SOPHOLA managed to come without bankruptcy for the last 1 year and 8 months.
In retrospect, one of the important growth drivers of this company is the creation of business plans, KPI management at the organization / individual level, “the current situation, issues, countermeasures” cycle, and execution, as I had learned in my entire career. This has been working pretty well so far.

The first thing that we focused on in 2018 was “to make one service that will be the foundation of future sales”. However, because it is not in an environment where hiring is relatively easy, it was necessary to provide a service that “can make sales consistently with as little resource as possible”. Fortunately, with the strong support of Adflex and AdScale, we were able to achieve this through the exclusive handling of AdScale AI services as “AdScale APAC”.

The theme for 2019 was to launch another service that “makes sales consistently with as little resource as possible”. The reason is that the AdScale AI service is in the auto-optimization area of ​​ “performance ads (ads that can be used to change and optimize ad operations by looking at ad data each time)” and the competition is extremely fierce.  For that reason, we considered bringing in services from overseas markets that have relatively few competitors in different areas. It is an automatic LP generation service that supports both SEO / SEM with a very unique function called “Longtail UX”. In Japan, there is currently only a “blog watcher” competing with this service, and the difference can be explained clearly, so it has a high competitive advantage.

However, as of December 2019, one of the major issues for the company is that this new service has not yet been launched. I would like to improve the service as much as possible so that the two companies that cooperated with the trial can feel that it was good to use it! In addition, thanks to Sebastian who joined in August this year, with Kenta, the fourth service “JME (Japan Market Entry)” was launched, and it was a big outcome that will play a crucial role for 2020.

1st service: AdScale related services
2nd service: Marketing consulting service
3rd service: Longtail UX service
4th service: JME service
“The theme of 2020 is to strengthen these four pillars”.
As usual, I would like to make a business plan by creating a business plan, managing KPI management at the organization / individual level, the current situation / issues / measures circle and implementation work well.

This is the last blog in 2019. Dear stakeholders, thank you so much for 2019!
We hope that you will have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. See you guys next year.

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc