HugCome, Inc.Yayoi Michimura

Tell us about "GLOBAL CROWN" of HugCome.

HugCome, Inc. runs an online school for kids. Specifically, we run an online English school named "GLOBAL CROWN."

While students can only choose a school in their residence areas for attending an English school, which limits their educational options, correspondence courses taken at home can also involve such issues as difficulty in maintaining motivation. In both cases, parental support is essential. However, I felt that this does not necessarily fit today’s family lifestyles as the number of dual-earner households increases.

GLOBAL CROWN hires bilingual teaching staff to provide quality services. It also controls the quality of teaching staff and provides a matching service for English teachers and students. Moreover, it has a unique system of keeping records of students’ learning history and progress as a way to help students establish a study habit and maintaining high motivation. From the viewpoint of safety, we provide our services on our original app, which avoids the risk of students being exposed to many and unspecified users like education services using Skype.

While other online English schools are also offering services at reasonable prices, GLOBAL CROWN is outstanding in terms of its lesson quality.

Tell us what made you start your own business.

Experience from my previous job gave me a reason to start the company. When I was looking for a job before graduating university, I wanted to join a company where I could create something new. This was why I chose CyberAgent, Inc. I was involved in the management of a subsidiary company and I also worked in the HR department. While I was working as a manager and engaged in hiring and training of new employees, I saw many people who were greatly talented, but were afraid of trying new things, had no goals, or were bad at making decisions on their own.

Meanwhile, since my parents were working as school teachers, they raised me in a way that maximized my intellectual curiosity since I was a small child. When I thought about what made the difference between me and those new employees, I realized that education during childhood had a great impact on the way of thinking and actions in adult. This experience stimulated my interest for education in a broad sense and I came to wish to support childhood education. This is how I ended up starting my own company.

Tell us about the future developments.

When parents start to look for an online English school, they do so in the vague hope to cultivate their kids’ English conversation skills. I want such parents to know about the characteristics of our high-quality lessons as I mentioned above. In addition, I also hope to sophisticate our products so that we can effectively communicate how their kids’ English abilities are growing by showing clear evidence. In addition to our current listening and speaking proficiency courses, I also wish to add reading and writing courses to our lineups.

For the future, I want to create a fun and sustainable online school where we can provide a wider variety of educational services beyond the genre of English conversation school by capturing the interest and curiosity of students and the needs of their parents.

I wish to accumulate various learning patterns into the future and create a school platform that can suggest and provide optimized educational services for individual students according to their personality types and environments.