The overarching trend that is affecting all B2-B businesses is how buyers are changing. B2B buyers are increasingly looking more like B2C consumers. After all, these buyers are buying from B2C online retailers in their free time, and they’ve been doing this for years. RAKSUL is a Japanese hi-tech unicorn that has built hugely successful B2B platforms in the domains of printing, logistics, and TV commercials and is renowned for its transformative marketplaces.

Q.1 Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Founded in 2009, RAKSUL is a Japanese hi-tech unicorn that has built hugely successful B2B platforms in the domains of printing, logistics, and TV commercials and is renowned for its transformative marketplaces. It is a publicly-traded company listed in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It started its operations as a B2B e-commerce printing services platform in 2009 and has further expanded into logistics/delivery marketplace with Hacobell, television advertising marketplace with Novasell, and corporate IT management SaaS platform, JOSYS. Named Forbes ‘Startup of the Year’ in 2018, RAKSUL aims to change the world by reinventing traditional industry structures with the power of the Internet and emerging technologies.

Q.2 What is your company’s vision? 

The founders of RAKSUL envisioned harnessing the power of the Internet and digital technologies to transform conventional industries. Our vision of “Better Systems, Better World” has remained unchanged since its inception, and RAKSUL strives to create new business practices to generate unprecedented value to benefit society at large. With a platform-based service model that focuses on the effectiveness of product development and management of talent in India, RAKSUL is harboring global ambition.

 Q.3 Tell us about your company’s contribution to the Cloud Computing space. How does it impact creating efficiency?

All RAKSUL’s solutions are cloud platforms. RAKSUL harnesses the power of cloud computing and the ubiquitousness of the Internet to transform conventional industry structures and create unprecedented efficiencies within traditional businesses. The true essence of our platforms is to radically transform business models by moving archaic, complex, and less efficient inefficient operations and transactions to the cloud, thus making the business services extremely efficient, secure, and cost-effective to both producers and consumers.

Q.4 What is JOSYS? How did you create this product in record time?

JOSYS is an integrated cloud solution for corporate IT operations management of employee lifecycle. It was conceptualized as a global SaaS product in late 2020. A truly born-in-the-cloud entity, RAKSUL India has played a crucial role in developing JOSYS from the ground up and it was launched for general availability in Japan on September 1st, 2021, well under one year since the first line of code was written. Finding the right talent, rapidly building a seed team, and culturally integrating it globally all equally contributed to creating a full-fledged SaaS platform with great agility and adaptability. The team maniacally focused on achieving MVP and delivered working code incrementally, every single week. Having a set of trial customers who gave RAKSUL continuous feedback, helped immensely and instilled a strong sense of customer discovery in the team. The entire team thrived in the fast-paced loop of hypothesis-experimentation-validation-adaptation.

Q.5 What is RAKSUL’s outlook on developing innovative products that impact its customer?

The customer is at the center of every mission of ours. One of the guiding principles in RAKSUL is being grounded in customer reality, for us to thoroughly understand and solve our customers’ problems. With such an orientation, RAKSUL offers its innovation to the world with its products and services that bring about a sea (of) change in the way traditional businesses operate. At the core of our innovation lies our intent to make our customers’ businesses operate smarter, more efficiently, and securely. With our innovation, not only do we aim to transform conventional industries, but also enhance the lives of millions of people working in those industries. At RAKSUL India, we yearn to take this innovation to higher levels and scales than what would have been conventionally plausible.

Q.6 What is RAKSUL’s strategy in changing the traditional business model through technological disruptions?

RAKSUL aims to alter the trajectory of the industrial evolution and catalyze it with the power of the Internet, which is ubiquitous now. Even today many traditional sectors of the industry are running not so efficiently due to a lack of technological penetration at the service level. At RAKSUL, we are reimagining one industry at a time and infusing emerging technologies to dramatically change their landscape. So far, we have disrupted complex and traditional industries such as printing, logistics, and television advertising by building and operating our hugely popular B2-B platforms. With our fourth line of business, JOSYS, we provide a one-stop solution in the cloud for businesses to achieve increased productivity, cost optimization, and enhanced security of their corporate IT operations.

Q.7 Please share some achievements of RAKSUL under your leadership.

RAKSUL India, a truly born-in-the-cloud entity that came into being right in the middle of the pandemic, has played a pivotal role in creating and successfully launching JOSYS and we are immensely proud of the cross-cultural integration and collaboration we have achieved across our global team. True to RAKSUL’s vision, “Better Systems, Better World”, JOSYS is transforming the corporate IT function by rendering it a whole lot more effective, optimized, and secure for businesses. As of today, we have over 600 businesses exploring JOSYS, which is phenomenal. Most importantly, this is just the start of the journey in realizing its full potential as a global SaaS platform spanning the whole gamut of employee lifecycle management. It is truly rewarding that RAKSUL India has been entrusted with the complete ownership of JOSYS product innovation mission and to that end, we will grow our headcount multifold over the next twelve months in the areas of SaaS platform development, data analytics, and product management.

Three key things led to the fast-paced development of the product:

• A cloud team to create this new business model at a rapid pace
• Putting together all leadership roles necessary for the development of the product – people, technical (what technical?), and operations leadership
• We are not just dependent on full-time employees (FTEs) to diversify the value generation channels. We build products by very diverse and ingenious methodologies and leveraging the ecosystem. We diversified and chose partners, contractors, and FTEs to create an architecture to contribute rapidly to building a product.

Q.8 What is your outlook and roadmap for 2022?

We have three strategic priorities for 2022. First and foremost, we will focus on delivering “customer success” to all the businesses exploring JOSYS as their Corporate IT Management solution. This is essentially the Product-Market-Fit we want to achieve. This will involve extreme agility, running a high-paced hypothesize-implement-validate loop, and effective pivoting based on fast feedback from our customers. Second, we want to rapidly position ourselves to enhance JOSYS in multiple dimensions with a broader tech team. We need to scale up fast. Third, we will lay the foundation to take JOSYS beyond the shores of Japan as a global SaaS platform.

Q.9 Kindly mention some of the company’s significant challenges until now?

Our biggest challenges all have a single cause – the pandemic. Operating 100% remotely, never actually meeting anyone else on the team, and not being able to get in front of a whiteboard to hash things out as a team. Cultural integration would have been easier with the travel and socializing of the cross-functional team. Despite all this, the team has learned to circumvent the obstacles, adapt, and deliver globally.

Q.10 What is your Leadership Mantra?

Adaptation is the core of my leadership style. That is one piece of advice I give to our new employees – being adaptable, keeping an open mind, and being willing to unlearn with as much eagerness as to learn are the keys to being highly effective. As Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” I find this quote timeless and context-free, and it has inspired my leadership style to a great extent.