Hello everyone! This is Thomas Larrigan speaking aka Sneaky Leprechaun. As you may have noticed, we are very quiet on social networks or our Discord for a few weeks. No more news, no more posts, and fewer chapters of our light novel are released monthly… Maybe you are wondering if everything is fine or if the Kumiai project is slowly dying, and you would be right.
First of all, I’ll be honest with you. Me and Jessie-ka, we almost put our project on hold. We had a downturn, I would say a loss of belief in what we were doing. I will tell you about our journey with Kumiai to understand the situation and what has been going on with Kumiai for the past few months.
We launched our project in September 2020, so it’s been over 2 years. We went through several emotional phases during these 2 years. In the beginning, everything worked with Kumiai, and a real craze was established. Facebook was surprisingly a pillar of this craze and a very powerful platform to create visibility for us. Thousands of people subscribed to our Facebook page, and every day our posts received thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. The core of our activity was the creation of anime characters and the universe around them. Our goal was to create little stories, games, and videos around these characters. We were looking for content that would appeal to our audience.
We posted a mix of memes and the anime characters we were creating. This harmony worked wonderfully with a very high engagement rate on all the posts, the ideal cocktail to introduce little by little the universe of Kumiai. We even managed to create a buzz with a post that was seen more than 20 million times, which made us gain 50,000 subscribers on Facebook in 1 month, everything was going very fast, even too fast. The other side of the coin is that we gained subscribers from all over the place, the majority of whom were not interested in what we were doing at all. Because of this, our engagement rate to our posts dropped, and consequently, our visibility since Facebook’s algorithm put us less in front because it considered that what we were posting was not attractive to people. To the point of not being highlighted at all.
This buzz was a lesson for us: publishing content that derives from the core of our activity can be interesting to attract people but can be devastating on social networks in case of buzz because it can make your visibility drop for real subscribers. So we decided afterward to reinvent our activity and to do things thoroughly, by creating a real universe with lore and a light novel and yonkoma with our existing characters like Rina Shimizu. We had a little craze for it at the beginning when we launched the light novel, that’s what pushed us to make a promotional video that presents the island of Kumiai, this video that you can find on the home page of this website. However, this craze has never been growing but is more or less stable, we never managed to make the light novel nor the yonkoma take off despite the positive and encouraging feedbacks. Still today, we continue to publish chapters of our light novel to satisfy and thank in some way our faithful audience. But we are still very far from the ambition we have for the Kumiai project. We are facing what is called the « Wilderness Period » in entrepreneurship, that is to say, a more or less long phase that can last weeks or years and which consists in having no or few results during this period, it is the phase where the majority of the entrepreneurs or content creators give up their project. It’s a phase that requires a lot of mental effort for little result. We are still there today, that’s why we have reduced the pace of work on our project.
However, during this summer, I got an idea, I said to myself that we had not done enough and that we had certainly tested everything feasible. We have tried maybe 5% of what we are capable of doing. At the moment, I am learning the Japanese language from home, I am progressing quite well and I am persisting in my learning because I am very motivated. One of my dreams is to be able to read, speak and understand Japanese, that’s why every day I immerse myself in this language. The problem is that distance learning systems are not very effective for the Japanese language, either they are boring or they simply do not work. This is the case for Japanese language learning apps, I am frustrated that I simply don’t have fun when I learn. And what is even more amazing is that despite the high popularity of anime, there is no good app to learn Japanese with an anime or manga theme. And that’s where I got the idea. We have a rich universe and adapted to transfer it into video games, so why not launch a Japanese language learning app that includes the universe of Kumiai? This is exactly what my Kumiai project is all about, bringing useful value to real life through anime. Let’s not forget that our motto is « Let’s moe the world! » so we are going to moe Japanese language learning. We call this project « The GTO Project » in honor of Onizuka, the most badass teacher in Japan.
Today, we are working full-time on this since October, we are in the phase of recruiting the team. This phase takes us time, but we want to work with competent people who understand our vision and ambition so that we will take the necessary time for each step of our GTO project.
I have tried to write a concise article explaining what has been going on with Kumiai for the last 2 years. We have doubted several times about some aspects of our project but we have never given up, we have not done anything with the Kumiai universe yet. Our focus today is the creation of this Japanese language learning app, we will do our best to achieve a high-quality app and we will keep you informed of the progress of course.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the chapters of « Kumiai, Cookies & Genki Club ». 🍪🍪🍪