Behind the Scenes of SPeak’s IVS2023 LAUNCHPAD KYOTO Pitch Contest Journey

JPort by SPeak Corp
9 min readAug 3, 2023

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This article discusses the journey of SPeak Corporation in the IVS2023 LAUNCHPAD KYOTO pitch contest. Though we didn’t win, we want to share the journey and share a bit about our company from Nicole’s (the marketer 🙋‍♀️ ) perspective.

Watch our highlights of the event for the full experience 👀

SPeak Corporation, the company behind JPort Journal and JPort Match, was chosen as one of the 14 finalists for one of Japan’s largest pitch events, IVS2023 LAUNCHPAD KYOTO. There, our founder and CEO, Hiromi Karahashi, shared the past, present and future of our company in a 6-minute pitch.

To cut to the chase, we did not go home with the first prize, or even the audience award. However, they say the journey’s more important than the destination! So, in this article I’ll be sharing the behind-the-scenes of our little expedition 🚂

My name is Nicole and I’m a marketer from JPort! I’m from the Philippines and I came to Japan in 2018 to study at Okayama University. I joined SPeak as an intern back in July 2021 when I was still in university, then joined full time in October 2022. Full disclosure, this article will be from the perspective of a fresh graduate, new to the work force and entirely new to the startup industry. If you’re someone who’s not too familiar with startups, this is the perfect article for you LOL.

This is me, second person from the left with some of our JPort senpais 🫶

The first pitch

At the start of 2023, Hiromi-san said that we would be starting another round of fundraising within the year. Naturally, Hiromi-san needed to create a presentation to convey to investors what our company was about (This presentation is called a pitch!). Since this isn’t his first time in the rodeo, he already had one from the previous round that he shared with us.

Not the first pitch but here’s a previous of the slides before they were entirely changed 🤭

Now I could tell you, with my JLPT N1 certification, I understood the pitch (in Japanese) in its entirety and was able to give constructive feedback! But I would be lying 💀. I knew what SPeak wanted to do in the future, cause Hiromi-san shared his vision when he gave me the offer for full time, so I kind of understood the gist. So after the 10-minute presentation, I thought this seemed like a good way to present our plans and maybe if I were Japanese, this would make sense to me!

Fast forward to Hiromi-san sharing this presentation with Xiqiao-san, my mentor and our advisor, and her husband Daisuke-san. They had notes 🗒️: what exactly you’re trying to do right now isn’t clear; is this another recruiting company?; there was so much information, I don’t know what impression you wanted us to leave with; the list goes on. From that moment, I realized that I wasn’t the only one left confused by the presentation 😅

Hiromi-san & a struggling to understand the pitch Nicole

On the bright side, this was the chance to completely change the story of the script and reconstruct it to be better. He took February to brainstorm and create new slides with the help of Yukiko-san, and with that he applied to IVS2023 LAUNCHPAD KYOTO, as suggested by one of our current investors.

Screening process

We got through the first round! The second round was in May so Hiromi-san had about a month to prepare for the presentation.

As a three man team, this meant each person had to do more tasks outside of our roles to keep the company moving. As the CEO, Hiromi-san was in charge of sales, customer success, hiring, fundraising and so much more. On top of that, he now had to allocate maybe 30% capacity to the pitch contest because he had already decided he would join to win the grand prize.

JPort team otw back to Nagoya station in Feb 2023 after joining the HREXPO

Despite having 5 million things on his plate, Hiromi-san decided to do what he could for the international community and this is why I’m on his team. There’s really only a handful of people that go out of their way to try and make things better, and I love that my job lets me support that too.

My main task is to do everything related to increasing the number of student users on our websites. This includes creating the marketing plan, creating content for the website (check out our videos about job hunting here), managing our SNS, hiring interns, planning and executing events, among other things. With the pitch contest preparation in motion, I also had to help with PR, handle intern management and collaborations with universities (this is what working at a startup is like 💀). I’m so grateful to the entire team for picking up the slack for both me and Hiromi-san as well!

Wacky little shot of our company’s stellar intern team circa 2022
And some more of our 2023 interns at CIRCLE by ANRI (our office since this year!)

Hiromi-san decided to reveal the results of the final screening during our weekly meeting and I truly have not questioned him more LOL. What a tragic moment it could’ve been if we didn’t get through, but thankfully we opened the email and saw we were selected as one of the 14 finalists (out of 400+ applicants oh man 😤)

Live reaction from opening the email!

Feedback from the community

At the start of June (one week after we found out the results) we held an event for our Senpais, international and bilingual working professionals in Japan. While I was fully immersed in preparing for this, Hiromi-san was fully immersed in practicing for this pitch. Check out the messages he sent to our check-in channel:

“Good morning! Yesterday I spent the night in a sauna in Akasaka for pitch practice 🧖Now at office. Today, will focus on Pitch Deck & Business Plan & 6 MTGS”
“Today finalizing the pitch deck and practicing at karaoke”

It was a crazy busy month 😂

At the end of our JPort Community Meetup in June, Hiromi-san presented the current version of the pitch to our JPort Senpais (international talent working in Japan) and students. As the marketer & community manager of the JPort community, I really wanted Hiromi-san to share the pitch with the attendees since I wanted the JPort community, who already agreed with our vision to make Japan a more global society, to know how we could really make it a reality.

Hiromi-san presenting the pitch to our students & senpais!

After the presentation, we asked for any feedback or improvements, expecting only a few responses. But more and more people were raising their hands one after the other trying to help us create a more compelling case.

  • “It’s sad because this will resonate a lot more with the people in this room than to the regular Japanese person so my only concern is, is there anything you can do to make this resonate with them more and make them feel our struggle more? I don’t know if there’s an answer to that but there were specific aspects [of the pitch] that really resonated with me so in my eyes it was a good pitch.”
  • “Since money talks, maybe show them how much the international people will contribute to the pension fund.”
  • “You could also compare what an international person’s journey is like in another country vs Japan so it’s easier to visualize the struggle people have here.”
  • “Maybe you could compare the steps the average Japanese person would take to find a job or get housing vs the extra steps an international person has to take.”

We had to keep the feedback time short since we were running out time but it was great to know that the international community was so invested in making sure we succeeded.

The people we’re doing this for! (Christmas Career Networking Day in Dec 2022)

One day before the presentation

Before the actual day, there was a rehearsal for all the presenters at the venue. He spent the whole day practicing, pitching to the ducks by the river, pitching the walls of the venue up until it was his turn to practice on stage.

POV: Your audience is the wall
Practicing while waiting for his turn

He was the 6th presenter, so Otomi (one of our interns) and I were able to take the good and bad parts of everyone’s presentation as reference for Hiromi-san’s part. After his turn.. we had a lot of notes 😂.

First time presenting on stage!

We all met up at Starbucks in front of the venue to give Hiromi-san our feedback: too much moving around the stage, turning your back against the audience, speaking too fast etc. (Yes, this is how we talk to our boss in this company lol). But in order to give him one last boost of motivation, we showed him a compilation of video messages from current members, past interns, JPort users and JPort senpais! This was his response:

🥹🥹🥹

IVS2023 LAUNCHPAD KYOTO START!

We invited some of our previous team members, some JPort users and senpais to watch the event live in Port Messe in Kyoto. We were meeting some people for the first time but somehow everyone was so easy to get along with! It was really great weather that day, amidst the rainy season, so I was really hoping it was a good omen for the pitch contest 👀

The JPort gang meetup before the LAUNCHPAD event started

After that, we all headed to the venue to watch the pitch. Watch the pitch below:

At the last part of the presentation, you could feel how much passion Hiromi-san had for what he was doing. It was so moving, especially for all of us who came just to see him do the pitch. But in the end, we didn’t win the grand prize, nor the audience choice award.

Hiromi-san was determined to win and the preparations he made for it were to reach that goal. But like in sports, you could spend every waking moment training to win, but the last stretch is just luck and timing. I didn’t feel too bad when they announced the results because I felt like we would get something else from the experience, but after the awarding you could feel Hiromi-san’s frustration from feeling like he disappointed everyone. 😭😭😭

JPort team in front of ROHM Theatre Kyoto after the pitch

But here’s the gang after the event! All of us were entirely so proud of him, and we genuinely felt seen for the first time. The things that could be seen as tiny inconveniences, struggling with job-hunting, having limited choices for apartments, not being able to make a credit card, are actually huge hurdles we have to face as international people just because we want to stay in Japan. To be able to share that with a Japanese audience and propose ideas to solve it, was a feat truly only Hiromi-san could achieve.

It’s a long long way to go but one step at a time, but this was a great first step in sharing our vision and passion with the world! Stay posted and watch us turn this into reality 💪💪💪

Thanks for reading this article!

If you’re interested in working with us at SPeak, we’re currently hiring for sales, web marketing and engineering positions. Feel free to reach out!

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