Episode 65: The Reality of Trinity’s Unique Programs, Part 7: Behind the Scenes of 20 Years of the Trinity Blog

“Real Management | The Real, Unscripted Stories of CEOs, Told as They Are—Successes and Failures in Corporate Management”

In this program, I, Tetsumi Hoshikawa, aka Hossy, talk candidly about management and what goes on behind the scenes, based on my own experiences.

Real Management isreleased every Friday morning at 6:00 a.m..

Good morning. I’m Tetsumi Hoshikawa, aka Hossy, a free spirit.

This series has dragged on far longer than we originally planned—so much so that we don’t even know when it will end. But as I say every time, it’s exactly these kinds of “digressions” that AI can never imitate. As the conversation goes off on tangents, my own past experiences naturally come spilling out, so it’s not the kind of thing AI could suddenly start talking about.

I think that’s exactly what gives meaning to “a human being speaking,” so I’d like to keep talking about all kinds of things.

We still have plenty of topics, but the first one is Trinity’s blog. It’s called the “Trinity Blog,” or “Torilog” for short, and we’ve been running it ever since we founded the company in 2006.

In the beginning, I was the only one writing it, and if my memory serves me right, there was even one year when I challenged myself to write a post every single day.

To start with why we even run a blog: corporate websites and product pages are usually neatly put together in a polished, formal style, aren’t they?

I do think it’s good to have that kind of information neatly organized like a catalog. But rather than those surface-level details, what matters more is the story behind them. This “Real Management” program is exactly the same—we don’t just want to introduce finished products; we want to share the thoughts behind them and the struggles we went through.

There are things we really want to say, but if we only talked about those things, it wouldn’t work as a product catalog, so we keep it to a certain length. But in truth, there are many more feelings and ideas we want to convey. I thought a blog was the right place to share those behind-the-scenes stories.

And then there’s myself. In the early days, there was a strong sense that “I, Hossy, equaled Trinity,” so I shared my way of thinking, my experiences overseas, what trade shows were like, and so on.

We used it as a place to communicate that kind of human side and those stories. Back then, there were also many people who wrote blogs themselves.

As a business, we are B2B, but in reality it’s B2B2C. Our end customers are consumers. With B2B, things are completed between companies, right? Consulting might be like that too, although consulting often involves supporting clients so they can do business with consumers, so there is that aspect as well.

For example, with some kind of system development, that business system is provided as B2B and ends there. But our products reach the hands of users who use smartphones and computers, so it really is B2B2C.

Exactly. So I’ve never really written content aimed at business customers, like mass retailers or people in distribution. The major, major purpose of this communication is to get people to like the products and the brand. Our ultimate goal in communicating is to create fans. I don’t think that many people become fans just by looking at a product catalog.

No matter how good the product is. People come to like something not through the product catalog, but by learning who made it and what kind of thoughts went into it. If they think, “If this person made it, then this product must be good too,” I think we can already count them as fans.

trinity.jpI don’t think people become fans just by visiting the site and looking at product information. When they can see the stories behind the products and the background I mentioned earlier, they might think, “Oh, these people are interesting.” I think the things that make people like us are the behind-the-scenes stories and the less rigid communications from inside the company.

Exactly. I think that kind of thing is extremely important. So I kept writing the blog myself for a long time. Some posts were really short and others were long, and I believe I’ve written around 3,000 articles myself.

I kept doing it for about 19 years. In the latter half, we shifted to having all employees write, so the frequency of my own posts decreased.

As I said earlier, there were years when I wrote 365 posts in a year. Even now, they’re still on Trinity’s site asblog articles, and you can sort them by author, so if you’re interested, please take a look.

I myself had been writing for a long time, but as the number of employees increased, everyone besides me was doing all kinds of work inside the company, right? Some people sell, some people make products, some handle marketing so people learn about them, some support customers, and some place orders, import goods, and ship them. In our company, those are the people we call operations.

Our products exist because there are people involved in all these different ways, so we changed the blog into something that everyone in the company would write.

As a system, basically everyone writes. Their turn comes around roughly once every two weeks, and they’re properly assigned the task and write a post.

Some people want to write, while others aren’t very good at it. For people who struggle with writing, we might use an interview format. I think customers find it interesting when all these different inside stories from Trinity come out in that way.

It doesn’t have to be about work—it can be about going on a trip, or something someone is really into. I don’t think other companies in this industry were doing that. Even if they had blogs, they mostly introduced new products. Updating every single day and writing about anything at all may have been unusual in this industry.

We kept doing it and surpassed one million page views. If my memory is correct, I think we exceeded three million page views annually. At that point, we were getting page views comparable to a small media outlet. Trinity’s site was originally a site for introducing products, but the blog started bringing in far more traffic.

At some point, the development team discovered articles that would absolutely go viral—or at least reliably earn page views. It was content that would definitely increase traffic when we wrote about it. Can you guess what it was?

Exactly. As a side note, when a new iPhone is released, Trinity naturally has new products ready for purchase in stores.

That means, of course, we know what kind of iPhone is coming. We already know around spring. But as a matter of policy, we didn’t leak that information little by little to get traffic just because other people didn’t know it.

So even while writing around 3,000 articles, we never revealed confidential information in advance. After all, when Apple officially announces something, people around the world should be able to be surprised by it and think, “That’s great.” If something comes out that you already know about, it’s not that exciting, is it?

I mentioned this briefly on the podcast before, but going to a product announcement and seeing something you already know is coming just isn’t interesting. In reality, there are lots of leaks out in the world, so recently many people may watch announcements thinking, “This kind of thing is probably coming.”

Especially because we also do this out of our love for Apple, we decided not to share that kind of leaked information in advance. We only put things out after Apple has made its announcement.

That said, we naturally understand the fine differences between iPhones, but from the perspective of ordinary users, many of those differences are hard to tell. For example, what’s different between the iPhone 15 and 16? I mean in terms of appearance, not functions. There may be differences like color and so on, but still.

With the current iPhone 17, the camera area has changed significantly, so people might say, “Something has changed,” and the iPhone Air has a completely different shape from previous models, so that difference is definitely obvious at a glance. However, with the main iPhone series, the subtle differences between the iPhone 15 and 16 are generally quite hard for most people to distinguish.

To make things complicated, the same case cannot be used for the iPhone 15 and 16. They look exactly the same, but the case doesn’t fit both. However, screen-side protective films or glass protectors can sometimes be used interchangeably. What the development team discovered was that explaining this with diagrams works really well.

Right. We would also publish the drawings properly and point out things like how the shape of this radius is different, or how the button placement is shifted by about 2 mm. We would put out those kinds of small differences soon after Apple’s announcement. After all, people can’t tell things like, “Can I keep using the same case?” or “Is the screen protector the same?”

That kind of information is hard to find online. But we make the products ourselves. With some other manufacturers, they’re just buying finished products from China. In that case, they don’t really get involved with detailed sizes, dimensions, or 3D data. It ends up being a rough exchange like, “We’ve got ones ready for the iPhone XX, so we’ll buy a certain number,” and they don’t really know what’s inside.

In that respect, we’re deeply involved in everything ourselves from the design stage, so the development members understand every tiny difference down to 0.1 mm. When we explain that in detail together with the drawings, it becomes very easy for people to understand. That became killer content, and every time we posted it, access would surge. It became a major strength of the development team.

That’s right. The development and marketing members even incorporated it into their annual goals. That said, we’re not dealing in gossip, nor are we sharing leaked information as I mentioned earlier, so we’re definitely not purely page-view driven.

Still, it is important whether a lot of people see it. In the end, people basically visit the site through search, right?

If they always read us, they might think, “Trinity should be putting out new information soon,” and come check. But basically, the traffic comes from search. Showing up high in the search results and getting clicked means that you’re providing what people out there are looking for.

Users are looking for certain information, they click through from there, and if they stay on the page for a long time, Google evaluates it as, “If we provide this content, people will be satisfied.” So it comes down to what you write and how many page views you can get.

This gets a little into marketing, but the best outcome is for someone who comes in through the blog to move on to a product page and then make a reservation or purchase. So we look at conversions and the overall time spent on the site.

Instead of having people read one article, feel satisfied, and leave, we want them to think, “Oh, they’re writing about this too. I’ll check out some other articles,” and browse around the site. Then we use things like time on site and final conversions as metrics, and explore how we can achieve those results.

For the other members, the first task was to keep writing at a pace of about once every two weeks. Through those efforts, we eventually created a system called “Blog King.”

We weren’t just doing it casually; we had a clear goal of steadily increasing total access. I believe we offered some kind of perk to the top three people or so. The prizes changed over time, but the one with the biggest impact was 10,000 yen worth of lottery tickets.

Right. If you win, it could be hundreds of millions.

With an Amazon gift card, it stays worth 10,000 yen forever, right? But with lottery tickets, maybe it could become “hundreds of millions.” We thought that had a lot of dream to it, so we also did things like giving out 10,000 yen worth of lottery tickets as a prize.

That’s right. In the beginning, that’s basically what ended up happening, so I remember separating things out in various ways. If we didn’t separate that, it would feel unfair.

Also, there were people who wrote properly and people who were late submitting, so we felt that the people working seriously should be rewarded. We made adjustments like giving awards to people who kept posting consistently, almost like a perfect attendance award.

That’s how we kept the blog going. As a side effect, when hiring employees, a lot of people would say, “I read your blog and found it really interesting.”

Since different members posted articles every day, it conveyed how the employees approached their work. At a typical company, I think articles are usually written by people in marketing or development, but in our case, you could really see even parts of everyday life. It made it easy to understand what the company was like on the inside.

Before joining a company, you basically don’t really know what kind of company it is, right?

You can get a glimpse of those things too. So even in hiring situations, people often brought up things like, “I read the blog.”

That’s true. Though it wasn’t literally every day for about 20 years. In the latter half, all the employees shared the work and kept updating it, but in the early days, it wasn’t updated that frequently.

Conversely, in hiring, I basically thought we should turn down people who hadn’t checked the blog.

I mean, think about it. If you want to work at this company, you look at the website, and there’s blog content being updated every day, but you haven’t read the blog, then it’s like, “You don’t want to join this company; you just want to get a job.”

It makes it seem like they’re not interested in this company. These days, on job sites and such, people can easily apply just by clicking checkboxes that match their conditions—“click, click, oh, this looks good, click, click.”

As I mentioned before, the benefits are relatively good. People can apply for reasons like, “It seems kind of easy,” or “It looks like a good company.” If it were a large company, they might hire people simply because they need a lot of staff.

But for a small, elite team like ours, what matters is not just having a good impression, but the feeling of “what do I want to accomplish here?” For example, someone might say, “I use a smartphone myself and had been buying your products for a long time, so I actually wanted to be involved in making Trinity products.”

People like that basically check the website, and on the site, the blog is lined up prominently as one of the top types of content. So if they haven’t read the blog, I do feel it’s a bit tough. During hiring, we also ask whether they’ve read the blog, and if they answer, “I have,” we dig deeper and ask specifically which articles they liked.

Yes, exactly. Differences become clear during hiring, such as whether they only checked the latest information. At Trinity now, it seems they no longer place as much emphasis on the blog as before. It seems they’re no longer updating it daily either.

This isn’t a matter of good or bad, so I’m not saying it’s wrong, but since they don’t seem to be doing it anymore, even if someone hears this and says, “I read the blog,” it may not have much effect in hiring now.

No, I absolutely think it’s a plus. I’m not directly involved now, so I don’t know what policy led to the change. It seems the president, Yohei, sometimes writes on note and places like that.

Again, this isn’t about good or bad, but personally, I think it’s important to put content on your own company’s platform.

I think it’s more important to accumulate content within your own domain. For example, various services have become popular over time, such as note and Hatena Blog. But even if you keep enthusiastically posting on those external platforms, if the service itself shuts down, all of that valuable content disappears.

But if you keep operating within your own domain, that content will continue to remain as your own asset. note is popular now, but personally, I don’t really see much meaning in posting there.

For individual activities, it may be easy to set paid access and monetize it by saying, “The rest is 100 yen.” But when I think about companies using note as a place to share information from the perspective of building their own assets, I feel a little skeptical.

Trends inevitably come and go.

note may be good now, but that could change in the future.

Exactly. There was Ameblo and so on. Well, I’m sure it still exists, but you don’t really hear about it anymore these days. Hatena Blog was like that too. Even with social networking services, there used to be mixi, and there were many people who wrote diary entries every single day without fail.

But when it comes to whether you can actually move that kind of content somewhere else, in reality, it can be difficult. And if that happens, all the assets you’ve built up over many years can end up disappearing entirely.

That background is part of why we distribute this Podcast through our own website as well. Generally speaking, it’s easier to use existing platforms like Spotify or Apple, so I think many people do that. But if those services were to suddenly shut down, or suddenly start charging fees, it would be a huge problem if you couldn’t control things yourself.

But since we distribute it ourselves, from our own site to Spotify, Apple, and nowadays Amazon and YouTube as well, it’s not really a problem even if trends change. So, Gajirou-san, do you have any thoughts on how this blog is run?

Yes, yes, that’s right.

That’s right. Our site isn’t an e-commerce site, so we don’t focus on directly generating conversions from each individual article. It’s more about branding.

But branding isn’t something where you can immediately measure, “This article gained us this many fans.” When you visit many corporate websites, there are usually menu items like “Blog” or “News,” right? If those sections aren’t updated at all, and the latest post is from two years ago, I think it makes you wonder, “Is this company really active?” and creates distrust.

There are cases where a site has something like a “President’s Blog,” but it isn’t updated at all, right? At first, they seem motivated and work hard to write one or two posts, but then it just stops completely. This is just my personal feeling, but I don’t really feel like buying that company’s products.

I feel like a company that can’t fulfill a promise it once made will show that same underlying mindset in other parts of the business too. Well, that’s just my personal impression, though.

Basically, I don’t buy products from companies whose news is extremely outdated, or from companies that say they have a blog but don’t actually post any blog articles.

So, Gajirou-san, we have a problem.

We’ve only been talking about the blog.

Since we’ve written more than 3,000 articles over the years, we do have a lot of attachment to it. As a system, everyone writes, the number of articles written is tallied, and you can receive 10,000 yen worth of lottery tickets. Including that slightly unusual and interesting aspect, I think it’s a pretty unique system. So this week, we’ll end with just our discussion about the blog, and I hope we can talk about a different topic again next week.

Well then, we look forward to having you with us again next week.

“Real Management | The Successes and Failures of Corporate Management, Told Honestly and Unscripted by a Real Company President”

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Your hosts up to this point have been Hossy, also known as Hoshikawa Tetsushi, and

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