Story of Nakama App Connecting 10,000 People Through The Spirit of Japan.
- Wayne Daniels
- Feb 23
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 24
In March 2016, I was asked by my closest friend to help build a one-stop-community-app that aggregated all of London's Japanese cultural community.
Given our history in successfully building previous startups within this space, I was keen to take on the challenge of building what he called 'Japan Nakama', a very strong brand name. Nakama in Japanese translates to 'Conrads', 'Friends' or 'Partners' in the community or working sense. Your colleagues at work are your Nakama but so are your team mates in a game of football. The word Nakama was popularised by one of Japan's biggest exports, anime, and more specifically the anime called One Piece, a band of misfit pirates with honest intentions.
Japan Nakama's goal was to unite all of London's Japanese events and services from Restaurants to Cafes all under one roof through a mega culture app.
Deciphering the core pain point of the biggest challenge for Japan Nakama.
There was a key element that united people that had an affinity towards Japan and we discussed for weeks around what that core element was, in the 'HackSpace' our dusty community-shed co-work space in Hackney Road, London.
People who are attracted to Japan have a combination of high EQ and IQ an affinity towards art, spirituality, technology with an openness to collectivism. All aspects that represented slithers of Japan. As CMO, I was tasked with the challenge of incorporating all of that into a single sentence. After much copywrighting and deliberation, the final sentence came to me on a bathroom break, to which I bolted back into the room with my friend (now CEO) and his partner and yelled;
"..connecting people through the spirit of Japan!!!"
After consensus and CEO final approval, we began embedding those values throughout all of the production pipeline.
The formula was:
Spirit of Japan x Connect People = Japan Nakama
For context, in 2006 my friend and I previous built and ran a web media agency together and by 2007 we built one of the first 'Deliveroo' like EPOS bicycle delivery services in partnership with a Japanese Restaurant (Ribon Restaurant) right in the middle of London St Paul's, the epicentre of the financial district (and financial crash) with customers from Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Sumitomo, Denton Wilde etc.
During this time, Meetup.com was the key events platform for Japanese culture related events, such as language exchanges, origami classes, shimasen lessons and the like. We concluded that best way to capture this audience was to RSS and scrape event data and output it as a single flow. So, Japan Nakama App was conceived to be available across Android, iOS and Browser Web App.
The core narrative for the app was incredibly important, as our target audience were used to anime streaming websites full of junk ads and malware at click away. We needed a narrative that spoke to their hearts with a clean UI/UX. A core pain point was the inability for people to be stationed in Japan all year around. Secondly the fear of missing out on Japanese cultural events that were happening frequently around London but weren't overly disclosed due to lack of marketing experience. The Nakama App led with the copy: "Find a Japan hidden in London" . V1 of the app was humble, but eventually scaled to 10,000+ downloads with a little magic.
I created this first app trailer using the voice of the CEO and his partner.
Our B2C audience was the most straightforward part of our work, but onboarding Japanese companies for features, partnerships and paying clients was the bane of our existence.
This is because the bugs in Japanese culture are its features.
Coveted cultural traditions which have been passed down for centuries has remained that way due to limited external influence from the rest of the world.
And in business, there is no exceptions to the rule.
Myself and the CEO spent months cold outreaching to over 500+ Japanese vendors, services, local government reps to break into the industry with little success.
Only with 2 years of compounding social presence from attending public events such as Hyper Japan, The Japan Society, Japan Foundation, Japan Matsuri and picking up Japanese interns and Western interns with client lists, and creating exceptional video coverage of Japanese services did we begin to get recognition and exclusive event invitations.
The help of CEO's partner (a Japanese national living in the UK) who worked for a Japanese Advertising and PR firm with an outpost in the UK managed to get us backdoor passes to events that would've required 10 years of relationship building to pass the red tape.
We had the fortune of meeting Japan's ambassador to UK and local government delegates several times at arrangements, many in which were keen to promote Sake, Whiskey to new audiences.
It was an honour to build friendships with those who were clearly and respectfully our seniors, yet, it was a small world with people that we'd previously crossed paths with during our delivery service era with the St Paul's Restaurant in London's finance district.
We began to see a lot of traction for Japan Nakama after doubling down on media content with 'Nakama Visits' series where we'd send someone from the Nakama team or community to review the experience and record the experience in exchange discount codes for our audience. We started to bring on interns who can take over writing, videoing, editing and which had all been done by myself and the founder at the time. The team grew.
Autumn 2017 was a big breakthrough moment, as the founder of Nobu UK got in touch after a "random" cold outreach DM on Nobu's instagram page.
A new brand of Nobu called 'Ichibuns' were launching a new Japanese inspired burger restaurant between London's China Town and Soho.
We had the honour of filming, reviewing all dishes with a small crew of 4.
That video went on to get the attention of many more venues across London, which in hindsight was our right to passage to the entire industry.
People spoke about Nakama without us instigating the conversation, and we witnessed friendships, businesses and relationships being forming from events that we had orchestrated.
The dream of Nakama had became a reality.
With a growing team of regulars and community contributors onboard, myself and CEO had more space to think about the overall vision of Nakama. We took on several meetings with 3rd parties with a scope to reach beyond.
We explored long stay tourism in Japan's remote villages, supported by a local government representative Akemi Solloway of Aid for Japan that we met at an government hosted event. Japan's demographic issue with ageing population was an issue that we were both aware of and sought to contribute to repopulating remote and desolate villages in Japan under the Nakama banner.
However, even with a local government representative, the bug which is also a feature arose. The locals were worried about the culture clash and the inability to preserve cultural protocols and heritage. This conversation is one that was started after Japan opened itself to the world after Sakoku the 200 year policy of isolation, we had doubts that we could end it in a couple of years, hence we focused our energies on improving the App UI/UX and high quality local events.
We improved to Nakama App - V2 and trailer.
END GAME: NEO JAPAN
We introduced the concept of Neo Japan one of the most significant and impactful things we'd ever done.
Neo Japan's concept was the idea of a permanent Japanese culture hub, where the community could host events, vendors could bring their services all under one futuristic style environment, a Neo Japan outside of Japan.
We wanted to test the thesis with popup events across London, and partnered with 'My Neighbour The Dumplings' a Japan themed restaurant that was inspired by an anime. The most fantastic venue with multiple breakout areas and an indoor but outdoor garden terrace, which often hosted Ongaku Yoru (Song Night) a DJ pair who sourced original City Pop (80's pop music Japanese Vinyls). We wanted to test the thesis with popup events across London.
We partnered with 'My Neighbour The Dumplings' a Japan themed restaurant that was inspired by an anime. The most fantastic venue with multiple breakout areas and an indoor but outdoor garden terrace, which often hosted Ongaku Yoru (Song Night) a DJ pair who sourced original City Pop (80's pop music Japanese Vinyls).
The challenge was bringing all of the years of marketing narrative under one campaign,
"A Japan hidden in London" under one roof a "Neo Japan - an immersive Japanese event"
We utilised the analytics from Nakama App to craft a data driven campaign on Social Media ran paid ads on it, the result for madly viral.
The success of the event was bottlenecked by signups to the app in order to finalise attendance, an amazing flywheel which worked much better than we had anticipated.
The event included Japanese mini market, indie games by local creators - film talks by local artists - live music performance by Japanese artists - 80s Japanee City pop by Ongaku Yoru, and food and drinks by the restaurant, every Nakama's dream experience.
Oversubscribed 300 capacity but 2000 attendees
The restaurant and Neo Tokyo venue My Neighbour The Dumplings had a capacity for approx 300 people. Our team massively underestimated our reach and appeal and had 2000 attendees.
Which led to queue of people that stretched around the block and down the road which almost got us in trouble with the local council due to lack of permits and crowd management.
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