What You Don’t Know about Japan’s Sharing Economy – Anytimes

Fewer than 1% of Japanese consumers have ever purchased a product or service from a sharing economy platform.

It's actually quite puzzling. Social and economic factors all seem to indicate that Japanese cities would be ideal for sharing economy businesses, but for a number of reasons sharing economy startups have not really taken off here.

Today we unravel a bit of this mystery as we sit down with Chika Tsunada, founder of Anytimes and the Director of the Sharing Economy Association Japan.

Anytimes is a P2P sharing economy startup with a unique and participatory business model. Chika explains why she chose that model and the challenges it presents. Even under ideal circumstances, building a P2P marketplace is hard. It's one of the most challenging business models to execute, and to succeed today requires doing something truly unique.

Chika has chosen an unusual path both for herself and for her business. It's a great discussion, and I think you'll enjoy it.

Show Notes

The best strategy for building a two-sided marketplace Why even Japanese entrepreneurs discourage their children from joining startups How to start a web-startup when you are not a programmer or designer Is it better to go deep or go wide in creating a marketplace? One technique for fighting online review fraud Why the Japanese labor market is unique in regards to the sharing economy Why freelancing has not yet taken off in rural areas The spark that will ignite the sharing economy in Japan How licensing and administrative guidence stifles innovation in Japan

Links from the Founder

Friend Chika on Facebook Follow her on Twitter @chikageena Check out the Anytimes homepage

Anytimes for Andriod Anytimes for IOS

[shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

You know, when I run startup workshops and classes on entrepreneurship, by far, the most popular business model used by the students for their startup ideas are two-sided marketplaces. Everybody wants to be a marketplace. Why not? There’s a lot to love about being a marketplace if you can pull it off.

Aspiring founders imagine themselves running a platform that matches up buyers and sellers and takes a small piece of each transaction. They imagine dozens of other ways to monetize both the relationships they have with the participants and the data and the insights they gather about the market itself, and they all scale up easily and can be run with a relatively small staff.

Really, online marketplaces seem like the ideal business model, and on paper they are. The reality, however, is that marketplace businesses are hard. I mean, really hard. Sure, once you have millions of users, marketplaces can be insanely profitable. The problem is getting that first 1,000 or maybe 10,000 active users. That’s hard.

To do that, you need to be doing something unique. Well, today, we sit down with Chika Tsunoda, the CEO of Anytimes and the director of the Sharing Economy Association of Japan, and she explains how she’s been building a P2P services marketplace with a unique Japanese twist. It’ been a bit of a crazy journey for Chika so far but she thinks that Anytimes is positioned to take advantage of a unique aspect of the Japanese labor market. But you know, Chika 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 am sitting here with Chika Tsunoda, the director of the Sharing Economy Association in Japan and the fearless founder of Anytimes. Thanks for sitting down with me.

Chika: Thank you for coming and thank you for interviews.

Tim: Anytimes is a skill-sharing and a skill-matching platform but I think you can probably describe it much better than I can.

Chika: Anytimes is a skill-sharing platform to connect people who need help and those who want to work in the neighborhood such as everyday household chores, pet care, assembling furniture, language lessons, and so on.

Tim: Tell me a bit about your customers. Who uses it? What are the most popular services people are sharing?

Chika: Yes. Most popular customer is housewives, and university student, and seniors.

Tim: What kind of skills? What are people doing? Are they putting together furniture for people? Are they cleaning homes? What are the services that are being offered?

Chika: Most popular category is house cleaning, and next cooking, and next assembling furniture. But we also have other categories. For example, pet care, English lessons, Chinese lessons, guitar lesson.

Tim: How much does something like that cost?

Chika: The price average is one hour ¥2,000.

Tim: Okay.

Chika: So, not high cost.

Tim: Right, right. The platform takes 15% commission?

Chika: Yes. Yes, 15% commission is our sales revenue.

Tim: Okay. How many active users do you have now?

Chika: Active users is our secret. I cannot say that. I’m sorry.

Tim: Okay.

Chika: But our user is 30,000 users.

Tim: How many people do you have that are offering skills?

Chika: Yes. 30,000 users because if you register Anytimes, you can be client and supporters, both of them.

Tim: But like for example, right now, today, on the website, how many different offerings are there?

Chika: There are also clients and supporters. Sometimes, they will be clients but sometimes, they want money, they will be supporters.

Tim: I see. So the idea is really that everyone on the platform should be both buying and selling something on the platform?

Chika: Yes, that’s right. Thank you.

Tim: All right. Do most people do that? Are most people buying sometimes and selling sometimes?

Chika: Yes. This rate is really important so next, our KPI is this late.

Tim: That’s an interesting design for a marketplace. Most marketplaces have many, many more buyers and only a few sellers. Has it been difficult to get everyone to get everyone to be a seller?

Chika: Yes. Our first KPI was seller KPI. First, we need seller. Especially in Japanese labor market, there is few labors. So, this is Germany’s big social program. So if we get sellers, this is very important thing.

Tim: I would imagine most of your users are not professionals, they’re just using it to earn a little bit of extra income. Is that right?

Chika: We also have professional and only hobby. But the people, they use as hobby but the hobby will be work and monetized.

Tim: Is it more men or more women? Is it more based in cities or in rural areas?

Chika: Men-female is 50-50 percent, so same. And then, areais 70 percent user living in Tokyo.

Tim: I guess that makes sense. You need a certain density of people before you can do this.

Chika: Yes. This is very important. Yes.

Tim: Right. Okay. Actually, before we dive into more detail about Anytimes, I want to back up a bit and talk about you. You graduated from Keio Law School. You worked at Nomura for a while and CyberAgent. These are big stable companies. What made you want to go out and start a startup?

Chika: Yes. This is a long story. When I was little, I wanted to work about 82 developing countries. I wanted to work in United Nations, like UNESCO, UNDB but after graduate university, I thought I should have experience. I wanted to learn business and finance. I thought there is many social programs in Japan.

Tim: But on a personal level, why did you decide instead of there’s a lot of things you could have done, you could have gone to work for an NPO like you were planning, you could have joined a division of a company that’s focused on those problems. Why start a startup?

Chika: In Japan, there is many social programs. I thought I should serve these programs in Japan. That’s why I decided to found this company, Anytimes.

Tim: Okay. But it’s a big change. What did your family think of the change?

Chika: Actually, my parents didn’t like founding a company because my father was also an entrepreneur and my mom was a programmer.

Tim: Okay. So seems like they would be more excited and supportive of you starting your own company.

Chika: No. Because my father knew about how it’s hard to --

Tim: He knew how much work it really is. It’s true.

Chika: Yes. And because he was also an entrepreneur. First, he said he that he worried about me, and my mum too. But if I decide one thing, they know I don’t accept other opinions. ;

Tim: You’re stubborn.

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Chika: Yes.

Tim: That’s actually very useful, for a startup founder to be stubborn. What do they think of it now? Have they come around and they think it’s a good idea now or do they still worry about you?

Chika: I think a little worried but they always support me and always care about my health.

Tim: That’s good. When you were starting to put the company together, you’re not a programmer or a designer yourself.

Chika: No

Tim: How did you build the team? How did you pull the team together?

Chika: Yes. The first year, I did only me and crowdsourcing services. But after one year, I started to hire people. The first employee is my sister-in-law, my brother’s wife. And then, my other friends, my friends’ friends.

Tim: So just your personal network?

Chika: Yes, yes, yes.

Tim: How did that work? Because I know a lot of people who are not programmers or designers but have an idea and they want to start a startup, it seems in theory very simple to go unto lancers or freelancer.com and say, “I want this done and this done.”

Chika: This was very difficult because I didn’t have experience of direction.