Thanks a lot Jason. This is very useful. As someone who does not yet have the ability to converse well in Japanese, would this hinder my ability to sell to Japanese people even if they speak English (I am developing a product for the English-language school market)?
You mention you "ask for comments in our welcome email, our support page, and also on Twitter (English) and Facebook (English)." Do you do this in Japanese as well or do you find that people are more comfortable giving feedback in English as opposed to Japanese?
Although I don't have much experience with Japanese companies, sometimes I get the impression that the Western benefits that are usually touted for products (save money or time) do not apply as well here. Have you had experiences like that?
If you are starting out and don't really have many (or any) customers to offer as social proof, what can you say to convince someone to make a change to your system?
Sorry, just realised that's not completely clear. We communicate 100% in Japanese with all our customers.
Those two are examples to make it easier for the English-only speaking reader to understand.
Developing your application completely in English might be very suitable for an English Language teaching tool. But not so suitable for a business critical tool.
We've had varying degrees of success with different ways to sell, but the one clear way to achieve success in Japan as you mention is social proof.
Basically the idea is to look for any way possible to display and feature users who are using your system to other potential users and customers. I've detailed a list of a few ways to do that for our kind of application. You're welcome to use those, or come up with an approach that's more suitable for your product.
Generally speaking, many English learners aren't able or willing to communicate in English, and that's especially true in Japan (I suppose you are not in Japan?).
Note that most English-learning products in Japan are marketed using Japanese, and more often than not the content itself (navigation, explanations, commentary, etc) is heavily in Japanese. For instance, this is Yahoo Japan's site for English learners:
You mention you "ask for comments in our welcome email, our support page, and also on Twitter (English) and Facebook (English)." Do you do this in Japanese as well or do you find that people are more comfortable giving feedback in English as opposed to Japanese?
Although I don't have much experience with Japanese companies, sometimes I get the impression that the Western benefits that are usually touted for products (save money or time) do not apply as well here. Have you had experiences like that?
If you are starting out and don't really have many (or any) customers to offer as social proof, what can you say to convince someone to make a change to your system?