January to March is always a busy season for us, and true to form, this year’s Q1 was the busiest ever. To give some idea, growth in the number of survey’s taken and data collected rose a whopping 284% year on year. For a small team working diligently through these months, thank you for your hard work and excellent performance.

With this growth, it is safe to say that we have exited the Covid-19-induced doldrums and are on the path to rapid growth. As we move forward however, it’s important for us to be aware of how we’ve evolved, rather than just changed.

Evolving Projects

As our company tries to solve issues both locally and globally, I sometimes say that we are in the “Glocal DX business”—whether that be for regional communities with our Tourism DX Platform or for the global south and our Social Enterprise Platform.

These DX projects, which to date have been very much proof-of-concept projects co-created with various partners, are now moving to the next stage.

For our Tourism DX Platforms, we have recently established a new training program for tourism marketing personnel, giving a hand to those using our systems so that they can improve how they collect and analyze the opinions of tourists, citizens, and businesses in their communities.

Transforming Nagano Prefecture Through How-To Courses in “Data-Driven Tourism Marketing” (Japanese Only)

For our Social Enterprise Platforms, we have followed up our success in Tanzania with a Phase 1 project in Bolivia—conducting an industry-academia-government collaboration project in the Department of Santa Cruz. Having wrapped that up recently, we are moving on with Phase 2, where we aim to further monetize the existing system.

Koeeru’s SHEP Marketplace “Mi Mercado Verde” selected for the Business (B2B) course of TSUBASA2023, organized by JICA/IDB Lab

With the evolution of both our Tourism DX Platforms and our Social Enterprise Platforms, our stage We realize that our company stage is changing.

An Evolving Structure

To date, Koeeru has built all of its platforms as through a design-thinking, agile-development collaboration between a business team in Japan and an IT and Operations team in Hanoi, Vietnam.

As part of the future evolution of this structure, we have decided to hire a full-time UI/UX designer and increase the number of IT personnel in Japan, and to build a business team in Vietnam so that we might establish a full-fledged design thinking structure in both offices—bringing all team members closer to our clients, our lead users.

Evolving Work Styles

Finally, I’d like to talk about working styles. When I was still new employee at my first foreign venture, there was a time when I realized that the company stage had clearly changed. My company had merged with another firm, and as a result various systems were changing daily. One big surprise came to me when I was forced to take three weeks off because I had built up too many paid holidays.

During those three weeks I took a backpacking trip to Spain, and when I returned, the atmosphere of the company was completely different. I still remember the impressions I received: my boss and coworkers seemed to be relieved by the new environment and were enjoying the change, but were also struggling to get used to it and the gaps between the new and old systems.

When working in a 0 to 1 company, the best way to describe it is being “just gung-ho”. Pioneer members, myself included, do what it takes to achieve success. This hard working style soon becomes ingrained, because frankly, that is what is needed. However, a work-hard, gung-ho style is simply not sustainable over the long term.

As the company’s stage changes, the way people work also has to change dramatically. For us, this means evolving from a frantic 0-1 growth stage to a sustainable 1-10 growth stage. Hopefully, members who lived through the crazy period can feel rewarded by the change, and new colleagues just joining can enter a company whose commitment to work-life balance is better than their last job.

Whether evolving in our projects, our structure, or our working style, I hope that these changes make us ready for the next stage in our company’s life.