FlutterScape gets $100k in seed funding
FlutterScape is on a roll. The Tokyo-based social marketplace site has taken a seed investment in a trade deal and they are negotiating another investment.
The best part is, it’s all thanks to exhibiting at our event, Echelon 2010 in June, according to co-founder and chief executive Takehiro Kakiyama (no we didn’t ask him to say that!).
Read on to find out about:
-Who they got $100k seed investment from
-Who their new Singapore-based advisor is
-How close they got to closing a deal with investors linked to SPH
-How to get 1,000 Facebook fans a day
FlutterScape is competing to be one of Asia’s Top 50 Apps. Like them? Vote for them here.
Aucfan investment
“One company has already put the money in, so I guess I can share the news. It’s a 10 million yen (roughly $100,000) investment. The equity exchanged is a very small amount. I’d rather not say the exact amount.
The investor is called Aucfan (as in ‘auction fan’). Aucfan.com aggregates all the transaction data on every auction site in Japan. Including Yahoo! Japan, Rakuten auctions — we have like eight auction sites in Japan. They have been in the business for about three years and accumulated about 800 million transactions in their database. Their business model is to sell the data as marketing reports, so that the companies can determine supply and demand of the product.
It’s more like a strategic investment for Aucfan. They want to go to English-speaking countries with their business model. What we offer right now is pure product discovery from Japan. What we have with Aucfan is to have sub-categories to recommend, and they will gives buyers an idea of what else is out there. We will differentiate Aucfan from our own product discovery.
The new Aucfan data should be available in September. We are still working on it.”
The mystery VC
“We are still under negotiation with some company. This is actually a, hmm, more like a VC company in Japan which has a lot of foreign networks. It’s pretty tough for Japanese companies to go abroad and do business, but since our market is purely outside Japan, we needed them.
Singapore investors
“(At Echelon 2010) we spoke to clickTRUE (now a subsidiary of SPH Magazines). The two founders would have invested individually, but as we are talking, making an investment into Japan turned out to be more difficult than they thought. However, clickTRUE has good resources, they themselves are entrepreneurs, have multiple websites with huge traffic and they have SPH backing them up.”
echelon 2010′s role
“echelon really helped a lot, it helped us network with a lot of people. It helped us brainstorm and identify who we are a lot more. It took us to the next stage, where we could actually pitch the domestic investors better.
I met Jeffrey Paine from Founders Institute there, and we are just about to welcome him as our advisor. We actually met a couple of investors, but due to difficulties in cross-border investments, they said that maybe they want to look at the investment later, maybe Series A (this is in reference to the clickTRUE deal). ”
Getting 1,000 Facebook fans a day
“This is pretty interesting actually. Basically we buy Facebook ads, but rather than directing the traffic to the site, we have them come to our fanpage, because it’s still on Facebook. Basically we ask a simple question, ‘Are you into Japan?’ ‘Do you like Japan?’.
Basically you can segment your target with Facebook ads, right. We have been targeting segments with interests such as anime and manga. We have about 5 million potential customers abroad who are into anime, Naruto, whatever you know. They are already into Japan because they like this. And I think this method works, because we got over 1,000 fans yesterday (the FlutterScape page has 28,362 fans at the time of writing).
What we do is to freeze our product discovery every night, so they are actually waiting for these fresh product discoveries from Japan. We also ask them questions like, ‘what did you do on the weekend?’, to engage better with customers.”
New affiliate program
We are actually offering an affiliate program on 20 Aug (Update: Hiro comments below that it’s 20 Aug, not 9 Aug) It’s more like a casual — we like something casual you know — it’s not an intensive affiliate program, its like you yourself are interested in buying something, but it may be a little bit expensive. Importing something from Japan is always expensive.
But you love the product and you want to promote that to your friends, like just an emotional plea to buy, over Twitter, over anything, and then you can get some portion of the sales. You log in (to Flutterscape), you browse products you like, you get an affiliate link dedicated to your account, then you are paid per sale. It’s pretty great, I mean, it’s pretty casual.
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