the tech world it would be the equivalent of "never be the biggest user of a technology"

It's a great point, and was actually a pretty intuitive connection in my experience. I started in Sales at Yelp, and when I launched my startup, I recognized that the interviewing and customer development process I was putting potential users through was pretty much exactly the same as the early stages of the Yelp sales pipeline.

The 50 customer development interviews turned into warm leads already halfway down our sales pipeline by the time we were ready to ship.

In the beginning, we definitely seeded our growth with my iPad. I still do it these days because it's fun and because the app works great on an iPad, but fortunately we've got several other customer acquisition channels right now that don't involve just me and an iPad :)

As AVTizzle says below as well, it's a fantastic way to learn more about your customers and the problems they're facing.

Hi there, thanks for your question.

Actually, I've been living in Japan for 11 years. I started my first business in 2003, and I had all sorts of problems with invoicing. I built some custom software to scratch my own itch. People started asking me about it more and more, and eventually I partnered up with Paul Oswald, my technical co-founder to try to bring a multi-tenanted solution to the Japanese market.

So, it was very much an evolution. I didn't wake up one day in Australia and decide to build this in Japan. I think it'd be tremendously difficult to build a solution like this without having a lot of direct exposure to the problems and pain points that people sending quotes/invoices in Japan actually go through.

Hey Matt,

Sorry, just realised that's not completely clear. We communicate 100% in Japanese with all our customers.

Those two are examples to make it easier for the English-only speaking reader to understand.

Developing your application completely in English might be very suitable for an English Language teaching tool. But not so suitable for a business critical tool.

We've had varying degrees of success with different ways to sell, but the one clear way to achieve success in Japan as you mention is social proof.

Basically the idea is to look for any way possible to display and feature users who are using your system to other potential users and customers. I've detailed a list of a few ways to do that for our kind of application. You're welcome to use those, or come up with an approach that's more suitable for your product.

Best of luck though - let me know how you go.

Generally speaking, many English learners aren't able or willing to communicate in English, and that's especially true in Japan (I suppose you are not in Japan?).

Note that most English-learning products in Japan are marketed using Japanese, and more often than not the content itself (navigation, explanations, commentary, etc) is heavily in Japanese. For instance, this is Yahoo Japan's site for English learners:

http://stepup.yahoo.co.jp/english/

This isn't unusual. Look at the language section at a typical bookstore and you'll see lots of books for learning English... written in 90% Japanese.

I'm not in any way a specialist in that field but if you throw me an email I'd be happy to provide you feedback on your product.

Wmboy, thats actually an old version of the article. Is it possible to remove that link?

Right - that's a really good idea. We've been getting approached by people running these kinds of seminars who are interested to promote us, which is nice.

Doing our own seminars (online and offline) is big on our radar as well though.

This is very common in Japan. Why argue. :)

It's also very common to put the amount of capital that your company has on the about page. When looking for vendors, a lot of companies will judge your strength by the amount of capital you have listed there, which is why many companies have stopped putting that number there. ;)

Jason, WP can be a right pain in the ass, can't it?

While I have your ear, I have a question about your comments regarding getting feedback:

You mention that you ask for feedback in your welcome mail as well as on Twitter and FB, which are both in English. Do you find that a large number of your users are open to the idea of using the English versions of your FB & Twitter accounts? If so, do you find that this is a product of being in the Tokyo area?

I used to sell security software and many of our competitors were using solutions developed abroad that in many cases were not translated, or translated poorly. In our experience even when the competition was leagues better than our solution, we won out contracts because of full-Japanese support, and the image of quality that comes from that. This may be a result of being in the Nagoya area, but I was curious about your experiences with "Japanese Only!" customers / clients.

Also, cheers on a great product, and that amazing hockey-stick of growth.

Apple is kind of a special case for a few reasons. There are definitely parallels though.

Apple shot to popularity in America first before Japan, leading the way for Japanese consumers.

Insanely great customer service is definitely a big part of Apple's way of doing business, considering the genius bar strategy.

They also have a large team on the ground here. Steve Jobs identified Japan as a huge opportunity, and flew here to hire the Japan CEO himself years and years ago.

We weren't actually planning to publish this on HN until later - we were fine-tuning our cache in Wordpress, when it shot to #1 on HN. Doh! Good advertisement to use a service like WP Engine.

Of course, all our users are still using the main application site with no problems.

Cheers - thanks for the well wishing! :)

Because we view ourselves as more of a business automation service, as opposed to a pure invoicing and quoting service.

The idea is that with a good online system, you can get rid of a lot of the crappy work, and make leaps in your business.

Perhaps it's a remote culture thing. I feel mostly the same about european web sites filled with cruft, buggy transaction handling and sending me back my password in plain text. It just sticks out when it's from a different environment than the one we are confortable with.

About the iphone in Japan...there's been a lot of myths and misinformation, but from my POV the iPhone was the shiny modern and bugged to death "smart" phone, and it was to be used in combination with the "dumb" phone handling all the serious business (making calls, handling NFC transactions, hosting the official bank apps, GPS navigation etc.). For a lot of people, crashing when recieving phone calls was a non starter if it were to be used as the sole phone device.

> Do they favor it? Or do they just put up with it?

They put up with it, for a couple of reasons. First is the absolute domination of the internet by mobile phones running proprietary "versions" of the web, and second is the language barrier - the newest ideas and techniques from the west simply don't get translated, or get translated poorly.

I've recently taken a job running UI/UX for a Japanese software company, and let me tell you - it's an uphill battle.

Just to add to this, one thing you can learn from the iPhone's success in Japan is "don't let Japanese exceptionalism blind you to good and innovative solutions that people will pay you a lot of money for". The Japanese love to tell you how unique they are and how different everything is here. It isn't hard to get the typical Japanese salaryman halfway up his own ass in Nihonjinron bullshit after a few beers. In that, they are like nearly every other people on Earth, but for some reason they seem the most convincing. It's probably being on an island and having a tough language, and some other stuff.

Anyway, a "keen student" of Japan would likely have told you the iPhone would fail here (no 1seg? Ha!), and that an invoicing service for Japanese companies, built by foreigners, was an outrageously stupid idea. But the Japanese market is no more impenetrable than the American market, or the British market, or the Indian market, nor any more difficult to learn and understand (though you still have to do that, of course).