Importance of expressing real dreams

Starting a venture company is about expressing your thoughts and dreams, getting people convinced and trusting your business plan, then getting invested with seed money. So, the importance of your dreams is relatively important. However, at the process of failing in establishing the initial business model and changing it gradually until the business became real, I lost my habit of expressing my dreams. I came to express our business in terms of real numbers such as profitability, revenue, growth, etc.

There is a phrase "paper-ware" which expresses software only written on presentation papers that doesn't work yet. When you initially want to convince your investors or customers with your new system, you tend to express things right out of your brain, without having proved it to work properly. As you keep on doing that, one day, you'd realize that you have become almost like a liar. The same thing happened to me.

In the initial days of CACHATTO, things we could do were unlimited. We promised all the possible implementation of new features and said that they would be delivered soon. As we accumulated many promises to customers, quite frequently failed to deliver those features, we started to feel like we had been deceptive. I was not clear about the boundaries between lies and deceptions; if you keep on expressing your discreet dreams for too long, they'd become to feel like lies. I simply thought lying was not good, so I stopped it, and shut down talking about my dreams.

Last week, we had a press release event in Kochi about our new Technical Center opening there and met with the governor. The governor was enthusiastically expressing his dreams to improve Kochi with whatever resources they had. Also, I met with an ex-CEO of an established game company in Japan, who said financial numbers and future dreams were equally important. Another occasion was that we had our users' conference in Osaka talking about the future of our product, then one of our customers expressed to me a little of his disappointment that my presentation lacked an inspirational dream. These are indications that I need to start concentrating on the company's future and the importance of expressing our real dreams again, just like I used to when I started as a venture company.