Sakai Will Give Three Small Companies Intensive Help Finding Customers

The number—three—reveals the program’s design. Applicants must be headquartered in Sakai and possess a concrete product or service. A prototype is sufficient. They must also intend to solve a social problem or create new value by spreading that offering. Applications opened August 7 and close August 28. Document screening will be followed by an online interview lasting about one hour.

That timing matters. As of August 23, the three companies had not been selected. Their names and products were not public. Sakai announced a recruitment and support plan, not a completed award. The eventual participants are expected to work through February 2027 and present their experience at an outcomes event around March.

Before selling, decide whose situation changes

A small company’s first description of a new market is often too wide: “older people,” “manufacturers,” “environmentally conscious consumers.” A real sales process needs a narrower answer. Who experiences the problem most often? Who controls a budget to solve it? Are the user and the purchaser the same person? What creates enough urgency to replace the current method? Which department can approve a trial, and from what budget line?

Sakai’s phrase—narrowing the customer and the offered value—means stripping away that ambiguity. Sales is not merely the final stage in which a finished answer is pushed into the market. For a young product, each approach is research. The buyer’s hesitation can reveal that the wrong user was targeted, that the value was described as a feature rather than an outcome, that implementation costs were ignored or that the person in the meeting cannot authorize a purchase.

Loop	The company decides	Evidence sought from the market
Customer hypothesis	One industry, role and use case with the sharpest problem	Frequency, present workaround and the cost of doing nothing
Value hypothesis	A promise framed as time, money, safety, access or revenue—not a feature list	Whether the customer can restate the benefit in the customer’s own words
Sales experiment	A route from contact or introduction to meeting, trial and quotation	Reply, meeting and trial rates; where decisions stall after a quote
Review	Changes to price, target, product, proposal or channel	Whether rejections become reusable knowledge rather than anecdotes

Three early sales do not by themselves create a business. The process starts becoming a business when those three teach the company how to win a fourth customer faster and at lower cost.

Before it was a manufacturing city, Sakai was a market city

There is more than local-development symbolism in running this program in Sakai. In the medieval period, the city flourished as an international port where people, goods and information moved through a wealthy, self-governing merchant community. Trade with Ming China and later exchange with Portuguese and other overseas merchants linked faraway demand to local craftsmen. A port carried not only merchandise but intelligence about what buyers valued.

That commercial information shaped production. Firearms introduced to Japan in the 16th century were manufactured in Sakai. Demand for knives to cut imported tobacco leaves helped establish the reputation of Sakai blades under the Tokugawa shogunate. Metalworking knowledge moved into professional kitchen knives and, in modern times, bicycle frames and components. The pattern was not “make first and hope for a market.” Trade, use and craft repeatedly informed one another.

The history was not a straight ascent. Sakai burned during the Siege of Osaka. Restrictive Tokugawa trade policy and sediment after the Yamato River was redirected weakened the port. Air raids devastated the city in 1945. Yet inland Sakai retained clusters of machinery, metalworking, bicycle, blade, textile-dyeing and incense businesses, while the waterfront accumulated large steel, chemical and machinery industries. The city has repeatedly had to rebuild the combination of technical skill and access to demand.

Small firms are short of people who can open a market

Japan’s 2024 White Paper on Small Enterprises examined the obstacles to finding new customers and sales channels. More than 40% of surveyed managers identified a shortage of the people needed for market development—the most common answer. The 2025 edition found that the smaller the employer, the less likely it was to report actively developing new customers and channels.

This is not simply managerial laziness. In a ten-person company, the president may be handling product development, hiring, financing, quality problems and the largest existing account. Skilled workers are occupied fulfilling orders. New sales activity is uncertain, rejection-heavy and easy to postpone. One unreturned email can be mistaken for proof that no market exists.

The most useful contribution from an outside adviser may therefore be less a famous contact list than a cadence. Every two weeks: whom did the company approach, what did it hear, why did the buyer decline and what will change before the next conversation? Between meetings, an email can correct a proposal or keep a trial from drifting. The accelerator reserves time for a learning loop that daily operations would otherwise erase.

Last year’s four companies showed why stage matters

In fiscal 2025, Sakai divided support into two tracks. The “acceleration” program served businesses with products already on the market that wanted to expand. Forest Bank sought to raise farm income by turning discarded crops into higher-value goods such as gelato. Fuji High-Frequency Industry combined established induction-hardening expertise with laser hardening and laser cladding. Support included customer introductions, fundraising and capital-policy advice, intellectual-property and legal knowledge, and revision and testing of business plans.

The “growth” track served prototypes or newly launched products. O-gai Holdings was building dental infrastructure around mobile dental-care vehicles and digitally produced dentures. ReeveSupport was making care taxis easier to use for older people and their families. Their support included customer approaches, proposal follow-up, analysis of buyer responses, plan revision and practical help with human resources, labor, law, accounting and finance.

The four fields—food, heat treatment, dentistry and mobility support—had little in common technically. That is precisely the point. The shared problem was translating a broad claim of social usefulness into a purchase decision by a specific customer. For 2026, Sakai has combined the earlier stages into one program open to prototypes and concrete services, with sales activity at the center.

The 2025 participants presented their work on March 5, 2026, at Nakamozu Innovation Meeting Vol. 4 in S-Cube, Sakai’s business incubator. The new cohort is also expected to speak after support ends. That is publicity, but it is also a modest form of accountability: knowledge produced with public support should be returned to the local business community.

Will KANDO deliver answers—or leave behind capability?

KANDO Inc. is the contractor for the 2026 program. On its website, the company describes a proprietary method that separates customer-centered ideals, practical solutions grounded in a firm’s strengths and the role that keeps implementation moving. It reports work with more than 200 companies across industry, government, universities and finance. KANDO supported Sakai’s growth program in fiscal 2025.

That history should help. But an accelerator should not be judged only by the number of meetings an adviser arranged. A sale to a buyer introduced by the consultant may produce revenue without producing a durable sales capability. If the next prospect disappears when the connector leaves, the company has not learned how to find a market.

Can city hall become a first customer?

Sakai operates a separate venture-procurement certification system. Products and services generally must have been offered for no more than five years, differ markedly from existing alternatives, possess useful value and have a plausible use within city agencies. Certification can make procurement through a negotiated contract legally possible under Japan’s local-government rules. For a new company, a municipal customer can provide the credibility that unlocks later buyers.

The city is equally explicit about the limit: certification does not promise that Sakai will purchase the product. Selection for the accelerator and certification for venture procurement are also separate decisions. Conflating them would create a false impression that public support guarantees revenue.

Still, the coexistence of the programs matters. The accelerator can help a company learn whom to sell to and why. Demonstration support can establish whether an offering works in a real environment. Procurement certification can open a lawful route for the city to buy an eligible new product. Loans, subsidies, digitalization assistance, S-Cube facilities and the Nakamozu innovation community add other pieces. Sakai is attempting to connect idea, testing, sales and credibility without pretending that one program supplies all four.

The strength—and danger—of going deep with only three

With about three participants, advisers can learn the product, buyer, decision process and financial constraints. They can work on actual proposals and live deals rather than deliver a generic seminar. Small cohort size is both an exclusion and a quality-control mechanism.

Public money creates harder questions. First, will selection favor firms already fluent in applications and interviews? The craft-oriented business most in need of sales help may be the least polished applicant. Second, will the pressure to report six-month revenue turn deep discounts and one-off custom work into “success”? Third, how will the learning from three participants reach the many companies that were not selected?

Visible result	The better question
Number of meetings	Were they with the intended segment, and did they reach the decision-maker?
Revenue	Was gross margin preserved, or did discounts and custom work buy the sale?
Introductions	Can the company reach the same customer group without an intermediary?
Product changes	Did the change solve a pattern across buyers or satisfy one loud customer?
Demo-day story	Will the company share failed hypotheses and corrections, not only a success narrative?

A public accelerator’s purpose is not to make three companies look like winners. It is to turn three companies’ experiments into knowledge that many local businesses can use.

The real reporting begins when the names appear

The next facts to watch extend beyond application and selection counts. Which first customer did each business choose? How did that hypothesis change? How many days elapsed from initial conversation to trial, quote and order? How much founder time and cash were consumed per sale? Can the company continue the process without the adviser? In March 2027, will the outcomes event show only revenue or the learning that produced—or failed to produce—it?

Sakai’s old merchants did not merely admire unfamiliar goods arriving in port. They interpreted demand, communicated it to makers, changed the offer and carried it back to buyers. Today, the port has become the customer interview, online store, public-procurement process or industry exhibition. The commercial question has not changed: who buys, for what reason and at what price?

Six months of work with three companies is tiny beside the scale of Sakai’s economy, and success is not assured. But a manufacturing city has placed the work that comes after invention at the center of policy. The aim is not to praise excellent technology as a local treasure. It is to make that technology reach a customer’s workplace and budget. Whether Sakai can make that journey repeatable will shape its next chapter as a merchant city.