Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Shinsuke Tabata, Co-Founder and CMO at Nulab:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Nulab?
A: Nulab was founded in 2004 in Japan by Nulab’s CEO Masanori Hashimoto and me. Our mission is to create software that supports productive communication and collaboration among teams. We are headquartered in Fukuoka, Japan, with offices in Tokyo, Kyoto, New York, Amsterdam, and we recently opened a new user community space in Singapore. Our software is used by more than 4 million people in over 190 countries.
Q: Can you give us insights into your products?
A: Currently, we offer three products: online project management and bug tracking software Backlog – which has been recently named a FrontRunner by Software Advice, cloud-based diagramming tool Cacoo, and the chat app Typetalk.
Q: Which types of businesses can use Nulab’s solutions?
A: Nulab’s products are meant for all types of teams and companies: it doesn’t matter if you are the marketing team of a small company or the IT team of a corporation, our collaborative products will help you achieve your goals.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Expect to see us grow. We are planning to expand even more outside Japan and to boost our presence in the North American and European markets. In the next months, we will bolster our Product and Business teams in our offices of New York, Amsterdam, and Singapore.
We aim to grow as a brand and to be recognized globally for offering the best software a company can use to increase its productivity. We believe that seamless integration between our products can help our users enhance collaboration and communication ensuring a smoother and successful workflow.
Q: What inspired you and your partners to create Nulab?
A: In 2003, I was working with Masanori in a software company. The job was interesting, but we kept seeing so many unhappy developers and teams because of poor communication and bad project organisation structure.
This is how Nulab was born: we wanted to create software that could make the life of developers and teams easier, help them communicate better, work better, succeed in their projects, and ultimately enjoy their work.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who just founded a new startup?
A: Trust your gut, don’t overthink, take action, and learn from your mistakes. Repeat. And no matter what happens, please keep releasing products, keep trying. Never give up. The most important thing is to find a partner who shares the same passion for what you want to achieve. And if you are determined to succeed, don’t be afraid of failure – it will stop you from making some of your best business decisions.
Q: Your project management software, Backlog, reached an important milestone: 10,000 companies subscribed to one of its paid plans. Why do you think businesses like and trust your product?
A: It’s easy to use, it provides great features, and effectively help companies of all sizes manage multiple projects and teams. I think one of the best aspects of Backlog is that everyone can use it – programmers, designers, marketers… No particular technical knowledge or experience is required.
Our cloud-based software is currently used in more than 50 countries by over 1 million users. It helps teams prioritize tasks and projects in one place while tracking progress in real-time and ensuring clear communication with clients, stakeholders, and other team members. It’s fully integrated with Git and SVN, and it offers many features like file sharing, wiki, tracking bugs, and hosting code securely in the cloud with private repositories.
Recently, one of our customers told us that Backlog is the perfect tool to deliver excellent results for clients while respecting tight deadlines. Best compliment ever.
Q: You’ve recently released Slack integration for Backlog; could you tell us something more?
A: We worked with Slack’s team to offer this new collaborative resource to our users. The new feature allows our customers to receive notifications about their projects directly on Slack. This is the latest addition to the broad portfolio of integrations offered by Backlog. Our project management and bug tracking software also allows our clients to create their own integrations thanks to its API.
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Q: What’s Nulab’s secret recipe for great productivity and collaboration in a team?
A: We have a flat organization, our work culture respects the values that are at the very core of our company: we are open to new ideas, if you work here you are free and encouraged to try new approaches, to be bold. Our first rule in HR is to hire creative people who are passionate about their work. Last but not least, we are committed to creating a positive and collaborative work culture, we want our employees to be happy about what they do and to leave the office with a smile on their faces at the end of the day.
Of course, we also use the best collaborative software in the market! All employees in our company use Backlog, Cacoo and Typetalk to create projects, organize tasks, and communicate.
Q: Why an office in New York instead of Silicon Valley?
A: We didn’t intend to look for developers and investors in Silicon Valley, we already have an excellent team of programmers in Japan. As we have many users in South America and Europe, we chose New York as a business HQ because its time zone facilitates us in our business relationships with these two areas of the world. And you know… I like New York.
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