Similarities between florists and AI businesses

Original Language: Japanese | 日本語はこちら
*This article was originally posted on 2017–06–02

There is a company called Hananova that is trying to innovate in the flower industry, and fortunately Mr. Takahashi from Hananova joined Team AI last month.

The industry is different, but from my point of view, Hanaba’s business and Team AI’s business have something in common.

Internet companies that build florists

I think the great thing about Hananoba is that they built their own offline florist.

The last time I drank with CTO Ozaki, we were looking for a manager.

He actually put out a truck and went to buy flowers at Ota-ku flower market at five o’clock in the morning.

That was a big deal! That’s what I was saying at the time, but I think it’s the best way to get familiar with the target market.

I think it is wonderful to touch various kinds of flowers for a long time every day, become more knowledgeable about the life of flowers than anyone else, and become a professional of the attributes of users and consumption behavior to buy flowers.

(Hannanoba’s wonderful store information is here.)

Importance of user interaction

Team AI also aims to support machine learning engineers, so we hold machine learning study sessions every day in Shibuya.

I’m trying to start offline and bring the final form online.

People often say, “Do you have study meetings 30 times a month? You must be tired. Crazy!” but I ’ m confident that this is the most efficient way to do business for machine learning engineers.

When I hold study sessions, I struggle every day to provide value to machine learning engineers. This is because the purpose of the business is to “Solving the problems of machine learning engineers and making them as happy as possible.”

We do this every day for exactly 3 hours for 5–10 machine learning engineers.

From the point of view of smart IT companies, it may seem inefficient, but by making communication with users “essential every day”, Team AI’s direction as a service has been changed every day “toward the goal”, and the business gears are moving smoothly.

Lessons from American entrepreneurship organizations

When I was mentoring under One Traction, an entrepreneurial development organization, in San Francisco in 2015, one of my mentors constantly told me, “Even if you come up with a new improvement idea, don’t write code! First, make a proposal for PowerPoint, then sell it to your target users. If they agree, write code; if they don’t, throw the idea away. “

I think this is also a message that we should value the time of the user’s direct conversation offline as a place to test the hypothesis of the idea.

The top incubator, Y Combinator, has said “Make products. Talk to the user. Exercise. Entrepreneurs don’t need any other time for PR or networking.”
Our focus is especially “talking to users”.

Stanford University’s design school and innovation conference IDEO, which we visited in the United States, also taught us to obsessively observe and deeply interact with our target users.

Recommended way for any business

I’m pretty confident, but I think these techniques can be used to launch any Internet business.

“Start a small offline business for your target audience and interact closely every day.

Work hard to make sure our users are as happy as possible every day, and gradually change the strategy in the right direction.

Repeat improvements by devising.

Eventually, the idea of “Making this available on the Web will solve the user’s problems!” comes naturally. “

Simply saying, if you do just that, you’ll be able to see exactly what the value of the user is, so it’s going to be a very smooth way to start an online business.

When I start a coffee IT startup in the future, I will start selling coffee wagons.

When I start a massage IT startup in the future, I will start an acupuncture clinic in a studio apartment.

I will start a small bridal production business when I start a marriage IT startup in the future.

Know your users.

24 hours a day, 365 days a year, keep trying to make your users happy.

I work every day believing that this is the key to business success.