The Fastest Way to Start a Startup in Japan – Mobingi

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has been a difficult startup business model in the US, but Wayland Zheng, founder and CEO of Mobingi, has found a way to make it work in Japan. His approach involves a combination of leveraging both a unique feature set and some unique aspects of Japanese technical buyers.

Wayland also shares his story of what is probably a record for the fastest time to startup launch for any foreigner in Japan. Within two months of landing in Tokyo, and unable to speak the language, he had settled on a startup idea, found a Japanese co-founder, and been accepted into one of the most competitive startup accelerators in Japan.

Three years later, Mobingi has an impressive and growing list of clients and investors.

We talk about how he made all this happen, the importance of accelerators, and how you need to tailor your startup not just to a rational business model, but to the business culture of the market.

It’s a great discussion and I think you will really enjoy it.

Show Notes

How Mobingi saves it's customers 80% on AWS services Why DevOps disciple has been slow to develop at Japanese companies The important difference between security and compliance Why cloud sales in Japan requires face-to-face meetings How to start a company after only two months in Japan The important differences between Japnese and American startup accelerators Why China is a better expansion market than the US What is the future of PaaS and middleware Why simple honesty is sometimes surprising among founders

Links from the Founder

The Mobingi Homepage

Mobingi Facebook page The Mobingi Blog Mobingi on Instagram

Friend Wayland on Facebook Check out his blog Join a Mobingi Meetup

[shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 93.

Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

You know, I get asked a lot about the difficulty of starting a company in Japan as a foreigner. I always have trouble answering that question because although I’ve started a number of companies in Japan as a foreigner, I have nothing to compare it to. I mean, I’ve never started a company in Japan as a Japanese person so I only have my own experiences to base a judgment on. Well, I’ve got good news. All foreigners who are griping about how hard it is to start a company in Japan can now officially stop complaining. I’ve got a pretty amazing guest and a pretty amazing story to tell today.

I’ve got a pretty amazing guest and a pretty amazing story to tell today.

Wayland Zheng started Mobingi only two months after arriving in Japan and he’s made a success of it. He attracted a co-founder, joined an accelerator, on-boarded customers, and raised funds all without speaking Japanese. Of course it wasn’t exactly easy. As you’ll see during the interview, it’s not even fair to say that he made it look easy. It was hard. But Wayland explains how he managed to overcome the language barrier and well, several other barriers as well.

We’ll also dive pretty deep into startup accelerators, how they differ between Japan and the U.S. and what founders should reasonably expect out of them, because Wayland’s been to a few and sometimes, they did not work out as planned. But you know, Wayland tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview.

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[Interview]

Tim: I’m sitting here with Wayland Zheng of Mobingi. Mobingi is a platform as a service company but I know it’s so much more than that. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about what Mobingi is?

Wayland: Okay. First, thanks for visiting my company. Mobingi is a software as a service. It’s a solution for helping companies to manage their application on the cloud. So basically, what it does is it helps engineers to automate their cloud applications workflow when they’re trying to deploy some applications to clouds or with like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud then instead of maybe we configure the resources, they can log into the console and just use their mouse and click and make the deployment automatically happens.

Tim: Okay. Both Amazon and Microsoft already have tools that they say manage the application life cycle and can help automate these processes. What does Mobingi do that’s different?

Wayland: Yes. A very good question. They’re trying to make the cloud computing more easier, like provide console is very cool. Cloud computing itself is very complicated. We have to face what is virtual machines -- how to configure storage, security groups. Those technologies require deep knowledge to manage. Like take an example of AWS, it has a lot of service, more than 30 services. If you really want to try to use AWS dashboard to automate everything, it’s almost nearly impossible. You have to configure a lot of stuff by yourself, by arranging your team. Mobingi is trying to solve the problem from a -- we see a high level solution that’s more easier for less-experienced programmers.

Tim: So the users can use the Mobingi platform to do the basic life cycle management and then if they have to do something really complicated, they can dive into AWS or Azure?

Wayland: Yes. Right. For some customers, they want to use AWS but AWS has a learning curve. They can use Mobingi. They just provide their Wordpress blog or website code and directly deploy their application on AWS. They don’t even touch the servers.

Tim: Okay. Before we started today, we were talking a bit about how you came up with the name for Mobingi.

Wayland: Oh, yes. Yes, the name actually has no meaning. It was made by my previous friend. He said “Mobi” is for mobility, “ingi” is some maybe Italian word or European word. So combined together is a general development tool or something.

Tim: So you were just looking for a domain name that was available?

Wayland: Yes. And it sounds like cool in Japanese, Mobingi. By the way, we do have a meaning after we made the name. MOBINGI short for Machine Obsessed Because Infrastructure Never Gets Intelligent, which means we wanted to try to make it intelligent.

Tim: Excellent.

Wayland: Thanks.

Tim: Tell me a bit about your customers. What’s the core selling point of Mobingi? Is it just that ease of use, how quickly customers can use cloud services? What is it?

Wayland: Firs of all, our current target is in Japan only. Most of our customers, they found by using Mobingi can help them to save the time and some human resource cost and also another advantage is we help them to save cost, not human resource cost, meaning server cost. For example, many of our customers, they deploy their applications to AWS. They’re spending more than hyaku man (百万). Hyaku man is $10,000 per month, which is a lot for a startup. AWS, they have on-demand instance, means normal instance. They also have like reserve instance and spot instance. Spot instance usually 70%-80% cheaper than on-demand instance. But these instances are like a bid model marketplace. If some other people bid this, either this can shut down anytime, so not very popular.

Tim: So by using this platform, it automatically bids and can reduce the cost by about 20%?

Wayland: By 70%-80%.

Tim: 70%-80%?

Wayland: Yes. But the system, not only bidding for them, we also help them to ship application to the instance. If instance being shut down by AWS, we are able to re-deploy this application to a new instance before starting up.

Tim: Okay. And that alone would probably more than pay for the cost of Mobingi, right?

Wayland: Yes, exactly. We are charging 15% out of the savings.

Tim: That’s a really interesting pricing model. You charge based on the savings not the installed base or --

Wayland: No, not base. It’s the savings. A hard point about this, because we are shipping applications to Docker Containers at the moment, that’s why it’s super-fast. We can re-deploy the application to a new instance before starting up, probably within two minutes. But since Docker Containers is not very popular in Japan yet, there’s a huge selling hurdle to customers which we require them to use Docker. We have to provide them some support even consulting to help them to ship to container, container writes their application.

Tim: Okay. The core selling point, not to be too cynical about it, but it seems to me that the core selling point is not so much ease of use or the transparency or the multi-cloud. It’s simply that at the end of the day, Mobingi saves the clients a lot of money on their hosting.

Wayland: Yes. Actually, it sounds like that but we did a lot of work on simplify the cloud deployment. We do help a lot like easy deploy. This is one selling point. The huge benefit, probably, yes, as you said is cloud savings.

Tim: Do you have a lot of customers who are not using that particular feature?

Wayland: Yes, we do have because they cannot ship their application to a container yet.

Tim: Are most of your customers enterprise, small medium businesses, startups, who’s your typical user?

Wayland: We are a pure B2B business. Most users are startups who raised the money already and some medium-sized enterprise. Fujitsu is one of our largest customer so far. Majority of the customers are like with a team about 50 people deploy application to the cloud like spending more than $10,000 per month.

Tim: Yes. That makes sense. If you’re just running two instances, you’re going to worry about saving a few dollars a month.

Wayland: Right.

Tim: Excellent. Let’s talk a bit about the whole culture of DevOps and container technology in Japan. From four-five years ago, this has just really taken over the way software is deployed in the U.S.