Started with only 300 thousand yen and no office!

Before telling you about how I founded the business, please let me introduce myself!

First of all, I was a typical salaryman with absolutely no interest in starting a business. Working as a copywriter, thus a rather technical job, I was doing my best as a member of the society. While working hard, sometimes I would dream that one day I want to be like Shigesato Itoi or Takashi Nakahata, but then I would think that all these great aspirations would also require a lot of overwork and sleepless nights.

My turning point in life was the moment my mother was diagnosed with cancer.

I was 25 years old at that time.While I was still in a state of shock, looking at my mother who was still healthy at that time, I kept telling her that her disease will be cured as medicine is in a continuous development and there are plenty of treatments.

However, my mother kept fighting with the disease for a few years after and she managed to see me and my older sister getting married. She passed away when I was 29 years old. Then, I suddenly realized something.

I never did anything in return for my mother’s support.

Truly speaking, I never did anything for her. My first salary was spent on a night out with some low-quality friends and all the bonuses I ever received, I kept them for myself, never thinking about my parents. Being very naughty as a child and growing up with a selfish behavior, my mother’s life was centered around me.

I was in charge of certain carbonated drinking water and I was spending my nights writing business plans and I began asking myself how I could ever repay all my mother’s efforts while still continuing the same job. It was at that moment that I met the manager of a start-up company in the healthcare industry. He said his father had also died of cancer while he was young.

I want to change the healthcare system in Japan!

I was suddenly struck by this idea. With this in mind, and with the skills I had cultivated in my previous jobs, I decided to change my occupation and to work together with this entrepreneur to make my dream come true. I was now the manager of a totally new business and I began developing various business projects. This is when I first came across ‘Baby Map’. At that time, it was just an app, with no plan and no funding and I was struggling within my division to find a way to turn it into a real business.

The above picture, published in Mac Fan, presents me and my division on the occasion of the app development.

If people think that I was the one who invented ‘Baby Map’, they’re wrong. It was when Kiyokazu Suzuki noticed the inconvenience caused by not knowing where the diaper facilities are, that the idea of the app came into my mind.

At that time, the app was collecting information about the availability of diaper changing and nursing rooms from all around the country through the mothers who used them and then published the information on the app. I was deeply impressed seeing by it so I was strongly determined to turn it into a real business.

The app was working thanks to the mothers’ generosity of sharing the information so that the users have no difficulties in finding nursing rooms.

I was thinking that it would be difficult to mobilize people without any incentive, but the truth was that many people were sympathetic to others’ difficulties over this matter.

When our company finally received an advertising sponsorship our company started to grow. Shortly after the venture raised 500 million yen fund of funds, the business and it’s activity domain started to develop and become stronger. However, the fact that the funds did not raise to the level we had estimated in the first place, put a strain on developing new projects.

But, in one way or another, I was strongly determined to develop Baby Map and do my duty of paying back my parents’ support. With this in mind, although it seemed an impossible thing to do, I asked the manager and I received the right to develop Baby Map. Therefore, finally, on February 2nd 2015, we obtained our certificate of incorporation and we started our enterprise under the name of Trim inc.

BUT! We had only 300 thousand yen capital funds, no office and no plan of what to do next!

It was a company with almost no resources. But, by chance, we applied to Open Network Lab and luckily we were selected. What is more, we were also lucky enough to get the big prize in the Yokohama Business Grand Prix. To be honest, we entered the competition just for the money. But we got more than that: we were offered the chance, as business entrepreneurs, to receive a thorough review of how to develop the basic elements of a business and develop new products.

Open Network Lab

https://onlab.jp/

Yokohama Business Grand Prix

http://www.idec.or.jp/kigyo/ybg/

After that, thanks to INCUBATE CAMP, we learn about how or company looks to investors, how to produce for larger scale markets and I still remember how I was passionately telling about my future plans of the company to the non-executive director Yudai Yamada, who was an associate of Incubate Fund.