【A10 Lab Inc.】Peer Support of 5-Member Teams for Fun Behavioral Change! Driving Insurance Business DX with "Minchare", Japan's Largest Smoking Cessation & Lifestyle Disease App

Developing Habits by Encouraging Each Other in 5-Member Teams. Achievements of the Smartphone App "Minchare" Boasting a 27.5% Active Rate

Hello, everyone. My name is Tsuyoshi Nagasaka, and I am the Representative Director of A10 Lab Inc.

Under our mission to "make everyone happy with technology," we are a healthcare startup aiming to create a world where everyone can change their behavior while having fun. Using a method called "digital peer support"—where peers with the same goals support each other—we help people who have trouble starting or continuing habits to develop them enjoyably, thereby solving medical and healthcare issues worldwide.

Our core business is the habit-forming app "Minchare," which focuses on behavioral change. It is a service where users form teams of five to encourage each other and develop habits together. Currently, the consumer app has surpassed 1.6 million downloads.

While there are many healthcare apps in the world, Minchare's greatest strength is its "overwhelmingly high active rate." Compared to general healthcare apps, the app is opened much more frequently. Specifically, 27.5% of monthly active users (MAU) open the app 26 or more days out of 30, showing a very high commitment. Since the ratio of daily active users is high, we can exert a high intervention effect and connect it to reliable health improvement results.

Leveraging this behavioral change engine, our business is growing rapidly in the B2B sector (business for insurers like health insurance societies) and the B2G sector (long-term care and frailty prevention projects for local governments). Especially for health insurance societies, we develop insurance programs that support smoking cessation and the prevention of aggravation of lifestyle-related diseases such as diabetes, which is currently the main driver of our revenue.

Challenging the 10 Trillion Yen Problem of Health Insurance Societies. Medical Device-Level Evidence and Overwhelming Cost Advantage of Half of Competitors

Looking at trends in Japanese healthcare, the increase in medical costs due to aging is extremely serious. While driving medical DX and shifting "from treatment to prevention" are urgent tasks due to the resource shortage of local governments, health insurance societies (Kenpo) face the biggest challenges.

Health insurance societies nationwide spend about 10 trillion yen annually. To prevent this expenditure from expanding further, they invest an enormous budget of about 500 billion yen annually in health promotion and prevention programs (healthcare projects) for policyholders. However, lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes are difficult to address because they lack subjective symptoms in the early stages, making behavioral change hard to initiate. In addition, conventional health guidance relied on face-to-face interviews by healthcare professionals, which limited the number of targets. Even among patients undergoing treatment at hospitals, about half suffered from poor control, worsening their symptoms.

Our healthcare business concept is to generate reliable behavioral change effects through "high participation rates" and "retention rates" via the app. We solve the two major issues that health insurance societies previously faced: "few people participate in programs even when invited" and "effects are weak."

We have three main differentiation strategies against competitors:
First, the overwhelming behavioral change effect cultivated through 10 years of product updates. We have conducted numerous joint research projects with academia, and academic papers with impact factors of 6 or higher have been published in fields such as diabetes, smoking cessation, and care prevention. We have demonstrated medical evidence comparable to or better than medical devices.
Second, low participation barriers. While conventional programs required face-to-face interviews and scheduling with public health nurses, which created psychological barriers for users, Minchare is completed easily online via smartphones.
Third, overwhelming cost competitiveness realized by eliminating individual interviews by healthcare professionals. Since we can offer the service at about half the price of conventional competing services, it can be introduced on a large scale without pressure on the budgets of health insurance societies.

Pay-for-Performance "Outcome-Linked Business". Enrolling Target Fields from Smoking Cessation to Diabetes, Hypertension, and Mental Health

Armed with this excellent package, the program currently achieving great PMF (Product-Market Fit) is "Minchare Smoking Cessation." This is a 3-month smoking cessation program that combines smoking cessation aids (medication) with the Minchare app.

Rather than just providing the app, we also provide comprehensive tools to health insurance societies to help gather participants, such as flyers, posters, web pages, videos, and email templates. As a result, we have succeeded in gathering 2 to 10 times more participants compared to other smoking cessation solutions. This fiscal year, about 6,000 people have participated, resulting in orders significantly exceeding our plans. In addition, the smoking cessation success rate is higher than that of visiting conventional smoking cessation clinics (hospitals).

We adopt a pay-for-performance model. Health insurance societies pay 33,000 yen for each successful participant and only 23,000 yen for unsuccessful ones, with 10,000 yen representing the performance-linked portion. Although we cannot express direct efficacy or benefits because we expand as a healthcare service rather than a medical device (SaMD), this outcome-linked model itself represents our confidence in the effect and directly leads to trust from our clients.

In the future, based on the winning pattern of PMF in smoking cessation, we will start full-scale expansion into prevention of aggravation of lifestyle-related diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia, which are estimated to affect about 40% of policyholders.

In the medium to long term, we will expand our target fields to mental health areas like sleep, support for pregnant women and returning mothers, or support for cancer patients where exercise therapy is effective. By extending our powerful behavioral change engine of digital peer support, we will move forward to realize a sustainable well-being society where everyone supports one another.

Q&A / Feedback

Commentator (Mr. Furuko): Mr. Nagasaka, thank you very much for your wonderful presentation. Changing habits, especially for lifestyle-related diseases, is the highest hurdle, but I felt it was very meaningful that you are approaching it with an app incorporating gamification and peer support elements and achieving clear results.

First, I would like to ask about your revenue base. You mentioned that your B2B business is growing. Is it correct to understand that your main clients are health insurance societies and companies working on health and productivity management? Also, will life insurance companies become targets in the future?

Mr. Nagasaka: Thank you for your questions. Regarding our clients, as you mentioned, we are introducing our service to health insurance societies and some companies promoting health and productivity management.

As for collaboration with life insurance companies, we are already working on it. We are running projects such as jointly providing the Minchare mechanism to policyholders of major life insurance companies. We believe they will continue to be very important targets and partners in the future.

Mr. Furuko: Thank you. It is a very good model for health insurance societies to introduce because it has less risk with the outcome-linked design.

However, it occurred to me that if users become healthy and problems are solved—for example, if all smokers successfully quit smoking—then there might be no subsequent monetization points. How do you plan to increase revenue points and the breadth of monetization in the medium to long term?

Mr. Nagasaka: That is a very important point. Indeed, if smokers disappear, the smoking cessation market will vanish. Therefore, we first open up strong networks (accounts) with health insurance societies through smoking cessation, and then deploy programs for diabetes and hypertension, which have larger market sizes. Since about 40% of policyholders have lifestyle-related disease issues, a huge market exists for the time being.

Looking further ahead, if everyone overcomes lifestyle diseases and aggravation prevention becomes unnecessary, we plan to shift our focus to earlier phases, such as metabolic syndrome prevention, specific health guidance, dieting, and exercise habit formation.

In addition, we will gradually launch vertical behavioral change programs specialized in specific health challenges—such as mental health, sleep, returning mother support, and exercise therapy for cancer patients—to build sustainable and diversified monetization.

Mr. Furuko: I see. Along with solving problems, you will expand target fields to other major health challenges and shift to the upstream of prevention.

In the future, if the accumulation and linking of "vertical data" like healthcare data and health checkup data progress, they might have value as rating data for calculating insurance premiums for insurance companies, or serve as advertising media for health-related companies wanting to advertise to highly health-conscious users. I am rooting for your future infrastructure development. Thank you very much.

Mr. Nagasaka: Thank you very much for your valuable feedback. We will continue to improve our products and expand our market to become an infrastructure that supports everyone's health.