The JME (Japan Market Entry) support service newly launched by Sebastian, which was taken up in the previous blog post “Efforts with Ingenuity-2”, has finally come into shape. Sebastian is responsible for the discovery of brands and advertising agencies that are likely to be interested in entering the Japanese market, service guidance, and general communication. Kenta makes use of his expertise to list such leads and provide support for creating documents. The first client was an EC site company selling Swedish bags and accessories called The Friendly Swede. (Https://thefriendlyswede.com/) I want them to feel the joy of achieving 0 → 1 first!

At my previous workplace—Rakuten Marketing, I had created several new services with managing dozens of members and profit/loss. As a result, I could create a new incremental revenue worth over 10 billion yen from scratch within two years. On the other hand, new added value at SOPHOLA has been created while continuing to develop new services and new markets in over a year. However, sales are not far from the amount created in the previous job. However, we are certainly solving digital marketing issues that could not be solved so far in Japan and other markets. Additionally, we are now able to help some  EC sites that could not enter even in the face of various issues even if they wanted to enter Japan. Through these, I feel that “new added value creation” has been made in my short career.

SOPHOLA is a company that started from scratch in Nagano City, where environmental conditions such as customer development, recruitment, and economic infrastructure are severe. However, supported by encouraging colleagues, partners, and clients, all but one quarter is achieving sales/profit targets and growing with great service line-ups and speed that far surpasses the original picture in my business plan. It’s a little early, but 2020 will be an important year to start a shift change into the B2B EC business, so we will continue to strengthen this baseline with an unwavering challenge.

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc