It has been over three years since we signed an exclusive contract with m19, a company based in Paris, France, that provides the Amazon auto-optimization solution m19. Despite the presence of a dominant competing solution in Japan, we took on the challenge of investing resources into m19—a tool with a strong track record in performance improvements powered by its unique machine learning algorithm. With the cooperation of m19, we recently reviewed the past three years, finding that cumulative ad spend saw year-over-year growth of 407% in 2023 and 285% in 2024. The total number of accounts has also grown, reaching close to 200 this fiscal year.

When I asked myself, ‘What’s behind this growth?’ the slogan of my favorite Japanese outdoor brand, Montbell—’Function is Beauty’—came to mind. Just as Montbell emphasizes functional beauty, m19 stands out for its impressive performance improvement capabilities and the valuable data insights it offers to users. But like Montbell, I believe another essential success factor is its robust support.

When you visit a Montbell store, the staff patiently guides you through various options in hiking gear and shoes, providing fitting support multiple times, and even after purchase, they handle repairs and questions with friendly, attentive service. For people unfamiliar with outdoor gear, few brands offer such a reassuring shopping experience.

Similarly, with m19’s English-based dashboard, it’s crucial to alleviate the worries of trial users and customers—those concerns of, ‘Can I really master this tool? Will I end up just paying for it without seeing meaningful performance improvements or time savings?’ By focusing thoroughly on customer support, led by our business manager Kaori, we’ve helped users make the most of m19’s features, achieving performance gains and operational efficiencies that have led to positive word of mouth. This has been a major driver of growth. Additionally, m19’s support team responds to inquiries within one business day, ensuring timely solutions to various issues and questions—another key factor in our success.

Moving forward, we’ll continue to focus on these two crucial success factors as we work to expand the user base of m19 and our other products!

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc