I have been busy with the start of my MBA program and moving since the latter half of last month. It has been a long time, but I thought I would write about what I felt when I exhibited at the Solution Market event held in Fukuoka early last month.

The theme of the 3rd Solution Market was DX & Solutions, and there were nearly 50 exhibitors from various cities as well as Kyushu, and a very large number of visitors (probably several hundred people) from all over Kyushu. The organizer of this event, Mr. Uchida of Solution Market, has a concept: “We want to promote the exhibiting companies in a neat way to impress the visitors and make it easier to share within the company when they return to their offices.” As part of this, each exhibiting company was given the opportunity to go up on stage for about 5 minutes to widely promote their products to the visitors. No other marketing event does this, so I thought it was a very nice initiative. (Our part can be viewed here.)

When I went on stage to promote our products and spoke at the seminar, I felt that out of the 50 companies, not a single one of them has a business similar to ours to begin with. We have been providing consulting services using cutting-edge overseas digital marketing technologies for nearly 7 years now, and I felt that we are truly lucky to have been able to create such cutting-edge services. Almost all the visitors who stopped by our booth said, “That’s a very interesting business model,” or “I didn’t know there is any company which does this kind of business.” We are very fortunate to be in this situation, because many companies are engaged in sales and business negotiations in a situation where it is difficult to differentiate their services.

We are working every day to make more people aware of our solutions through sales, but we will do our best without forgetting the results of sharpening our services (a situation for which we are grateful). And in the process of this sharpening, I have recently made a critical business decision, which I hope to announce soon!

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc