Swimmy Minami (pictured right) is the co-founder of BizReach, a site that helps its users find senior level jobs that pay more than $100,000 annually. The interesting thing is that it charges users, rather than the conventional way of charging companies for posting jobs.
Although the business model isn’t a common one, it works well for BizReach so far. It turns out that people are willing to pay for exclusive and curated content like this. To date, BizReach has more than 5,900 senior level jobs postings attracting over 140,000 registered users in Japan. Swimmy has also recently launched RegionUp, a similar site targeting other Asia regions.
To find out more about BizReach, we managed to speak to Swimmy who revealed more about his startup.
1. What were you doing before BizReach?
I was one of the founders of the Rakuten Eagles, an expansion baseball club in the Japanese professional league. I played various management roles in starting-up the club, such as assistant general manager, assistant to the CEO, head of entertainment, and I represented the club in several league-wide business committees. Before my career in sports, I kicked off my career in Morgan Stanley’s investment banking department, where I was a financial analyst on Tokyo’s M&A advisory team. I later moved on to become a founding member of PCCW’s Tokyo investment team, where we made strategic investments in various parts of the world.
2. What is the BizReach story?
My goal was not to become an entrepreneur, but to look for opportunities to work on new business projects at a larger corporation, similar to the baseball team. I was talking to various headhunters to see if I could dig up any under the surface opportunities in the technology space, and had an extremely frustrating time with them. I met close to 30 headhunters over a one month period, and every single headhunter gave me a different position to consider.
The entire process puzzled me and the uncomfortable situation presented by headhunters. This situation rang some bells, and I immediately started doing research on the job market. Certain ideas led to others and I felt very strongly about individuals, or basically jobseekers, paying a certain fee for access to job-related information.
I love looking back at the history in the evolution of industries when I embark on a new business, and I quickly found out that jobseekers did indeed pay for job-related information until 15 years ago. Yes, job magazines and newspapers. I felt that as long as I could create an online platform where I could support jobseekers in efficiently and effectively collecting information that would help their job search process, they would indeed pay a certain fee for the service. We would become the first subscription-based jobs site in Japan.
I also took a look at the Japanese online job market and saw that the market consisted of four major mass-market job sites (similar to JobStreet or JobsDB in the APAC market). I am a big fan of new businesses serving a specific niche at the beginning stages, so in order to not become a direct competitor of these giants, I decided to differentiate ourselves by exclusively focusing on the senior-level job market (above annual salary of US$75K). We also became the first specialized job market in Japan focusing on the senior-level job market.
Through the initial founding stages of BizReach, I had seven other founders, who were all specialists in some online roles for other companies. The founders had experience working for firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Sony, MTV, and Recruit. Six of the founders actually decided to continue working for their respective companies, and drop all extracurricular activities on weeknights and weekends for one year to focus on starting up BizReach.
My promise to the team was that I would raise enough venture capital money within 12 months, so that I could pay a fair-value salary to everyone to join the team on a full-time basis. From the kick-off of our project in late 2008 to our official launch in April 2009, and finally until we raised US$2.6 million from a local venture capital group, we worked together to bring this idea to reality. We would hold meetings every Thursday night and Saturday morning at our garage-like office to talk about our respective progress, and go back home to work on our respective tasks.
3. What are some of the most difficult moments you faced while building BizReach?
The most difficult task for me was in building the initial founding team. I am a firm believer that there is always someone better than your friend, when it comes to building a business, so I went out and tried to build a team of consummate professionals. Since I did not have experience working for a technology or online firm in the past, it was extremely difficult to figure out what kind of people I needed to succeed in building an online business.
I literally had no clue about anything, and I met with countless people who had some kind of experience or knowledge of what I was trying to do. It was like being put into a pitch black room, and you have to figure out in which direction you should move.
The only thing I could do is to run around trying to collect as much information as I could using my instincts and senses, in order to come to a decision. That decision for me was in finding the right people who could join me as the founders of our business. I actually found every founder via a different route, and each story is a classic.
One of the engineers was found through a random e-mail I sent out to a few sites run by individuals. My other founders I met at a breakfast seminar, drinking parties, and even one at an interview of another American company who I was helping to consult. I spent many hours meeting with various people everywhere, and probably met over a hundred people before settling on my team. I’ve never been rejected by so many people, whether it was joining a startup or being told that my idea was impossible to execute, but these difficult moments and disheartening experiences eventually led me to my awesome partners.
4. What is your goal for the company? How many employees do you have right now?
Shortly after we finished raising the initial US$2.6 million for BizReach, I started thinking about other businesses which fit my belief that people would be willing to spend more money via the internet. BizReach sold information to individuals via the web, and my instincts lead us to the start-up of LUXA, a subsidiary of BizReach, which focused on the online sale of products.
LUXA was started on the belief that there is excess inventory everywhere in every industry, and that there was a right price for everything. We benchmarked offline retail businesses such as outlet shops and wholesale stores, and eventually ran into a US site called woot.com. I actually traveled to Texas to meet with the founder of woot to get a better understanding of the business. There, I realized the potential of a warehouse-sale style e-commerce business in Japan, where I would sell various types of products, such as fashion, cosmetics, food & beverages, electronics, etc. I also saw that Groupon was successfully pushing a flash sales business based on selling excess capacity at retail stores, so I decided to promote our service like a Groupon (flash sales site) for products.
We started up LUXA, as a new business unit of BizReach in August 2010, and two months later, spun the business out as a separate entity. Seeing that the business needed capital to get through the initial start-up phase, I went out into the venture capital market and subsequently raised US$6.0 million from a local venture capital.
With the growth of both BizReach and LUXA over the last couple of years, we currently employ about 140 people (90 for BizReach and 50 for LUXA).
Business was growing in Japan, but my ambition pulled me to take on the next challenge and take our business to new markets. The next logical choice was to expand operations in Asia, particularly focusing on the two APAC regional head cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Once again, I found myself looking for the right pieces of the puzzle to not only fit in with the culture we had established at BizReach, but to also bring in new perspectives and help propel us into uncharted waters.
In fact, no other Japanese internet company had dared take on such a daunting task. Nonetheless, I knew the APAC market was missing a clear niche and putting myself out there, I’d meet the right people to help start RegionUP.
As fate would have it, during a trip to Singapore shortly after New Years 2012 I would meet someone who reminded me of myself four years prior searching for new opportunities, only to be frustrated by the process of finding the next career challenge. With previous work experience in both Japan and Southeast Asia, the first piece was set. The rest of the team would quickly all in to place shortly after.
Over the past few months, RegionUP has entered a market saturated with mass job boards and social media sites. No one gave us a chance to be successful out of our niche market in Japan. So once we saw the first paid customer come through, jubilation rang through our company. Yes, the market is there and we’re determined to become Asia’s premiere career platform for Asia’s best talent.
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