Growth Is Fun! A CEO × COO Conversation on How to Make It Genuinely Enjoyable

To mark the launch of "Hero Magazine," CEO Kurose and COO Sasatani sat down for a conversation. What do they want to communicate through this growth-focused media — and what do they hope to achieve?

── StoreHero aims to become "the global No. 1 in the Shopify × growth space." To better understand the concept, could you tell us again about how the company was founded?

(Kurose) After gaining experience at several SaaS startups in digital marketing and serving as country manager in Japan for a Silicon Valley-based company, I co-founded StoreHero with Sasatani in 2019. During my SaaS days, I had a strong desire to expand our products globally, but it was harder than expected. Taking the country manager role at a US company made me realize that most of my work was focused on the Japanese market — and if I truly wanted to take a Japan-born product global, I would have to do it myself.

(Sasatani) While still in university, I interned as an engineer at a company providing cross-border e-commerce services and worked on new business initiatives. After graduating, I was involved in services that facilitated online M&A transactions, as well as digital marketing including advertising, before co-founding the company with Kurose.

(Kurose) Sasatani and I had been talking things over long before we actually started the company. Many of StoreHero's current leadership team first met during those startup days.

── So you're aiming to expand StoreHero's products globally.

(Kurose) At our scale, we decided it made more sense to build products that run on top of a globally expanding platform, rather than trying to become a platform ourselves. The question was which platform to choose. Shopify had just started expanding into Japan at the time. Given our backgrounds in digital marketing, we felt we could add real value for e-commerce merchants, and so we chose Shopify as our platform.

(Sasatani) At the time, Shopify was popular globally but not yet well known in Japan — we saw it as something that was about to take off. We started with a loose division of roles: I handled product development, while Kurose managed merchant relationships.

(Kurose) Most Shopify merchants at the time ran their businesses entirely online, so we launched a service where we rented retail space and set up pop-up stores on their behalf, holding their inventory. Drawing on our SaaS experience, we believed that software-only services would eventually struggle to differentiate — that some analog element would be necessary. So we launched what would now be called an OMO (Online Merges with Offline) service. But the COVID-19 pandemic made that difficult. We decided to pivot and focus on what merchants actually needed: store development and growth support (sales improvement) for Shopify merchants.

── There are many Shopify Partners out there, but StoreHero has a strong reputation for growth support. So merchants were already coming to you for sales improvement help early on?

(Kurose) We offer Shopify-specialized growth consulting as a service. Merchants we work with also use our internally developed product, "StoreHero." It's a product designed to help set KPIs for growth initiatives, translate those goals into concrete daily tasks, monitor results, and drive continuous improvement.

(Sasatani) Take CRM as an example — there are many options that are user-friendly or have excellent UI. But the products with the widest global adoption tend to have a clear philosophy behind them, and I think users stay with them because they genuinely believe in that philosophy. If you find a philosophy you resonate with, it naturally feels right to use the product that embodies it. We have our own philosophy around e-commerce growth, and we offer "StoreHero" to make that philosophy easier to act on.

── You have a Shopify app for live commerce called "LiveHero." Isn't that also now a product you can expand globally through the Shopify App Store?

(Kurose) When tackling specific initiatives, if there's an app that doesn't exist yet but would be useful, we'll sometimes develop it. That said, just because an initiative becomes easier to execute doesn't suddenly make sales shoot up — and even when it does, we believe that kind of boost tends to be temporary. We're deeply committed to sustainable growth, and we believe sales are something you build yourself. We want to offer "StoreHero" alongside that mindset.

(Sasatani) The people who understand a product and its end customers best are the merchants themselves. When people hear "growth support," they sometimes expect us to come up with some spectacular strategy that will go viral. But that's not what StoreHero actively provides. What we do is support the operational side: helping merchants arrive at ideas like "this initiative might really resonate with our customers," execute consistently, review the results, and pursue further improvements.

── Has "StoreHero" led to any tangible results?

(Kurose) Through the product development process, our internal team has developed a shared understanding of how to think about and approach growth. In the past, merchant meetings typically meant having a meeting agenda, monitoring data in various spreadsheets, and scheduling sheets — each in their own format. But through building "StoreHero," a standard framework has taken shape, making it easier for team members other than myself to offer advice and support. Even junior members can now work more effectively within that framework, making it easier to propose initiatives that are grounded in goals and translated into concrete daily actions.

Merchants who have been using the product for some time will now look at "StoreHero" proactively before we make any suggestions, saying things like, "These numbers are showing up, so I'm going to try improving the operation here." Growth comes from accumulating small daily efforts, so when merchants take initiative themselves, progress accelerates dramatically. The gap compared to waiting for a consulting firm to come to you with proposals is significant.

(Sasatani) E-commerce operators are busy, and sometimes day-to-day operations leave no bandwidth for focusing on growth. Going forward, AI integration will likely enable greater automation as well. "StoreHero" is also designed to consolidate data across multiple channels — for example, making it easy to monitor GA4 and Shopify data in a connected, digestible view. Our goal is to support merchants so they're not just surviving daily operations, but actually thinking about growth initiatives and executing them as part of their everyday workflow.

── What message do you want to convey through "Hero Magazine"?

(Kurose) "Growth" as a concept still feels somewhat vague and loosely defined. Through content from "Hero Magazine," we hope to articulate it clearly. For content we produce ourselves, we want to cover everything from the underlying philosophy to concrete step-by-step processes. From interviews with merchants, we want to capture honest, real-world voices about what they actually tried and whether it led to results. It might seem unglamorous at first glance, but we'll be sharing things that are genuinely useful in practice — so please look forward to it. Above all, growth is something to enjoy. That's the message we want to get across.

(Sasatani) Feeling like you need to grow sales, but not knowing whether what you're doing is actually right — that's exhausting. StoreHero's approach is to propose a logical, structured operational framework rather than appealing to intuition or creativity alone. Data should be at the foundation of that — but even experienced merchants who have been at it for years often aren't making full use of the data they've accumulated. That's a real shame. Through "Hero Magazine," we want to share a data-driven way of thinking and working, so that merchants can approach growth with genuine enjoyment and a sense of purpose.