The story of online community platform “Yay!”: part one.
On the Internet, everyone can find a place for themselves.
…Is what we really believe here at Nanameue. And we are working towards making it the reality. Let me tell you why, and how.
Today I would like to talk about one of the main services that are being developed at Nanameue: online community platform “Yay!”.
(This post is going to be mainly concerned with the question “why?”, and the “how” will be explained in the part two, so be sure to check that out too.😉)
Introduction: the concept behind
As a Japan-based company, our sense of responsibility is coming from observing the society around us: and the reality sometimes appears rather grim. In Japan, many young people are wrestling with feelings of loneliness and alienation, which results in very tragic statistics. So, our mission is to battle this situation through the power of SNS, and together create a world where everyone feels like they have a place they belong to.
But why battle loneliness through social network services? The answer is not simply providing some short-term distraction, but to foster and help flourish real human connections, and create a sense of tight community. This is how our CEO Ishihama Takahiro explains why:
“We believe that such social problems as bullying, school refusal, suicide; as well as making life-changing decisions of which career or dream to pursue; and simply daily feelings of both content and distress — all these things are being decided for largely by the environment within which we live.
However, the “environment” is not something that is distributed equally among everyone. For example, in a small social space such as school, we are forced to survive among the people who ended up there by chance, only by the virtue of living nearby and being the same age.
The chance of encountering a real friend who can be trusted throughout your whole life in such a small community made up of random individuals is small. However, when this small well is all one knows, to them it seems like it really is the entire world.
We would like for everyone to have the same right to shape their surroundings by themselves, no matter where they are born. We want to create not the small well, but the opportunity for everyone to express their true self in a big world. This is our desire lying behind the creation of Yay!.
The long prehistory of Yay!
We have launched the online community platform “Yay!” late December, 2019. However, this not not exactly when the story started: prior to the birth of “Yay!”, since 2015, we have been developing and operating a social network for students called “Himabu”.
In four years of running Himabu the application accumulated around 8 million registered users, with around 6 million posts and messages being exchanged daily: which absolutely made it the most loved social network made specifically for students.
What made Himabu special — and what will continue make Yay! special, is the fact that all we’ve managed to operate this giant service by our team of around 20 people, all thanks to their talent and commitment. We are really proud to be a very international, but still local Japanese company that is able to compete with such moguls as Twitter, for example — especially in the times when the internet services are increasingly monopolized and absorbed.
Moreover, another unique aspect of our communities is making sure that we are reachable for the users, that they can rely on our community managers; we try to maintain a real relationship with people who love our applications.
And this is not just PR speak! All these things absolutely can be quite challenging, but they for sure are very rewarding.
So, back to Yay!: this year we have rebranded from a community for students into a community targeted for all ages. Because of course, the issues of loneliness and lack of place of belonging is not something that only students experience. We have come back with improved security measures and strategies to ensure the development of safe and healthy communities, and our hearts are still in the same place.
If you would like to check out Yay! for yourself, you can use the link below:
https://yay.onelink.me/jqva/press (The interface currently is in Japanese.)
I hope that I was able to convey our motivations and approach to Yay! in this post. In the next post I will explain in a little more detail how the app actually works, and what distinguishes it from other popular social networking services. See you later!✌️
