Kaizen lets you crowdsource growth-hack solutions (#StartupAsia Arena)

Yugo Takino, chief product officer at Kaizen

At Startup Asia Tokyo’s Arena Battle, Kaizen Platform, took the stage to display a product that has been gaining rave reviews in the Tokyo tech scene. Kaizen promises it can remove a giant headache for new entrepreneurs and seasoned CEOs – underperforming webpages. Launched in March 2013, Kaizen Platform’s main product is planBCD. Users can login and challenge a community of growth hackers to devise the perfect A/B test for improving underperforming conversion rates on web pages.

As Tech in Asia showed in our earlier profile of the team, users are able to sample various A/B tests at the same time and then see which one is most effective. This desire to do as much as possible as quickly as possible comes from the founders, Kenji Sudo (CEO) and Toshimasa Ishibashi (CTO). The two were growth-hackers for Recruit and realized that their processes were antiquated, too slow and limiting to keep up with advanced pace of the internet.

So far they have found a lot of people who agree with them. Orders keep coming in and the company just closed a nice US$5 million fund at the end of March. The new money is earmarked for new hires and international expansion throughout Asia and the United States.

Looking to the future, Sudo and Ishibashi want to apply A/B test and growth hacking concepts to a host of other media. From websites, they believe it is possible to jump into email, online ads, apps, and videos.

Judge’s comments

Taka Hasunuma, Vice President at Recruit Strategic Partners asked if the company keeps users long-term or if the clients learn the conversion methods and then cancel the service. Yugo Takino, chief product officer, answered that the room for improvement does fall over time but, to keep services as optimized as possible, clients tend to keep using planBCD.

Yasuhiko Yurimoto, founder and CEO of Global Brain, expressed some doubt about the reliability of crowdsourcing solutions. Takino countered, saying that Kaizen members of Kaizen’s crowdsourcing team are judged by conversion and are paid by the degree of improvement. Yurimoto followed up, asking why Kaizen is so eager to expand overseas as quickly as possible. To that, Yukino said they think that, while A/B testing is prevalent, the market for services like Kaizen is relatively empty.

Shinji Asada, Director at Itochu Technology Ventures, was curious about the revenue breakdown between mobile and computer. Yukino noted that it can vary depending on the industry. For instance, advertising companies tend to want PC browser websites optimized but B2C services trying to increase their registration rates are more committed to mobile. Overall, however, the revenue split is about 50-50.

David Milstein, Head of Japan for Fidelity Growth Partners, declined to ask questions as he is a current investor in Kaizen.

See: Introduction to growth hacking for startups