Giving up profit for loss-funded growth, and the first TV campaign for a corporate business-card service (2013)

Who pays for inventing the name?

Outside capital raised in the first six years came to ¥50m; over the next five, roughly ¥10bn. A substantial part of money that had moved two decimal places went not to the product but to its name. As long as the act of a company sharing business cards in the cloud had no name at all, no amount of selling would put Sansan on the table for comparison. What President Terada Chikahiro chose was not to go and capture demand but to draw its outline first. A company able to turn a profit giving up that profit is a judgement that holds only when the reason for not growing is located in the market rather than in the product.

Generalizing the pattern as a success story, though, is difficult. That the category name was broadcast on television while sales meetings hid it behind CRM and SFA shows that mass advertising alone did not get proposals approved internally. Administrative expenses exceeded revenue for a long stretch, and had the suppliers of capital not kept coming, it would have stopped partway. Nor did the word it made last: nine years later the company took it off its own tagline. The cost of making a market, it can be argued, becomes an asset that binds the company once the market is made.