- First of all, could you please introduce yourself.
I'm Yasuhara, and I run a company called IGREKS in Tokyo.
I started my own business when I was 25 years old, but the company was founded when I was 29. We are still a small company, but we would like to continue to develop useful services for people and improve our financial strength and welfare.
- Could you tell us more about your company's business?
We are mainly developing an ASP service for email delivery service called Y-ml.
In general, mail delivery services focus on how to deliver mails to the inbox as fast as possible by having a large number of multiple SMTP servers and properly performing delivery control, distributed delivery processing, and error control processing.
However, in the case of Y-ml, the primary focus is on "sender consistency," which Gmail also recommends in its guidelines. For this reason, we build and rent a dedicated delivery environment for each customer. It may be easier to imagine that we prepare a dedicated server and manage it for you.
In terms of functions, we have many useful features such as step mail and loop mail, which are ideal for business email delivery.
- It's amazing that you can create such a large system with self-study programming.
I am glad to hear that. Self-study programming is not an uncommon thing, although in reality there are other development hands involved. In my case, I bought a book for beginners of Perl, PHP, and MySQL, and after a few years of repeatedly writing code as it was written, I naturally came to know the everything. Even if you don't understand the structure at first, the first step is to write the code anyway.
The Y-ml program itself is not very advanced, but it is basically a packaging software that anyone can easily use, and is based on the premise of using a relational DB with low redundancy.
Therefore, the software must operate with limited resources and withstand high loads to some extent, so it is difficult to design for efficiency and fault tolerance.
For example, we have to devise a way to make read-only processing as light as possible, and we have to make sure that the consistency of the articles being distributed will not be lost even if the DB or the web suddenly fails.
It All Started When I Thought, "I'll Try to Sell This."
- What was your motivation for developing Y-ml?
To begin with, I had no particular plans to develop an email service.
Before I started the company yet, I tried to modify a simple auto-responder script of American nature to make it easier for me to use.
At that time, I was still an amateur who didn't even know much about the Internet, but I was fascinated by the fun of programming that worked exactly as I wrote it. And as I modified it, I completely rewrote the script and changed it into a script for simultaneous mail delivery linked to a DB. I guess I had a lot of free time at that time.
I thought, "Oh, I'll try selling this," and that's how it all started.
- Please tell us about any difficulties you encountered when you first released the product.
After all, no matter how unlimited it was, there were people who used it in a way that was far beyond our expectations. They are what we call spammers.
But in the end, the impact was also an opportunity to improve fault tolerance and program efficiency, as well as to develop various policies to prevent spam distribution and workflows for spam reporting.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused to those who have received spam mails sent from Y-ml, but we would appreciate your understanding that the service administrator will take strict measures against such senders.
- We also use Y-ml to publish our newsletter. It has all the features we need and is very easy to use.
We are very grateful to your company for having used our service for a long time, and it makes our hard work worthwhile to receive such praise from someone who uses the service as much as you do.
With Y-ml, we have tried to cover the basic functions that are naturally implemented by other companies so as not to stress the users as much as possible.
I think it would be a good idea to start with that as a starting point, and then select a system based on what Y-ml can do, what features it has, and whether the price is reasonable.
Our development policy is to make a system that can handle all kinds of business e-mail delivery situations, and to reflect the users' voices in the development as soon as possible.
You Can Create a Well-Designed Website
Just by Changing the Theme to TCD.
- How did you know about TCD?
Actually, I have known about TCD since it was first released. I've known the representative of your company since before it was founded through the newsletter.
At that time, I think it was the pioneer of the WP template industry. WordPress now has the largest market share in the world, but at the time, movable type was still the mainstream, and companies like L and S were dominating the free blogging services.
I think it is amazing that CEO Nakata was quick to recognize the future potential of WordPress and the importance of design and site branding, and that he was able to focus on this and compete. Of course, I still read Mr. Nakata's newsletter.
- Have you had any positive experiences with it?
We would also like to hear your objective impressions of TCD.
First of all, I think we can all agree on the sophistication of the design. Just by changing the template to TCD, without doing anything difficult, the design and practicality will be enhanced at once.
Depending on the theme, the layout of the elements and the parts that stand out are considered to maximize PV and conversion. I am impressed by the marketing knowledge that Mr. Nakata has put into this area since the beginning.
All of the recent themes are responsive and easy to install, but in addition to that, they also have a full manual, which may be obvious, but I think they are well aware of the times and the needs of the users.
As part of my job, I am also concerned about the specifications of the other side (the management screen side), and I am impressed with the well-thought-out UI design to make it stress-free for users. Specifically, they have tried to minimize unnecessary buttons and input items so that the user's operation time is minimized, and even once the screen is switched, the original input status is retained so as not to stress the user. Other details are also well thought out.
There are a lot of plug-ins distributed by other companies that are well-designed on the front side, but inappropriate on the back side, and plug-ins that are just made and not designed for versatility, but I feel that all of them are easy to use and well thought out in TCD.
From personal blogs to corporate sites, full-fledged owned media and curation sites, WordPress and TCD can be used without stress.
- Finally, please tell us about your future plans.
As I said at the beginning, I would like to make the company more fulfilling. This means focusing on operational efficiency even more than now, establishing a stable PDCA cycle, and creating an environment where it is easy to take on new challenges.
While developing new services, I also want to give young people a chance to challenge themselves and develop services that they like.
I would also like to study more about ICT technology and business administration to improve my skills.
編集後記
My first impression of Mr. Yasuhara was that he was a serious and honest person, but he also said some funny things from time to time, which made the company visit enjoyable from start to finish!
The mail magazine delivery system "Y-ml" is a service that we also use. He has experience in publishing email newsletters, so this is a very easy-to-use email newsletter delivery system that has all the features that email newsletter senders want. He emphasized that he will continue to focus on improving the service, and I felt that it will become the new standard for email delivery services.
IGREKS INC.
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