14 episodes
Tech Culture Podcast - Conversations With Successful Founders In Japan Tech Culture Podcast
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- Business
Tech Culture Podcast, hosted by Kaustubh Hiware and Prashant Anand, brings you conversations with top startup founders in Japan running successful businesses.
We cover a wide range of topics, including deep-diving into the founders' lives, learnings, and successes and failures.
Join us for actionable insights from the founders who have been there and faced the same challenges as you, providing what you need to build your own successful business.
If you enjoy the IndieHackers podcast or Startups for the Rest of Us, you'll enjoy our show.
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Building an AI product for 3100 customers in 50 countries with Hazumu Yamazaki
Kaustubh (@_ofkaus) and Prashant (@primaprashant) sit down with Hazumu Yamazaki (@HazumuY), co-founder and co-CEO of Empath, to talk about challenges in building an AI product - from getting initial users to serving 3100 customers in 50 countries, from starting with zero data of their own to creating their data supply chain, and more.
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Topics:
00:00 - Intro
01:17 - What's Empath all about?
02:31 - How Hazumu's PhD research led to Empath
04:37 - Market research and validation for emotion recognition API
07:47 - Getting initial users and longer B2B sales cycle
09:55 - Founding team
11:11 - Becoming sustainable
12:16 - Improving productivity of online meetings with JamRoll
16:55 - Interesting feature requests like lie detection
18:15 - Problems with emotion recognition in videos
21:48 - Collecting data for a new AI startup
23:47 - Adding labels to the collected data
24:45 - Recognizing emotions in different languages
26:05 - Sarcasm and hidden contexts in conversations
27:49 - What distinguishes Empath from publicly available models
30:06 - Tech stack at Empath
32:02 - Adoption of AI Japan
33:40 - Advice for the initial stages of building an AI product
35:11 - Organizations that support AI startups in Japan
37:10 - Going global
38:54 - How to make a great pitch
41:23 - Funding rounds
42:00 - Biggest challenge in reaching the next milestone
43:46 - Long term vision for Empath
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#12 - Bootstrapping a B2B SaaS to 150+ Million Yen ARR with Iqbal Abdullah of Xoxzo
Kaustubh (@_ofkaus) and Prashant (@primaprashant) sit down with Iqbal Abdullah (@iqbalabd), founder of Xoxzo Inc., and LaLoka Labs, to talk about:
bootstrapping Xoxzo to >150M JPY ARR,
uniqueness in B2B sales in Japan,
selling 67% stake in Xoxzo,
advice for people who want to build their own business in Japan, and more.
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Want to be among the first to hear from us? Follow us on Twitter @techculturepod.
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Topics:
00:00 - Intro
01:28 - Xoxzo's pronunciation and history
05:05 - Beginnings of Xoxzo
08:25 - Evolving use-cases of Xoxzo
13:27 - Continuous improvement in the long-term
16:56 - B2B sales in Japan
21:30 - Selling majority stake in Xoxzo
25:15 - Bootstrapping Xoxzo
27:02 - Open-source grants
29:25 - Contribution to Python community
33:01 - Adventures at Laloka Labs
38:12 - Book recommendations
42:30 - Advice to build your own business in Japan
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#11 - Going Full-Time on Side Business with Eric Turner of JapanDev
Kaustubh (@_ofkaus) and Prashant (@primaprashant) sit down with Eric Turner (@_etdev), founder of Japan Dev, and VCList.jp, to talk about his transition to an IndieHacker role, common business mistakes made by engineers, getting customer feedback, sharing progress, and more.
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Topics:
00:32 - Intro
01:09 - Working full-time on JapanDev and being accountable
06:16 - Tasks with high ROI and impact
07:38 - Job market in Japan
15:00 - Building features that customers want
18:43 - How JapanDev started and early mistakes
26:11 - Managing side-business along with a full-time job
31:01 - Eric’s long term plans
34:20 - The technology for which Eric is most optimistic? -
#10 - Newsletters and E-mail Marketing
We love the smell of newsletters in the morning. Learn all about newsletters and e-mail marketing.
Topics:
00:00 - Developing new habits (hint: habit stacking).
02:57 - Introduction to newsletters and e-mail marketing.
06:27 - Starting your own newsletter.
09:14 - Metrics to keep track of for your newsletter.
19:35 - Stats about B2B and B2C email-marketing.
21:08 - Successful newsletter stories.
22:42 - Newsletter recommendations.
Sources for stats: HubSopt Backlinko MailChimp
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#9 - LinkedIn Top Indian Startups 2021
Discover exciting startups from the LinkedIn Top Indian Startups 2021 list.
Topics:
00:00 - Personal updates for last few months.
03:04 - Introduction to LinkedIn Top Indian Startups 2021 list.
03:44 - Fampay is India’s first neobank for teenagers. It allows minors to do UPI, P2P and card payments without the need to set up a bank account. Fampay YC page.
07:21 - ShareChat is India’s #1 social media app, with more than 160 million monthly active users.
10:27 - NoBroker is a real-estate platform that makes it possible to buy/sell/rent a house without paying any brokerage.
14:00 - Trell is the largest lifestyle social commerce platform in Indian languages.
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#8 - Industrials, Developer Tools and More - YC W21
Discover interesting products from industrials, developer tools, wellness, and food industries from the YCombinator Winter 2021 Batch.
Topics:
00:00 - Introduction. YC winter 2021 batch stats.
00:57 - Alba Orbital makes satellites to image everywhere on Earth, every 15 minutes. They can see events within minutes such as wild fires in real time and have signed $41m of LOIs. To date they have launched 6 satellites into orbit. Alba Orbital YC page.
03:49 - Enode provides API for electric vehicles and other energy consumer products. Interesting use cases of Enode API. Enode YC page.
06:11 - Dendron - Notion for Developers. It is an scalable note taking tool that grows as you do, built on top of markdown, git, and VSCode, Dendron helps you reference all your information in seconds, regardless of how much of it you have. Dendron YC page.
08:43 - Chorus provides online group meditation classes led by live instructors. Chorus YC page.
10:20 - Mezli is building "auto-kitchens", fully autonomous shipping-container restaurants that serve great, affordable meals for takeout and delivery. Mezli YC page.
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We'd love to hear your feedback for this episode! You can provide us feedback using this form.