--- title: 'Go-to-Market (GTM) Manager (Japan/Asia) at Startale Group' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/go-to-market-gtm-manager-japan-asia-startale-group-japan-etxgkdnkvee7' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-19' --- # Go-to-Market (GTM) Manager (Japan/Asia) at Startale Group - **Company:** Startale Group - **Location:** Japan - **Posted:** 2026-07-13 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-19 - **Apply:** https://startale.com/career/5339444008?gh_jid=5339444008 ## Job description Go-to-Market (GTM) Manager (Japan/Asia) Location: Tokyo, Japan (must be based in Japan) Reports to: Head of Marketing & Growth ## About Startale Startale Group is a Japan-born global startup in onchain finance (Web3/blockchain), on a mission to build the next civilization by bringing the world onchain. We're vertically integrated by design — the chain (Soneium, our Ethereum L2 with Sony Block Solutions Labs; Strium with SBI), the currency (JPYSC stablecoin), onchain finance infrastructure, and the consumer super-app that ties it together, Startale App. - Raised ~¥10B (~$65M) in Series A from Sony, SBI and others - Startale App: 210,000 monthly users - At WebX (July 2026) we announced Startale OFK (onchain finance infrastructure) and the Visa-enabled Startale Card - ~65 people across 20 nationalities; English is our working language The world is moving from paper to online to onchain. We're building the products that make that shift usable for everyone — and Startale App is where real users meet it. ## About the Role We're hiring a Go-to-Market (GTM) Manager to own how Startale App reaches, converts, and keeps users. This is a product-growth role, not a communications or PR role: you live in the funnel, the experiments, and the metrics. You'll take payments products and features to market, decide who they reach first and what makes them stick, and help create onchain financial products that people use every day. Startale App is early, growing fast, and aimed at millions of users. You'll help build the growth engine from an early stage. Priorities shift with the market and with regulation, and you will often be directly involved in choosing what a good strategy looks like. In your first six months you might: - Identify core regions for Startale App to expand in. - Plan and run various product launches such as the Startale Card in Japan and other key markets - Have a firm understanding of demand and needs of users in core regions, and provide product optimisation feedback to drive onboarding and conversion. - Run a campaign tied to a real spending moment, and measure impact against company OKRs. ## What You'll Do Payments & Card Growth - Drive adoption of the Visa-enabled Startale Card: acquisition, activation, first transaction, and repeat usage. - Grow stablecoin payments and on- and off-ramp usage, and treat conversion at each step as a number you own. - Build campaigns around real spending moments, including yen-dollar settlements. - Bring proven playbooks from crypto card programs and exchange growth teams, and adapt them to Japan. Growth Marketing - Run acquisition, activation, engagement, and retention across organic, community, and paid channels. - Partner with Product to sharpen onboarding and the end-to-end user journey. - Find the leverage points across the lifecycle and push conversion up continuously. - Design and run experiments and A/B tests, and let the results decide. Product Marketing - Turn technical product updates into content users understand and act on — landing pages, blog, email, social, in-app, and announcement copy. - Run competitive research and user insights to keep positioning sharp. Analytics & Experimentation - Measure launch and campaign performance against product growth metrics and onchain metrics, not vanity numbers. - Add payments to the scorecard: card activation, transaction frequency, and on-ramp conversion sit next to user growth. Regulatory-Aware Delivery (Japan) - Stay current on crypto and financial-product regulation in Japan, and engage directly with the regulatory/compliance side. - Partner with Product to translate those requirements into go-to-market, messaging, and campaigns that can actually ship in Japan. - Find the compliant, Japan-viable way to deliver each launch — so growth keeps moving without hitting regulatory friction late. Cross-functional Collaboration - Work day-to-day with Product Managers, Designers, and Community to ship launches that land. - Keep messaging and experience consistent across the product and every channel. Must-Have - 4–7 years in Product Marketing, Growth Marketing, or Digital Marketing for a digital product (ideally a consumer fintech, payments, or crypto app). - Native-level Japanese and business-level English (English is the internal language). - You've launched digital products or features end-to-end — plan through execution — and can point to what the numbers did. - Strong command of GTM strategy and product positioning. - Hands-on with multi-channel growth campaigns (organic, community, paid). - Analytical by default: you measure campaign performance and user behavior and change course on the data. - Sharp writer and communicator; comfortable running several projects at pace across teams. Nice-to-Have - Consumer tech, fintech, SaaS, gaming, or Web3. - Mobile app marketing and product growth. - Product analytics tools (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics). - Lifecycle marketing / CRM / user-engagement campaigns. - Experimentation and A/B testing frameworks. - Card program marketing: activation and usage campaigns, or co-marketing with a card scheme. - Experience marketing on- and off-ramps, stablecoin payments, or exchange campaigns in Japan and Asia (fintech or crypto). What Winning Looks Like You own monthly active users, card activations, and payments usage, and you grow all three month over month with repeatable acquisition strategies in identified core regions. You don't wait for a brief; you find the next experiment, ship it, read the result, and run the next one. You care that the product is genuinely good, and you make more people feel it. ## Compensation & Benefits - Competitive salary, plus stock options. - Take discretionary leave when you need it. - Flexible, remote-friendly working (Tokyo hybrid base). - Annual global workation (past: Croatia, Turkey, Dubai, Korea, and more). - Premium tooling and real budget for AI — we don't make you fight your setup. ## Why Join - Own the go-to-market for a Visa-enabled card and stablecoin payments at the moment they launch, with the metrics and the mandate to match. - Work alongside world-class engineers, designers, and product leaders — a small, high-ownership team across 20 nationalities. - Own meaningful initiatives with direct, measurable user impact. - Grow inside one of the fastest-moving industries in technology, backed by Sony and SBI. ## About Startale Group ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Startale Group is a global Web3 infrastructure developer building the next civilization by bringing the world onchain through the development of Soneium, Astar Network, and developer tools. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: Singapore, Singapore - **Founded**: 2019 - **Founders**: Sota Watanabe ## Core Business - **Primary Industry**: Blockchain infrastructure and Web3 development - **Target Customers**: B2B (enterprises, developers, and Web3 projects) and B2C (end-users of onchain applications) - **Mission Statement**: "Build the next civilization by bringing the world onchain" — making blockchain technology a transparent, borderless, and programmable foundation for everyday life. ## Products & Services - **Soneium**: A next-generation Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, co-developed through Sony Block Solutions Labs (a joint venture with Sony Group Corporation). Designed to bridge Web3 and traditional internet services (Web2) for billions of users. - **Astar Network**: Japan’s largest public blockchain, serving as a gateway for projects across enterprises, entertainment, and gaming. Leverages a multi-layered tech stack (zkEVM, EVM, WASM) powered by Polygon and Polkadot. - **Startale Cloud Services**: Infrastructure and developer tools (RPC interfaces, account abstraction tooling) that let developers ship faster on Soneium and Astar. - **Startale App**: An all-in-one gateway to the Soneium ecosystem, uniting blockchain-native applications in a single intuitive experience. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metrics**: - **Annual Revenue**: ~$1.0M (per LinkedIn) - **Total Funding**: $70.0M across 5 rounds - **Funding Rounds**: Includes a $50M Series A (March 2026), a $13M Series A (January 2026), a $3.5M Series A (February 2024), and earlier rounds led by SBI Group. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Sony Group Corporation (joint venture for Soneium), Hakuhodo (joint venture for Hakuhodo Key3), SBI Group. - **Growth Signals**: 49 employees (+20.4% YoY); operates across 19 countries; Soneium mainnet launched in January 2026 and is described as one of the most rapidly expanding L2 ecosystems; CEO moved from Singapore to the U.S. to drive global product expansion. ## Competitive Advantages - **Unique Joint Ventures**: Co-develops Soneium with Sony Group Corporation and operates a joint venture with Hakuhodo, giving Startale unparalleled access to Japanese enterprise and entertainment ecosystems. - **Japan Beachhead**: Astar Network is Japan’s largest public blockchain, providing a strong home-market position with government and corporate relationships. - **Full-Stack Web3**: Unlike many L2-only teams, Startale builds at every layer — protocol (Soneium, Astar), infrastructure (Cloud Services), and consumer apps (Startale App) — similar to Tesla’s integrated strategy. - **Top-Tier Talent Pool**: Team members come from Binance, Polygon, Crypto.com, Google, Microsoft, and Y Combinator, with a culture described as "sharp, fast, and globally competitive" [startale.com](https://startale.com/en/blog/Startale-Group-going-global-interview). ## Strategic Focus - **Product-Led Growth**: Shifting from a business-development-heavy approach to a product-first strategy, with a focus on wallets, payments, and stablecoin products. - **Global Expansion**: CEO Sota Watanabe has moved to the U.S. to lead the charge, aiming to win in the American market as a path to global leadership. - **Entertainment + Finance**: Combining Japan’s strength in entertainment with blockchain’s financial infrastructure, designing experiences where users interact onchain without realizing it. - **Long-Term Consolidation**: Betting that blockchain will consolidate into just a few global platforms (like iOS/Android), and positioning Soneium and Astar as core infrastructure. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Startale invests heavily in culture, describing it as a key differentiator — products can be copied, culture cannot. They hold yearly all-members "workations" (past events in Croatia, Japan, Korea, Turkey, Belgium) and team offsites (sports festivals, etc.) to build bonds across a remote, multinational team [startale.com](https://startale.com/en/career). - **Remote-First & Flexible**: "Full-Flex" policy — no fixed hours or locations. Fully remote team. Output comes first [startale.com](https://startale.com/en/career). - **Global Compensation**: Salaries benchmarked against global market levels for global talent, with compensation packages competitive with U.S. startups like Coinbase [startale.com](https://startale.com/en/blog/Startale-Group-going-global-interview). - **Perks**: Unlimited PTO, stock options, and powerful tooling (from machine to AI agents). - **Engineering Culture**: Team is 80% international, with members from 20+ countries. Discussions are described as "sharp, fast, and very global in perspective." The company values three things: Growth Mindset, Integrity, and Open & Transparency [startale.com](https://startale.com/en/career). - **Current Openings**: 8 active roles including Senior Rust Backend Engineer, Senior Rust Blockchain Engineer, Senior Frontend Engineer, Senior Product Manager (Trading), Security Engineer, and Senior QA Engineer (Trading) — all remote [startale.com](https://startale.com/en/career). ## Sources 1. [startale.com - Career Page](https://startale.com/en/career) 2. [linkedin.com - Startale Group](https://sg.linkedin.com/company/startale) 3. [startale.com - Mission Page](https://startale.com/mission) 4. [startale.com - Interview with CEO, COO, and Product Lead](https://startale.com/en/blog/Startale-Group-going-global-interview) 5. [builtin.com - Startale Careers, Perks + Culture](http://www.builtin.com/company/startale) ## Other roles at Startale Group - [シニアテクニカルプロジェクトマネージャー｜規制対応オンチェーン金融基盤](https://feeny.ai/job/startale-group-japan-nc8wc1phfe00) — Japan - [事業開発／プロジェクトマネージャー（オンチェーン金融）](https://feeny.ai/job/startale-group-japan-0v0ebd60673r) — Japan - [People & Culture Associate（採用・広報・カルチャー）｜採用を軸に、Startale の「人とカルチャー」を支える](https://feeny.ai/job/people-culture-associate-startale-startale-group-japan-hg7dmz5p2y8z) — Japan - [シニアバックエンドエンジニア（TypeScript）｜デジタルアセットのスーパーアプリ「Startale App」](https://feeny.ai/job/typescript-startale-app-startale-group-japan-bn2we0ejemfa) — Japan - [プロダクトアソシエイト（PdM 候補）｜完全オンチェーン取引所「Strium」／デジタルアセットのスーパーアプリ「Startale App」](https://feeny.ai/job/pdm-strium-startale-app-startale-group-japan-h533z7bd8gym) — Japan - [Growth Marketing Manager (Japan/Asia)｜Startale App のプロダクトグロースを牽引](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-manager-japan-asia-startale-app-startale-group-japan-bctyrrdz2k3x) — Japan - [シニアソフトウェアエンジニア（品質エンジニアリング・SDET）｜完全オンチェーン取引所「Strium」／デジタルアセットのスーパーアプリ「Startale App」](https://feeny.ai/job/sdet-strium-startale-app-startale-group-japan-n39zdkypeean) — Japan - [シニアフロントエンドエンジニア（React / TypeScript）｜完全オンチェーン取引所「Strium」／デジタルアセットのスーパーアプリ「Startale App」](https://feeny.ai/job/react-typescript-strium-startale-app-startale-group-japan-twtw82prntex) — Japan - [Director of Sales, Startale Japan](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-sales-startale-japan-startale-group-japan-zfxrwz1v28ek) — Japan - [Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering (SDET)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-quality-engineering-sdet-startale-group-remote-qkr1h8ze3114)