Selling SaaS in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Selling SaaS in Japan

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90 pointsewf42 comments

I run a successful SaaS biz in Japan. Its possible, but its waaay hard. The article is right in principle. Unless you are 110% all in on localizing and hiring lots of local staff, to the extent that you will give up priorities in other markets, its not worth trying. Otherwise its a waste of blood and treasure—a local player will eat your lunch.

A consultant like Nihonium or whatever wont be able to help you really. Like any good consultant, they will be there to tell you things you already know. The motivation to do it needs to come fundamentally from your own company.

And even after doing all that, VCs will still undervalue your company vs a similarly sized US company.

I'd love to hear more about this if you ever plan to write about it. Congrats on making it work!

I really need to make a blog hah...

Seems like you have a lot experience in that regard. I have some questions about software companies in japan, is possible to send you a DM or mail?

Sure, send me a mail! shields at tablecheck dot com

> The process is different. You just can’t treat sales and go-to-market as a whole in Japan the same as you would in North America or Europe.

As if the european market didn't consist of dozens of languages, legislations, cultures and histories.

> When should a SaaS company consider reaching out to Nihonium?

Aah, that's what the article is about

I think a big difference between Japan and many smaller markets is you are going to have local competitors in almost every sector that have some sort of buy in.

Even if you win on a feature matrix in theory (and is your feature matrix actually tailored to a local market!), the general sort of "well, local companies will be more responsive to our needs" is going to be very present.

Obviously people use Microsoft products for example but Microsoft has a _huge_ presence in Japan to support that. I have been on the receiving end of SaaS's trying to roll out their Japan sales strategy, and all the ones that got a nice and strong footing basically hired loads of local sales talent to do it.

Obviously Europe has a lot of fragmented business process things, but I think that many smaller European companies will be pretty habituated to buying services from outside the country because... well, there's no Salesforce Dot Com alternative based in Italy for example

(There are several SFDC alternatives in Japan)

Anyways the short thing is "buying services from abroad" is a perceived risk for Japanese enterprises because they will often not have to confront that issue, because the local market is "healthy"[0].

[0]: People will whine about the Japanese options being worse, but the options are at least there.

> As if the european market didn't consist of dozens of languages, legislations, cultures and histories.

Not really. They just use whatever the Americans give them. What are they gonna do anyways? Europe is a captive market. (As is the third world.)

You seem to imply that the trade is only going in one direction. A quick lookup gave me (2024 data)

€334.8 billion worth of EU imports from the US

€532.3 billion worth of EU exports to the US

which shows a) that trade is heavily bidirectional and b) that US is importing more from EU than vice versa. So that doesn't add up to support your statement at all.

There is always that one person who writes that Europe is many countries. Yea, we know. But European countries also collectively represent themselves to the world through EU. Look at how Europe talks about the Greenland issue. It’s always a collective.

I'll try to express this as a programming analogy:

You are correct that to the outside the EU market negotiates as a single entity, like, say, an interface:

  interface Market {
    interact(string payload)
  }

on the inside though you will quickly realize that the payload format is XML in one country, Json in another, a completely custom format in a third. And that's not even talking fields, names, types, semantics etc. Hope this could clarify the confusion.

I've been working in Japan as a product manager/engineer for a few years. The market is indeed quite different from other parts of the world. It's hard to build trust and get sales in Japan, but once you do, your customers tend to stick with you for a very long time (sometimes decades or even longer - not in IT of course). Simply localizing your app is far from enough. You'll need a sales team, preferably composed of Japanese people, based in Japan. And you'll need to be patient.

One thing I agree with the Japanese on is that documentation is king! One major reason I decline various software demos or testing opportunities is the lack of proper documentation or screenshots. Maybe it's because I am from SEA; I tend to hesitate to confront people or ask questions, especially during a demo.

What do you mean? Like culturally it is not in the nature or because of bias from stakeholders that are not from SEA?

It is interesting to see how the Japanese market validates the idea of sharing information instead of hiding it. I get annoyed when companies hide their features behind a contact form because I just want to do my own due diligence. Giving people the information they need to research independently seems like a much better way to sell software.

The same (want to see docs first, decide thoroughly, risk aversion, etc.) is true for Europe. We just are nearer in terms of sales, so we were greeted early with aggressive US marketing tactics, so it is ignored and wondered about why we don‘t just buy the damn thing.

The point about documentation is spot on, but there's another technical hurdle often overlooked: payment infrastructure. In Japan, B2B is still heavily dominated by bank transfers (Furikomi). If your SaaS billing stack only supports credit cards, you'll hit a wall with larger enterprise clients who expect to pay via monthly bank invoices. Localizing the billing logic is almost as important as localizing the UI.

The "download service documents here" (something like サービス資料ダウンロード) call to action part is true. But everything else sounds like a marketing fluff for the company in the article. Like yes, the process is longer, but it's mostly due to risk-aversiveness of most of the companies.

it is the "marketing fluff for the company in the article". Not sure why it got posted, just water is wet marketing text with no value.

Brilliant article and thank you for sharing.

Local payment methods seem to be a really huge thing. For instance, I'm told that in India most people want to use Google Pay, and even street vendors have QR codes at their stalls. If anyone can weigh in on that I'd love to hear about it.

Its UPI. Google Pay is just one provider among many including Amazon.

You don't even need a middleman. Your regular bank app also directly supports UPI payments.

Those QR codes are for a payment method called UPI that is managed by a conglomerate of banks (NPCI), with the blessings of the Reserve bank. Google Pay, PhonePe etc are apps that are interoperable and allow P2P or P2B payments by scanning a code. The payments are instantaneous and free; at least for P2P scenarios. Anyone with a bank account can sign up for any of the UPI apps and generate a QR code using which they can accept payments from anyone and this drastically reduces the effort it takes to join the digital payments economy.

Working in that area in Japan. I think I can provide some answers.

Payment: CC are mostly used for BtoC but if you are a BtoB SaaS you want invoice and a local presence (ie no tax or currency shenanigans for your customer).

Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers. Instead: Contact form, Cold call, go out to events, lots of drinking.

Regarding language: Many people do not speak English. I think that surprises some, but Japan is big and you can live forever happily only speaking Japanese. So if you don't support Japanese it's a complete no go.

> Many people do not speak English

More like noone speaks English, plainly put

In other words, don't bother from outside of Japan unless the SaaS has been fully translated into Japanese? That's what I'm getting from this response. Is that true?

Translation alone is simply not enough. You'll need local presence, Japanese sales people, and patience (a lot of them).

Thank you. I'm already on it.

> Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers.

Brutal! Is that true even for Japanese companies with a traditional sales force?

Your sales team can totally utilize a free plan, while communicating with the customer. But a free sign up from the website, without sales person contact, is something we only had negative experience with, so stopped doing it. (Talking about B2B, B2C might be different)

Someone actually downvoted this comment, and I would honestly like to know why. Did I say something offensive?

Indian here. UPI (QR code for payment) is huge. UPI adoption is extremely high.

In no-trust society like India, where fake note, torn notes, fake coins can strike anyone. UPI is blessing to most.

I'm still pre-launch, but I've attended (and presented at) a couple conferences / industry events for my SaaS in Japan. You can get a lot of traction by getting out there and actually talking to people. Networking is important (probably this is the same anywhere?) and talking to other presenters is as important as talking to potential customers, because you can get that relationship going for mutual benefit.

Word of advice: don’t do SaaS anymore. It’s over.

Stripe's billions of dollars per year would suggest otherwise.

https://stripe.com/sessions/2025/scaling-vertical-saas

Stripe sells shovels though.

Not their revenue. The revenue of their saas clients. Read the article.

What would gurus advise to do?

People will move to selfhosted for a while, find out it's more expensive to maintain, switch to SaaS and then a couple years later will switch back to selfhosted. It's an endless cycle

Nah you don’t get it.

Great insights on selling SaaS in Japan! I found the emphasis on documentation being "king" particularly valuable, especially how it helps those who hesitate to ask questions during live demos. It’s a good reminder that GTM strategies must be tailored to specific cultural and regional nuances.

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