Co-founder & CEO, Flowbase
I met Jordan through a mutual contact in the workflow automation space a few months back. Flowbase had been growing quietly across the US and parts of Europe, and Jordan was starting to ask the same question a lot of founders eventually ask us: is Japan actually winnable for a product like his, and what would it really take. We ended up talking for close to two hours, and I asked if he’d be open to sharing part of that conversation here.
Flowbase is a workflow automation platform for operations teams, currently serving customers across North America and Europe.
Flowbase helps operations teams automate the repetitive, cross-tool busywork that normally falls through the cracks between systems, things like routing approvals, syncing status updates, and chasing down the same piece of information across five different tools. We started building it because our own ops team was drowning in exactly that kind of work, and we figured if it was painful for us, it was probably painful for a lot of other teams too.
Most automation tools ask you to think like an engineer, building flowcharts and writing conditional logic before you get any value. We designed Flowbase so an operations person with no technical background can set up a working automation in under ten minutes. That’s really the whole bet: automation should be usable by the people who feel the pain, not just the people who can code.
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Honestly, our customers brought it up before we did. We had a couple of US-based enterprise accounts opening offices in Tokyo and asking whether we supported Japanese language operations teams. That got us paying attention, and once we started looking at the market seriously, the size of it was hard to ignore. But I’ll admit our first instinct, just translate the app and see what happens, was the wrong one.
Slowing down. We’re used to moving fast and iterating in public, and that instinct doesn’t translate well here. Japanese buyers want to see that you’ve actually thought things through before you ask for their time, not that you’re figuring it out live. We’ve had to get comfortable spending more time preparing before we ever pitch, which felt uncomfortable at first but has clearly paid off in the conversations we’ve had since.
Don’t treat it as a side quest you can run with twenty percent of your attention. Talk to someone who actually knows the market before you commit real resources, and be honest with yourself about whether you’re willing to adapt your product and your process, not just your marketing copy. The founders I’ve seen struggle are the ones who assumed what worked at home would just transfer over.
Jordan’s story is a familiar one to a lot of the founders we talk to. The product usually isn’t the problem, the assumptions about how to bring it to Japan are. If you’re at the point where customers are asking about Japan, or you’re just starting to wonder if it’s worth exploring, that’s exactly the conversation we have in a free diagnosis.
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