Lumosity’s Journey to Japan

btrax first connected with Lumosity in the summer of 2014 to help them improve their Korean and Japan mobile UI. In the same period, we interviewed their CMO, Joshua Duyan (who has since left Lumosity), about their Japan marketing strategy and published an article on our Japan blog.

Recently, we had the chance to sit down with Lumosity’s International Expansion Lead, Fabian Seelbach, and catch up on what the top online brain training startup has been up to ever since.

1) Lumosity has become one of the most popular brain training apps with more than 70 million users. What kind of audience are you trying to reach?

With more than 70 million members in 182 countries, our focus is on making brain training accessible to everybody globally. Given our origin in the US we are of course more well known there, but a very significant share of our new users are from outside of the United States. Looking forward, we hope to grow our already substantial international presence even more.

2) The online brain training market has become increasingly competitive with many players. Who do you consider your competitors and what’s your special sauce to differentiate from them?

We are very excited to see other startups from all around the globe join us in our quest to make brain training accessible for everybody. One area we particularly emphasize at Lumos Labs is our work with the scientific community to collaborate on studies to advance cognitive research.

3) Lumos Labs has partnerships with many companies and organizations. How do you start conversations with potential partners and what company would you most love to collaborate with?

We partner with a number of organizations, but some of our most important partners are in the scientific community. A lot of the conversations with our science partners start through the Human Cognition Project (HCP), our platform to facilitate more efficient and comprehensive studies of human cognition and cognitive training.

Right now, we are involved in over 60 projects and have over 100 research partners investigating a wide range of scientific interests. We value all of these partners tremendously and are always interested in meeting potential new collaborators. Cutting-edge cognitive research happens all around the world — we would love to partner with research organizations everywhere!

4) Lumosity has expanded into offering apps made for kids with Lumikids. What other areas are you looking to expand into?

We have a number of exciting new features in development at the moment, many of which originated from customer feedback — we’re always looking to our users to understand their wants and generate ideas for ways to help them engage with Lumosity. Some areas we’re exploring right now include sleep, mindfulness, and applied skills like vocabulary.

5) Lumosity launched in Japan in December 2014. In the past, you expressed that the Japan market was the most important market for Lumosity in 2015. Where are you at in the Japan market today and what lessons have you learned?

Following the launch of our mobile apps in Japan in December 2014, we have seen tremendous growth in Japan. Lumosity membership grew 3x during 2015. Japan was the first market we launched a local language app in, followed by our other languages in the first half of 2015. After focusing on Japan in 2015, we are planning a more balanced approach between our international markets for 2016.

6) What’s next for Lumosity in evolving the product and growing globally?

We are making significant investments into growing our global membership and are very excited by the progress we have made in 2015. To further accelerate our growth in 2016 we are investing in our international operations based in San Francisco. We now have an International Product Marketer leading our efforts for each one of our markets. Additionally we are continuing work on the localization of our product to improve our program’s accessibility and engage our international users.