You need to Ignore the Worst Advice being given to Female Founders

Everything about employment in Japan is changing.

Lifetime employment is gone. Skilled workers are discovering that they have job mobility and large Japanese companies are increasingly confused by the fact that many new graduates don't want to work for them.

Wantedly has been one of the companies that has changed the way corporate recruiting works in Japan, and today we sit down and talk with the founder and CEO Akiko Naka.

We first talked with Akiko a few years ago when Wantedly was starting to gain traction, but since then Wantedly has grown, IPOed and become of the most highly valued public companies in Japan.

We talk about her journey, of course, but we also dive into how the nature of work is changing in Japan, the best way to promote yourself and your company in Japan, and the one terrible piece of advice that women founders need to stop listening to.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

Show Notes

Why Japanese companies can’t hire creative employees How to deal with startup copycats The advantages and dangers of diversification The secret to making change happen in Japan How to brag about yourself in Japan The best advice for companies wanting to expand outside Japan Unconventional advice for women entrepreneurs Why Japanese millennials really are different

Links from the Founder

Everything you wanted to know about Wantedly Checkout Akiko's blog Friend her on Facebook Follow Akiko on Twitter @acanocic

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.

Today, we’re going to sit down with an old friend. Well, I mean, actually, she still a very young friend, but we’ve known her for years, so she’s – anyway, she’s Akiko: Today, we will be sitting down and catching up with Akiko Naka, CEO and founder of Wantedly.

Of course, we will talk about Wantedly’s amazing growth and the IPO that has happened since the last time Akiko came on the show, but there is a much more important story here, and before we get to that, I should let you know at other than a brief overview of Wantedly’s business model, this show is all new content and conversations.

If you want to understand the crazy ideas and questionable positions that led to Akiko creating Wantedly, and believe me, that’s a story you want to hear, I urge you to listen to the original episode at disruptingJapan.com/show008. I’ll have a link up at the site as well.

But today, ah, today, we will be talking about the best way to sell genuinely new product to large Japanese companies, some practical advice for anyone trying to take their company into overseas markets, including into Japan, and why the most common advice given to aspiring female founders is actually terrible, terrible advice, but you know, Akiko tells that story much better than I, so let’s get right to the interview. Interview Tim: So, I’m sitting here with Akiko Naka, the fearless founder of Wantedly, so thanks for sitting down with me again.

Akiko Naka: Thank you so much for coming.

Tim: You know, it’s really great to have you back on again. So much has changed since we sat down over three years ago.

Akiko: Yeah, I can’t believe it has been three years already.

Tim: Well, listen, we have a lot to catch up on, but for my listeners who did not follow my advice during the intro and go back and listen to our old interview, why don’t you explain what Wantedly does.

Akiko: Wantedly is a platform where we match users and companies based on vision and values, not only salary and benefits. When we compare our platform with traditional media, traditional job matching platform, traditional ones values more salary and benefits, but our platform focus on why the company do what they do, so more value and culture of each company. So, that way, we believe users and company can meet people casually, and that way, they can get to know each other better, and then eventually, those people can have a long-lasting relationship.

Tim: That’s a really radical concept in Japanese HR.

Akiko: Yeah, thank you for saying that.

Tim: The whole industry, the whole process is built around very rigid job descriptions and salary scales, and even the resume format is pre-decided.

Akiko: Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m really glad you said that we are very drastic because every time I explain our platform to foreign writers or reporters, their reaction is like, that’s only applicable to Japanese markets because Japan is very unique, but actually, the Japanese market is very conservative, like you said now. So, yeah.

Tim: Well, does there continue to be like, pushback from HR people or from the big companies or saying like, we don’t want to do it this way, or…?

Akiko: In early days, I would say nine out of 10 pitches we did to HR people was turned down, and most of pushback we had was HR people would say, “Akiko, you don’t understand anything about our job. We are so busy. We have to go through so many resumes a day and we have to do so many interviews. We don’t have time to sit down and have a chat with people just checking in and dropping by the office.”

Tim: It doesn’t surprise me that 90% of the prospective customers said no, but the 10% who said yes, we want to try this, why did they say yes?

Akiko: Well, I think the only reason is they trusted me, so yeah. So, early users, CEO or people in charge of HR, those people were my friends, and I was like, I was begging them to use Wantedly. So, yeah, they probably would try out anything even if it wasn’t Wantedly.

Tim: Okay. Well, you guys have scaled tremendously since event, so last I read, you had over 2.5 million active users a month, and how many employers?

Akiko: Right now, we have around 30,000 clients.

Tim: So, pitching to your friends is a great first step, but what has driven the rest of the enterprise, is it just from successful case studies where they have seen other companies succeed, what has driven it?

Akiko: Right, so it’s mostly word-of-mouth. I mean, even these days, we don’t do any outbound. So, it’s mostly inbound.

Tim: Well, have you had to change the image? So, when you first started out and during your growth face, It was always this kind of quirky outsider startup company, that was the whole image, but as you grow and you scale, can you still keep that as a post-IPO company?

Akiko: I mean, I guess a lot of people don’t really know that we are probably because we are still small. Yeah, I believe that we still have this image of very innovative and providing really cutting-edge technology over into products, but yeah, having changes were made as an organization wise, so in early age, we didn’t have any salesperson to chase up clients. We only had people to close the deal, but now, so in the past year, we doubled the headcount of salespeople. So, I think that’s a big change. We have more organized way of selling or closing the deals.

Tim: So, branding and image-wise, it’s still the same. You have just become much more efficient and organized, and scalable inside?

Akiko: Yeah, yeah. So, early age, I didn’t really believe in having a proper sales team because I really thought building really cool product will bring all the customers, but reality was, there is a chasm and to come over the chasm and going to the main market, we have to have a really strong human touch.

Tim: Enterprise sales in Japan, it’s time-consuming.

Akiko: That’s very true, yeah. Yeah, these days, there are a few other SaaS products like MoneyForward or SmartHR, so there are lots of foreign products like Slack, Evernote, and Dropbox. So, enterprises are getting used to interesting things without consuming so much time, but yeah, still.

Tim: Yeah, but HR is one of the most conservative parts of Japanese organizations. As you got bigger and more established, did you find other companies trying to copy the Wantedly formula?

Akiko: Right, right, so I think we saw more copycats in the early days. So, we started back in 2012 and I think around – by 2015, we had more than like, 20 or 30 copycats, not only in Japan but over Asia, but none of them succeeded, yeah.

Tim: Were the copycats other startup or are they large recruiting companies trying side projects?

Akiko: They’re both.

Tim: Yeah?

Akiko: Yeah, so there are many startups and also large enterprises, but none of those succeeded. I think the reason is for startups, I think people just saw the facts until it’s very successful, and they just wanted to copy the superficial essence and they just thought they could copy Wantedly, but they did not really truly understand what the true essence of Wantedly, so.

Tim: So, I want to dig down into this, so the true essence, so were they just copying the business model? What did they miss, was it a community that they missed? What was missing from most of these copycats?

Akiko: So, I never have really done an in-depth study of those copycats. I didn’t really pay much attention, but I guess, so we really value how users of visited offices, like casual visits, and I think a lot of startups weren’t that persistent in terms of keeping the user experience. So, most of the HR people will say, we’d rather want to have regular job interview. We don’t have to stick to Wantedly’s way, if you don’t have strong philosophy, you’re going to just let those HR play by their rules.

Tim: Yeah. Well, you know that’s interesting because I always find that is the critical balance in all startups. So, you have to believe in your vision strong enough to tell your potential customers no, but you also have to listen to your customers to make sure you are building something they actually want.

Akiko: Yeah, yeah, that’s true, that’s true. So,