Raising approximately ¥9 billion in funding within three years of service launch. The strategy behind Timee's continued overwhelming growth.

This series presents conversations between startup entrepreneurs, executives, investors, CMOs, and others, and employees of Dentsu Inc. involved in startup support. It explores how they overcame challenges encountered during the growth of their companies and businesses.

This episode's guest is Ryo Ogawa, CEO of Timee Inc., whose mission is "to build infrastructure that expands life's possibilities through work." The company operates businesses including the part-time job app "Timee." Business Producer Ryo Kato asked about the company's strategy and the reasons behind its rapid growth.

Pioneering the New "Gig Work" Market

Kato: Since its launch in August 2018, Timee has rapidly grown into a massive platform within just a few years, boasting over 2.3 million workers and 56,000 participating stores. As a startup, it has also raised cumulative funding exceeding approximately 9 billion yen. Could you first explain Timee's service and the market potential of gap-time jobs?

Ogawa: Timee is a gap job service that matches "time people want to work" with "time employers want workers." Workers simply choose jobs they want to do, start working immediately without resumes or interviews, and receive payment right after their shift. Businesses just set the desired time and required skills, and the system automatically finds suitable workers.

Currently, about 20 companies worldwide operate in the gig work space. When we launched, our service was often discussed in the context of societal trends like work-style reform and the liberalization of side jobs. Recently, however, market demand has expanded to include solutions for labor shortages driven by Japan's aging and declining population, as well as the concept of "individual empowerment."

Kato: While it's a niche domain like gig work, you're now tackling a core challenge right at the heart of the HR field, aren't you?

Ogawa: We consulted extensively with you, Kato-san, on defining the domain. We believe a startup's role is to create unprecedented value and new concepts. It's crucial for employees to feel proud that "we are challenging something new." That's why we developed the term "Skima Bait."

Kato: It's very unique and catchy, accurately capturing the needs of people wanting to utilize their spare time effectively. Defining your domain early on, when awareness is low, is crucial for marketing strategy, so I remember we discussed this point many times. By the way, what benefits does Taimee offer to workers?

Ogawa: The main benefit is effectively utilizing spare time to start working immediately without needing a resume or interview. Going forward, we want to create a system where these "real internships" gain societal recognition. Workers can accumulate a record of where they worked and the evaluations they received, which could be leveraged during job hunting, for example. We aim to focus on "visualizing the efforts" of the workers who use Taimee.

Marketing to Create an Overwhelming Gap with Second-Place Startups

Kato: There are many part-time job platforms in Japan. How do you interpret the reason for your rapid growth among them?

Ogawa: There are several factors, but I believe securing a position in the niche market of "gap work" has been significant. For startups pioneering new markets, the greatest threat comes from competing startups also focused on 24/7, 365-day service.

Kato: I see. What strategy did you adopt to counter that threat?

Ogawa: We felt it was crucial to create an overwhelming gap with competing startups, so we invested heavily in marketing initiatives early on. When I consulted you about TV commercials, our revenue hadn't even reached 10 million yen yet, and we only had around 300,000 downloads, right?

Kato: That's right. When Ogawa-san said, "I want to do commercials," we were taken aback (laughs). Running large-scale commercials at that scale wasn't standard marketing theory, so we had deep discussions from the perspectives of the product, customer success, and our internal sales structure.

Ogawa: Precisely because we were at a disadvantage, I believed creativity would be key. But thanks to your dedicated efforts from casting to creative execution, awareness ultimately expanded fivefold, even tenfold, within just a few months. For startups, if competitors in the same market gain a tenfold lead, investors become reluctant to fund you, making the battle instantly much harder.

Kato: Ogawa-san always seems to voice what he believes is right early on, bouncing ideas off partners like us to try new marketing approaches that aren't just tracing the past. That said, wasn't the decision to run a TV commercial at just 300,000 downloads a bold move?

Ogawa: I think it was crucial that we had the financial capacity to run several ads and could establish a scenario where "running this many ads guarantees at least this level of effect." Even if one ad didn't hit the mark, we figured a few hits would eventually land (laughs). Of course, we should strive to hit the mark with the first attempt, but it wasn't a case of "if this fails, we're done." Fundraising is a major weapon for startups, and to secure it, you need to increase your company's value. TV commercials are one of the most leveraged means to do that. We judged the odds were in our favor, considering both the growth speed and the risks involved.

Kato: You have that principle of not chasing immediate success, but doing the right thing the right way. When we proposed several creative ideas, we even went back to the fundamental discussion: what should the CM's goal even be? Opinions were divided within our team too, but when Ogawa-san made the clear decision, "First, we're at the stage of broadening awareness; CPI comes next," it felt like everyone's hearts aligned.

Ogawa: Fundamentally, I don't believe running commercials is inherently efficient, so focusing solely on CPI there is misguided. It's crucial to create our "face" – the first impression we make through commercials – and then leverage that effectively in sales and web advertising to enhance efficiency.

Engineering skills are essential for startup CEOs

Kato: I'd like to ask a bit more about Taimee's strategy. Taimee is a platform with both B2B and B2C characteristics. It's a classic "chicken or egg" problem – how did you balance growing both the number of adopting companies and the app users?

Ogawa: Being a student entrepreneur myself, I had the advantage of relatively easy awareness-building among students. Thanks to that, within about a year of launch, we expanded to 100,000 users with almost no marketing costs. That's precisely why we focused on acquiring corporate clients. Also, since unknown services don't get clicks even with web ads, we prioritized PR and publicity in the early stages to increase exposure on TV, YouTube, and other platforms.

Kato: That early exposure was incredibly effective. You even appeared on regional programs, and I felt Skimabite really resonated the more local it got. Also, I was impressed by how much product refinement you did in the early stages. It's almost as if you understood the service's inner workings better than anyone else, down to the smallest details—truly remarkable.

Ogawa: Learning from the failure of my previous startup, I realized a CEO who doesn't understand engineers' perspectives and sensibilities won't succeed. So I learned programming languages and took on product design myself.

Kato: Beyond that, I was struck by how hands-on you were—experiencing various roles within the business yourself. It felt very down-to-earth, and I sensed you truly value people.

Ogawa: Startups fundamentally won't grow unless you get your hands dirty. I'm always careful not to become too top-heavy.

We want to enrich "work," which occupies such a large part of life.

Kato: As you mentioned at the start, I think the social challenges we're tackling are growing from the gap-filling work space to individual empowerment and addressing labor shortages. How do you envision positioning Taimee within society going forward?

Ogawa: First, we aim to build a brand where people think, "If we rely on Taimee, we can rest assured." Then, we want to expand into more industries and support more flexible ways of working. We'll also pursue developing features that are easy for users to use. In the past, companies were in the position to choose people, but now it's an era where workers hold the power – for example, even when companies recruit, few people come to interviews. Therefore, we believe that thoroughly prioritizing the user perspective to create an excellent service will ultimately lead to solving companies' challenges.

Kato: Could you share the vision behind your mission statement: "Building infrastructure that expands life's possibilities through work"?

Ogawa: Well-being has been emphasized for a long time, but life satisfaction is truly essential for people to live well. Since work occupies a significant portion of life, we believe that finding meaningful work, enjoying work, and gaining new options and meeting new people enriches life and ultimately contributes to enriching Japan.

Kato: By the way, if you had unlimited time and money right now, what would you want to do?

Ogawa: Hmm, I'd probably seek out societal challenges and try to solve them. For entrepreneurs, creating "things that wouldn't exist in a world without them" is their raison d'être. They dedicate their lives to how many times they can change the world. I want to keep creating things of lasting value for future generations.

Kato: That sense of mission—what impact you can make in this world—is your driving force, isn't it? Working alongside you, Ogawa, is a huge daily inspiration for me too. Looking forward to continuing our collaboration!