Nabetomo: Japan's Senior Conversation Service

From late 2025 through the summer of 2026, I joined a Japanese startup called Nabe, based in Nagano, Japan, as the lead engineer and CTO. Our primary product was Nabetomo, a conversation service connecting Japan’s elderly with younger generations through weekly or biweekly scheduled online conversations.

Last month, we decided to shut it down. Here’s what happened.

Auspicious Beginnings

The concept for Nabetomo was born years ago when the founder and CEO worked at an elderly care facility back in the US. He witnessed countless individuals undergo rapid and wholly unnecessary cognitive decline, even while their neighbors maintained their liveliness seemingly without effort.

The difference? Regular visitors. Social interaction.

In short, conversation.

Today, Japan’s population has over 36 million people (29% of the population) aged 65 and over. Many are siloed away in their own homes, isolated by time, space, and technology.

Meanwhile, research and anecdotal experience agree that regular, stimulating conversation extends healthspan. A company that provides meaningful “conversation-as-a-service” to Japanese seniors has the potential to be subsidized by national and prefectural governments.

The stars were aligned. A fast-moving startup could make it happen.

Product-Market Fit

As with any early stage startup, our primary concern was product-market fit: does the problem exist, and does our solution resolve it?

The problem: elderly individuals are lonely. The relevant parties are the individuals themselves, their immediate family (usually the children), and their caretakers (e.g. an elderly care facility). Each one deserves a separate marketing strategy.

So we set up an online conversation platform with built-in scheduling. We collected a small army of young, motivated college students and early career professionals willing to chat it up with an elderly person online. In fact, this core of individuals was to be our only organic success: despite zero advertising, people from all walks of life frequently contacted us to get involved.

Then, we executed a number of marketing campaigns targeting specific parties. We sent mailers, attended events, got on TV, and ran Internet ads on multiple platforms. With each experiment, we sought a strong signal that someone understood the value in regular conversation - and was willing to pay for it.

Unfortunately, we never discovered that signal.

Retrospective

We actually collected a fair amount of interviews and analytics data throughout the campaigns. As a result, we have a theory about why the conversation service failed to take off.

The theory consists of 3 primary reasons.

1. Low Technical Literacy

Even from initial tests with elderly users, we knew technical literacy would be an issue. Computers, especially phones and tablets, remain impenetrable to large swathes of the senior population. Most of this generation never used touch devices on a daily basis.

We worked hard to make the technology self-driven and accessible. But it’s an uphill battle when the user is not sure where they’re displayed on the screen, can’t recognize buttons on the screen, and ultimately forgets it’s time for a conversation. Our most successful users were always individuals joined by their child or facility manager, helping navigate the technical issues as they arose.

We think it will take another generation or two for the average senior to be comfortable joining an online conversation using a tablet.

To compound the issue, seniors that don’t use technology are therefore isolated from internet-based marketing campaigns, making it expensive to reach them directly. Ultimately, we did not discover an effective way to tell seniors about Nabetomo directly.

Next, we targeted their children.

2. Cultural Etiquette Towards Parents

In order for a middle-aged Japanese person to get their parents to use Nabetomo, they must first have “the conversation”: they must broach the topic of aging.

We found that there’s a strong cultural reticence around criticizing those older or more experienced than you. We might have a wildly positive conversation with the child of a potential customer, only to later conclude with, “I just couldn’t talk to my mom/dad about it.”

We never found an appropriate way to address this tension. We can reach middle-aged Japanese individuals, but many are reluctant or outright unable to have that conversation with their parents. This experience put the brakes on our marketing experiments for the children of Japanese seniors.

This left us with only one target for marketing: care facilities.

3. Reputation & Elderly Care Facilities

Care facilities play a vital role in caring for Japan’s aging population. Although marketing to these organizations is generally a slow, manual operation, the potential to improve the lives of so many people is worth it.

In our conversations with elderly care facilities, we frequently experienced rejection, but not because they denied that Nabetomo could help residents.

Sometimes, lack of interest or the inability to dedicate staff towards handling technical literacy issues were cited. But the most important basis of rejection was rooted in organizational defensiveness: the facility could not offer additional, paid online conversation time because even offering such a service implies residents do not already receive this level of care.

We couldn’t offer a strong enough counterbalance, resulting in a failure to create a market from elderly care facilities in Japan.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we believe an online conversation service is still a fantastic way to enhance the lives of elderly people in Japan. But, today is not the day. We couldn’t untangle the intricate web of technical and cultural barriers - but, perhaps, a few decades of gradual change just might.

Thanks to Michael and David for reading this before publishing!