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This is mind blowing to me if this is true. I didn’t take many business classes so I wasn’t exposed to this definition. I do run a startup and as others have eluded about startup tech CEOs I’m pretty bad at marketing. But saying that, I still can’t wrap my head around how a marketing person can identify a market or create a product for that market. I basically created the company cause I saw a need. It’s my job as CEO to make sure our company is laser focused on solving that need. Solving this need is basically our overall focus but I understand you are probably talking about marketing creating new markets within that scope. Our process of identifying and creating a product and market is all about meeting with potential customers and trying to solve their needs which is a combination of sales engineers and sales and tech leads being consultants and figuring out how our technology can solve their problem. I don’t see where marketing fits into this such that they could go out and create a new market and new product for us..i always thought marketing’s job was to help us better reach those markets, but I had no idea they could identify new markets and create products for those markets. Maybe we see are using different terminology.

I think that goes under the “Japanese are generally clean” explanation. Along the lines of them not wearing shoes in the house, social distancing, washing their hands/bodies regularly etc. The hand cleaning product is actually called “Oshibori” and its usually just a wet towel. I am sure it helps but its not disinfectant or soap.

Yep, originally i believed everyone when they said masks aren’t useful except to keep yourself from touching your face, but after wearing masks I realized it’s also really hard to stop adjusting it.

My point is that it keeps infected from spreading droplets through the air and on those surfaces.

I am so angry at the experts saying masks were not helpful at the beginning of all this.

Sewing Ordinary face masks should help! The lie was that only n95 rated masks help because the virus is so small it goes through ordinary masks, but its not about that. It’s about stopping infected from spreading large amounts of it through droplets.

It’s in Japanese but I found this website on recommendations on how to create a mask: (I had to use Google translate) https://www.cottontimemagazine.com/page/10

To elaborate, yes Japanese are pretty clean by nature and do have social distancing naturally, but everyone is still taking the subway, the government has not cracked down much. Ubiquitous wearing of masks is the only really unique thing i can think of. (Actually even now not everyone is wearing them, but its still a good percentage and as soon as Japanese feel sick they wear masks) So I’ve come to the conclusion that if Japan isn’t just “lucky” (Lucky after 8 or 9 weeks is probably impossible) it has to be the masks.

So assuming it’s the masks, why have masks stopped the explosion we see elsewhere? We can theorize it must have kept the R rate down (Reproduction rate).

But, I do think a lot of people ARE still getting sick here. I think the government is only testing those with very severe symptoms so we aren’t seeing the true extent of the infection rate. I even think I might have had it a week ago as I had (very minor) similar symptoms. The weird thing is we don’t see a lot of severe cases here in japan. The main thing that I believe the masks are doing is stopping droplets getting spread from infected people (Meaning infected people who wear masks don’t spread the droplets as much). I think this reduces the rate of spread, but also I think reduces the amount of viral load that is getting transferred from infected people and can reduce severity of symptoms.

You reduce Infection Rate and you also reduce Infection Severity (reduce viral load) by wearing masks which combined with japan only testing severe cases leads to the results we see now in Japan.

I’m here in japan and have been trying to find an answer to this for the past week. It has to be the masks.

For those in Tokyo, Soul Food House in Azabujuban has some very good Hot Chicken and delivers through Uber Eats.

I’ve been in a similar position as you. I’ve spent the last 8 years building a b2b company. It’s a hard long road. I can hear the unspoken panic in your writing. It feels like you are flailing around and giving up already. You really need to analyze the reason you guys are failing without all the emotion if possible. You say that you didn’t learn anything valuable. That is absolutely not true. Think back to why you thought this was a good idea in the first place. Think about all the lessons learned with your failures. You actually got people to do some pilots. Making money is freakin hard. Ignore the prsssure from investors for a moment. They knew they could lose their money. You need to personally decide if you keep going or do something else. I can promise you it won’t get any easier though if you stay in the startup world.