Work from Home

日本語

• Are you spending too much time doing boring and tedious work, not using your creativity and talent?
• Are you wasting time on meaningless tasks, not learning anything new, and your boss doesn't care?
• Are you tired of commuting to work in crowded bus or train, when you know that work-from-home is possible with today's technology?

Our company started by producing mobile apps that help make sport events more user-friendly. Now we are launching a new app "GroupTiv" for both sports and non-sports use. We are looking for someone to be in charge of marketing in Japan, and potentially help target overseas markets as we grow.

GroupTiv is a mobile app that makes group communication more efficient. It has many possible use cases.

We will start by targeting pre-schools in Japan. Most kindergartens and hoikuen still rely on paper or email for communicating with parents. With GroupTiv app, parents can be informed of urgent matter, or other routine details, all within in one app. Click here to see more detail about this use.

We will also target sports teams and bukatsu. Most sports teams just use a chat group to communicate, which is not ideal. GroupTiv offers a lot of features that can improve the communication experience. Click here for more details.

We are an international team of young* people in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam. We work online, and mostly flexible hours - yes, we are a real tech company!

*The boss Leroy is a bit older, but he is still very young at heart. He sails and plays water polo regularly, and keeps learning new things everyday. Last year he learned to play blues guitar. This year he is learning to play pop piano and windsurfing.

Some of our team are full-time staff, some are part-time. One colleague in Japan has 3 daughters to take care of, and can only work 4 hours a day, which is totally fine.

Every week, we discuss (online) to decide what we need to achieve in the week, and what was the results of last week. Then we go off to work on our own. All of our staff work from home, or in a cafe, or on a beach. As long as there is internet connection.

We use various online tools to track progress and share information. We don't use any paper.

When one colleague has an idea or a problem, we just go online to brainstorm.

Leroy Yue (Founder) decided to quit a very cool job in Hong Kong when he was 30. He was accepted to the London Business School MBA program (consistently ranked among the top 3 in the world). He quit his job half a year before he went to London, to study Japanese at the Sophia University in Tokyo.

25 years later today, he speaks fluent Japanese. He also speaks Chinese and English.

He has worked at senior level of very large companies for many years, in Japan, Hong Kong, China and the UK. He hates the inefficiency, politics and bureaucracy in large companies. He wants results, but he also wants to have fun. Most of all, he hates people wasting other people's time, which is common in large companies.

Leroy thinks that in most office work, only 20% of work done is actually meaningful. If someone takes one hour to travel to work everyday, and works 8 hours in the office, he spends 10 hours but only less than 2 hours of that 10 hours is actually useful.

With us, you don't need to spend time travelling to the office. So you already save 2 hours. And we want to make sure you don't spend time on unnecessary work, so you will have time to learn new skills that can help you work even smarter, produce more creative work. And also to have time to relax, have a chat with your family, play music, etc.

Radio interview of our employee Keiko, talking about the learning opportunity and work-life balance at our company.

We have created an app (GroupTiv) that is now downloadable for iPhone and Android. We don't have many users yet. Still a lot of bugs, and some features are missing, but our programming team is working to improve the app everyday.

As introduced above, GroupTiv can be used for different use cases - for example: for kindergartens to communicate with parents, for sports teams to organize training and competitions, for package-tour operators to arrange trips with customers. And the app is already in English, Japanese and Chinese, so we can target different cities/countries in the world.

The job is to find out which market segment is the best for us - meaning which one will generate most income with least cost.

To do this, we run advertising campaigns on platforms such as Facebook. Each campaign can use different marketing message, or in different media (Text, video). Each can be targeting a different target audience (age, city, occupation, interest, etc). Each campaign has a CTA (call-to-action). We will be able to measure the effectiveness of each campaign in terms of number of downloads, and also number of conversion (from a trial user to a paid user).

Once we find some campaigns that work well, we can repeat in other cities/countries, in the same language or test it in other languages. The idea is to try out different formulas, and repeat those that work. It is almost like looking for good mines.

GroupTiv can also be used for other situations, like in the promotion video above (Family Groups).

If you have read up to here, I suppose you have found this job interesting and exciting. And your English is good enough. If you didn't know some of the jargons, but have google-searched them, and learned something new, that's great. We want to hear from you.

If you have done similar things before, that's great. If you have not done anything like this before, don't worry. None of us knew how to do what we do now when we started. The eagerness to learn is more important than what you already know. However, you have to be reasonably smart to learn fast. If you don't think you are smarter than the average, don't apply.

Also, check out the question below to see if you are the "right fit":

When you are told to something, do you:

1. first think whether the request is meaningful
2. just do it so that you can finish it and get off work

When you are told you are not allowed do something, but you know it should be done, would you:

1. try to convince with evidence and solid arguments
2. forget it and move on

When you don't know how to do something, do you:

1. Google search
2. Ask a friend.

There are 2 ways to do the same task. Which one will you choose?

1. A new method that looks very elegant, and seems to be able to save a lot of time, but requires learning a new skill
2. An old method that is tedious, but is safe because you have used that method before

If you answers are 1, we want to talk to you!

Currently, we are need someone to take care of the Japan market. So you need to be able to write good native Japanese. You need to be able to express complex ideas in simple language. We need your help to create product and marketing materials in Japanese.

You don't decide to get married after one date. You want to make sure you and your new boyfriend or girlfriend are a right fit, before you get married.

Similarly, we think deciding on a long term employment after one interview is an outdated method. With technology, we can be more flexible. Both sides can be more comfortable to start with a task-based arrangement.

The ideal way is that, after understanding each other via online meetings and chats, we can assign some tasks and some learning to you (with payment), just a number of hours per week in your spare time if you are currently employed. If you are not currently employed, things can be much speeded up. After some time, and when both sides are happy, we can arrange for a long term employment relationship, with social security as required by law.

This way you can evaluate us without quitting your current job, and we can evaluate you too.

CVs are boring. We don't want to read them. We want to know how you want to express yourself in a free way.

If you like this job, and you think you are smart and keen to try this job, send us an email with the following:

• Your name (full name and nick name) and which city you live in
• Your phone number and what is a good time to call you (morning, night, weekend etc.)
• URL to your Facebook profile and/or your Linkedin profile.
• Your story - who you are, and what your current situation is (job, relationship, anything that is interesting), and tell us the most unusual thing you have done in your life (work, sport, school, music, anything.
• Anything else that is interesting about yourself and what you have achieved.
• Tell us what you think about GroupTiv.

Check out the following webpages:

https://www.grouptiv.com/schools
https://www.grouptiv.com/clubs

Download the app:

iPhone
Android

Click here. And Google our company name and our founders name (Leroy Yue).