Commmune is a Customer Success Community SaaS product that enables scaled customer success for everyone. In September 2021, we raised an $18 million Series B from Japanese and international investors.
Committed to becoming international
We’ve already experienced a lot of success with our product in the Japanese market, but aren’t satisfied with stopping there, so we’re going international, starting with the US market. We recently opened up a San Mateo office, where our CEO has relocated to build it up, already hiring several international people who don’t speak any Japanese.
Our team of more than twenty engineers is built up of native Japanese speakers, but we’re looking to change that as well. We’ve already switched our language for written technical communication to be English, and several of our engineers have previous experience working in English. Now we’re looking to make the team more international, with the goal of creating an environment where engineers don’t need any Japanese ability to communicate.
Enter an untapped market
While there has been a ton of attention given to the problem of communication with customers before a purchase, there’s little been given to communication after the purchase. With more and more companies adopting a subscription model, businesses need to keep customers happy, giving rise to the methodology of Customer Success.
Because we’re tackling the problem of Customer Success communication from the ground up, rather than trying to adapt some existing tool to better suit its needs, we have the opportunity to create something completely new, rather than just a variant of something out there already.
Tackle interesting technical challenges
Our product combines both aspects of a SaaS product and a community platform, meaning we have to think about both the needs of our clients, and that of the users, giving rise to plenty of interesting problems. We also are operating at a large scale, with lots of data, which both creates technical hurdles and opportunities.
We’re not afraid to try new things
We approach things with a flexible mindset, and are not locked into a certain way of doing things. When our members make suggestions, we’re willing to quickly make decisions to try out something new.
Work remotely from anywhere in Japan
We’re working fully remotely. On Friday, we have an optional office day, which about half our members attend. We already have engineers working across Japan, and you’ll never need to come into the office if you don’t want to.
Our tech stack and tools
- Front-end: Next.js, Typescript, SWR, React Hook Form, Redux
- Back-end: Express, Typescript, Sequelize, ajv
- Native App: React Native → Flutter
- Infrastructure: GCP（Cloud SQL, Cloud Load Balancing, Compute Engine） ,
- Dev tools: Github, CircleCI, Slack
- Monitoring: Datadog, Sentry
- CDN: imgix, Fastly
- Others: Elasticsearch, Retool, Redash, Digdag
- E2E,API test: Cypress, Jest