About

Customer centric, always.

A business must make its customers' lives and businesses better by solving their problems and filling the gap.

The Tokyo waterfront from a riverside walkway, with a small boat crossing

Philosophy

Bridge the gap.

The market is always uncertain, and timing accounts for a good part of business success, so we learn fast and move fast.

What we can contribute is to bridge the gaps between countries, business boundaries, communication hurdles, and cultural differences.

If things are not working well, we have to ask questions whose answers hurt us. We are here to face the brutal reality, not to ignore it intentionally to look good as an agency. We and the customer, as one team, will deal with whatever struggles lie ahead of us.

Minoru Shiina

Founder and representative, Dorado LLC

LinkedIn profile

15+ years in the Japan market
Sets up the research for each product
Reads every brief before it is sent
English, Japanese, and Mandarin

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Founder

The person you'll actually work with.

Years 1 to 15

Fifteen-plus years in the Japan market

Started at a listed logistics company in Japan, then moved into helping overseas businesses succeed here. Clients ranged from SMEs to Fortune 500 companies, across many industries.

2021

Founded Dorado LLC in Tokyo

Built around the philosophy above. Understand the customer first, and you can outsmart the competition.

Today

Runs every engagement personally

Market research, go-to-market operations, and customer success, in English and Japanese. Minoru sets up the research for each customer's products and reads every brief before it is sent.

What we believe

Four beliefs the work keeps proving.

Each one is a lesson the market taught us more than once, and each one changes what we do on an engagement.

Belief 01

What they want is not what they need.

A need is something the customer cannot live without. A want is better to have, and never becomes a necessity. Even a real pain isn't always a need. Companies live with problems that never justify a purchase.

Belief 02

Embrace uncertainty.

All businesses are built on top of uncertainty. We see that as an opportunity for us to navigate the market better.

Belief 03

Business lasts when both sides win.

商売は相手ありき: there is no deal without the other side. We don't do one-way pitches. We are an external firm, but we move as part of your team. Companies that need a better product learn about it correctly, then buy it or resell it, and both sides end up better off.

Belief 04

Outsmart yesterday's success.

Markets, customers, targets, and partners change every time. The playbook that worked last quarter is a hypothesis again this quarter. We treat everything like our first project.

Working principles

Eight rules for how the work gets done.

01 · Learn at speed
Be the fastest to understand this moment
No two situations are the same. The job is to understand this customer, this market, and this moment, not to reuse last year's read.
02 · Reasons to win
Laser-focused on objectives
Walls are the default state of market entry. We look for the reasons something can work before listing the reasons it can't.
03 · Measure and improve
Log every miss
A hypothesis that gets no response looks like a wasted shot. It isn't. We hate waste, so we log every miss and learn from it.
04 · Long-term success
Commit and be patient during the process
When the evidence says go, commit resources at once. When it doesn't, be patient and keep doing what can be done. Drifting between the two is not a decision.
05 · Bad news first
You hear it from us before the numbers
We don't hide things. If something is going wrong, you hear it from us before you see it in the numbers.
06 · Two clocks
Short-term honesty, long-term purpose
Short-term KPIs keep the work honest week to week. Long-term KPIs are why the work exists. We run both.
07 · New tools, proven use
Technology where results justify it
We built our own operating system for this work. We use AI where measured results justify it, not everywhere it's fashionable.
08 · Hard days are the job
Find the move that breaks the wall
Most days in market entry are hard days. The work is holding on through them and finding the move that breaks the wall.

Company

Dorado LLC.

The beliefs on this page weren't written for it. They're what fifteen years of deals, won and lost, left behind.

Company name: Dorado LLC (Dorado合同会社)
Representative: Minoru Shiina, CEO
Founded: 2021
Location: Hamamatsu-cho Dia Building 2F, 2-2-15 Hamamatsu-cho, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-0013, Japan
Business: Japan market research · go-to-market operations · customer success representation
Languages: English, Japanese, Mandarin

Customer centric, always.

Bridge the gap.

Minoru Shiina

The person you'll actually work with.

Fifteen-plus years in the Japan market

Founded Dorado LLC in Tokyo

Runs every engagement personally

Four beliefs the work keeps proving.

What they want is not what they need.

Embrace uncertainty.

Business lasts when both sides win.

Outsmart yesterday's success.

Eight rules for how the work gets done.

Be the fastest to understand this moment

Laser-focused on objectives

Log every miss

Commit and be patient during the process

You hear it from us before the numbers

Short-term honesty, long-term purpose

Technology where results justify it

Find the move that breaks the wall

Dorado LLC.