Striving for 10x Better Experience

Insights Gained in the US

"A great product solves one job 10 times better than any other app."

Around 2022, considering a US base, I visited San Francisco and Austin. Through experiencing local apps, dialoguing with entrepreneurs, and visiting major tech companies and Stanford University, I gained a crucial insight:

The importance of "providing overwhelmingly superior solutions to simple, fundamental needs."

The Bird Scooter Shock

When it came to the need "to move easily and precisely when inspired, more conveniently than other transportation methods," Bird offered:

• Ubiquitous scooters

• Seamless onboarding

• Drop-off flexibility These elements provided users with an overwhelmingly superior experience.

Questioning Teracy's Core Value

"What's Teracy's primary value?" When asked by an entrepreneur in SF around 2022, I couldn't answer succinctly. Well, I did answer, but it felt forced, not deeply internalized at a level I could truly stand behind. I wanted to disappear into the ground.

Looking back, I was explaining that our core was "Record × AI, synchronous to asynchronous conversation transformation." But that wasn't it. While important, it wasn't core. It wasn't addressing people's "fundamental desires."

Below is our second version of the product.

It integrated with calendars and schedule data to visualize and make traceable all synchronous conversations within teams, aiming to asynchronize internal communication and eliminate team context gaps.

However, this had marketing challenges too. The product experience required enterprise sales for implementation, and it didn't capture the characteristics of globally successful products that spread bottom-up from small teams and individuals.

The Breakthrough

With these new insights, I was riding a scooter around San Jose. While riding, my mind was consumed with thoughts: "How can we fulfill people's wishes?" "What do people fundamentally desire?"

Then something clicked in my mind. That's it - "The taxi transceiver."

Pivoting to Transceiver UX

Inspired by Bird and Uber experiences, I reached the hypothesis that "people desire a 'state' where they can talk immediately."

Interestingly, it's not just about being able to talk immediately, but having that state reliably and unconsciously prepared.

That's when the taxi transceiver approach hypothesis emerged. Because it maintains a constantly synchronized state without conscious cognitive load. If we could achieve this state in remote work, we might simply solve current remote communication challenges.

Immediately after moving from San Francisco to Austin, we began validation. I vividly remember walking under Austin's scorching sun, entering a café, and becoming immersed in work.

We created basic Figma prototypes and slides, collaborating with designers in Japan for prototyping. We also distributed actual rental transceivers to team members to validate the value without development.

After gaining confidence, we began development and achieved a test release by late 2022.

We essentially installed a transceiver-like extension on PCs, creating a constant ready-to-talk state.

It eliminated approval steps in communication:

• "Answering" phone calls

• Slack Huddles' "checking availability" and "entering rooms"

• Virtual office tools' "browser access" and "room entry"

• Zoom/Google Meet's "schedule coordination"

The key feature was minimal usage "like a PC extension" with minimized cognitive load.

Below is our third version, the transceiver app. You might call it "Transceiver for Remote Work."

Scrap and Build, Team Dissolution

With this UX pivot, we decided to rewrite code and review the architecture. In the second version, due partly to my inexperience, we were spending about 10 million yen monthly on development without fundamental PMF.

Feeling the need to rebuild from scratch, I made the difficult decision to terminate 15 engineers one by one. With sweaty palms, I remotely conducted interviews from South America, bowing my head to each person who had believed in and followed me.

Rebuild everything from zero - technical foundation, team foundation, UX foundation. I faced this with strong determination. This would be our breakthrough.

That's what I believed.

This Wouldn't Solve the Problem Significantly

After about three months of development, we created the Transceiver app MVP. However, this approach wasn't perfect either. The psychological barrier remained high, and conversations didn't increase as expected.

I was stunned. Given our expectations, it felt like everything before me went black.

Taxi transceivers worked as a low-barrier communication tool because both "drivers" and "dispatchers" had clear roles and mutually understood the expected content of communications. However, in remote work, the psychological cost remained high due to uncertainty about others' availability, ability to talk, and implicit knowledge about time requirements.

Although we had funds from selling our previous cash-flow generating business, watching our account balance steadily decrease, we deepened our thinking in search of one last light.

From there, we would discover the essential element that could change the world.