The harder question was whether we could build a business there.

As a co-founder, I owned product and design direction, hired people, selected delivery partners, and contributed to fundraising. I also attended customer meetings and led product delivery. Expansion would bring new responsibilities across all of that work.

I expected to adapt the product. I had less appreciation for how much I would need to adapt my own approach to leading it.

These lessons come from the customers and teams I worked with. They are personal experiences, rather than rules about every Japanese company.

Market opportunity is only the beginning of the decision

Our alternative was to continue growing in New Zealand. We understood that market better, but its size limited the opportunity we saw ahead.

Japan offered a compelling direction for a games business. Pursuing it meant establishing a local operation, building relationships, hiring people who understood the market, and learning how to deliver for customers whose expectations were unfamiliar to us.

The market opportunity made expansion attractive. It did not make expansion straightforward.

Looking back, I see market entry as a decision about the capabilities a company is prepared to build. An attractive market is of little use if the business cannot understand its customers, work effectively with its partners, or deliver what it promises.

For me, the commitment became tangible through hiring and customer work. I helped establish the company in Japan and hired local UX designers. Those decisions were part of entering the market, rather than tasks to complete after the strategy had been settled.

I had to change what I expected from a meeting

Some of my earliest difficulties were about communication.

I would bring an idea into a meeting expecting discussion: questions, challenges, suggestions, and a direction shaped together. Instead, I sometimes found colleagues listening carefully without the exchange I had anticipated. Asking for feedback did not necessarily produce a more open discussion.

I found that frustrating. I was using the meeting to develop an idea, while the people around me appeared to expect something more prepared.

That experience forced me to examine my own expectations. I had treated my familiar way of working as if it were a neutral starting point. It was a preference shaped by the environments I knew.

With the Japanese team, I learned to give more precise direction and make room for detailed briefs and requirements. We needed to work through edge cases explicitly. The preparation required more patience than I initially expected.

I could not judge the usefulness of that work only by how quickly we reached the next meeting or began designing. I also needed to consider whether we had established enough shared understanding to deliver.

A short message is not always a clear message

I remember sending a request or plan in one or two English sentences and seeing a colleague turn it into a much longer Japanese message before forwarding it.

My first reaction was to notice the extra length and effort. I thought I had already been concise.

But concision from the sender's perspective does not guarantee clarity for the recipient. My colleague was communicating across a different set of expectations, relationships, and conventions. The short message I considered sufficient did not necessarily contain everything needed for that exchange.

I learned to pay more attention to what I was leaving implicit.

What was the intended outcome? Which parts were decided? Where did the team have room to explore? What needed to happen in unusual situations?

As the person setting product direction, I had a responsibility to make those things understandable. Repeated clarification was information about the quality of my brief, not simply an inconvenience in the process.

That lesson has stayed with me well beyond Japan. When a team needs more context, asking everyone to communicate more efficiently can leave the underlying ambiguity untouched.

Local design expertise needed a place in the team

I hired UX designers in Japan because understanding the market had to influence the product itself.

My experience in gaming and product design gave me a useful foundation. It did not give me complete knowledge of Japanese customers or of what would make an experience work for them.

Local designers brought knowledge I could not replace with confidence or a translated brief. Hiring them also required me to accept that some decisions needed to be informed by expertise I did not personally hold.

At the same time, I stayed close to customers. I attended meetings to understand their requirements and translate them into product and delivery direction.

Those activities supported each other. Customer conversations grounded the work in a particular brief. Local design expertise helped us interpret and respond to it. My role was to connect those inputs and keep the product moving toward something we could deliver.

Growth depended on how we built

Our early business involved creating individual branded games for clients. Each new campaign brought more development work.

We moved toward a platform that connected advertisers with developers whose existing games could be adapted for a brand. That gave us a more repeatable foundation than building every game from scratch.

The model also created a product challenge. We needed to support different customer requirements while preserving the reuse that made the business easier to grow.

My responsibilities extended into building the delivery capacity behind that model. I issued tenders to companies in India, the Philippines, Russia, and Jordan, and defined criteria for choosing a development partner. I assessed whether their plans matched our timeline and quality expectations.

With limited funding, those choices mattered. A product direction was only credible if we could assemble the people and partners capable of delivering it.

This was one of the most formative parts of being a founder: product decisions, hiring, supplier selection, and funding were closely connected. I could not consider each in isolation and expect the business to hold together.

Customer work made the opportunity real

In Japan, we went on to work with customers including KFC and Kao. I led product and delivery for KFC work, and also for Pita Pit in New Zealand.

Those campaigns gave us concrete opportunities to apply the platform to customer needs. They also kept me connected to the distance between an appealing business model and a finished experience.

A customer brought a campaign objective and requirements. We had to translate them into a game, guide the design and development work, and deliver an experience that fitted the brand.

That work gave substance to the expansion decision. We had moved from believing there was an opportunity in Japan to serving customers there.

It did not make every early assumption correct. It demonstrated that we could build the local capability and delivery relationships needed to participate in the market.

What I carried into later leadership roles

Building iKEMU in Japan made me more attentive to the assumptions I bring into a team.

I became more careful about mistaking silence for agreement, brevity for clarity, or familiarity with a product category for knowledge of a market. I learned to invest in local expertise and to make my direction explicit enough for others to act on it.

It also changed how I think about growth. Entering a new market asks a company to develop new capabilities. The leader has to be willing to change alongside it.

Today, when a team works differently from the way I expect, I try to understand what its approach needs to accomplish. Sometimes the process needs to change. Sometimes the brief needs to improve. Sometimes I need to give people the space to apply knowledge I do not have.

Japan made that responsibility difficult to overlook. I arrived with a product ambition. Building the company required me to become a more adaptable leader.