Shogo Harada

Backlink Audit of Our Own Site: 4 Domains, 2 That Count

Our company website has been live for over a year. On 15 August 2026 I set out to find out how many other sites link to it, and separately how many of those links Google can actually count. The answer was four domains. Of those four, two pass any ranking value at all. I am […]

We Reported a Competitor That Had Already Gone Out of Business

A friend of mine in Singapore works in F&B, and one thing kept coming up whenever we talked: a surprising number of stores run their marketing with no strategy behind it. Run the ads, keep the social accounts going, bring in an influencer. The numbers move right after. A month later the lift has gone […]

Why Employees Don’t Use AI: It Wasn’t Fear, It Was Time

You rolled AI out across the company, and it isn’t being used the way you expected. So the question now is what to do next. The standard explanation goes like this. Your people are afraid. If they get caught using it, their rating drops; if they deliver too much, their work gets taken away. So […]

Vietnam Software Development Outsourcing Companies: How to Choose (2026)

I run one of these companies. Linnoedge is a software engineering company in Ho Chi Minh City, and if you are shortlisting Vietnamese vendors right now, we are a company you might end up comparing. So read this the way you would read anything written by an interested party. I am not going to rank […]

What Does a Software Vendor Actually Sell? — We Sell “Not Falling Below Expectations, Every Week”

Hi, I’m Shogo Harada, CEO of Linnoedge, writing from Ho Chi Minh City. A few weeks ago I couldn’t stop thinking about something Brandon K. Hill, CEO of btrax, posted on X. His argument: design agencies are failing at a rising rate worldwide, and AI alone doesn’t explain it. He closed with a question: what […]

“Just decide, and I’ll move on it.” My AI was already a step past that.

“AI is going to take our jobs.” I hear that everywhere, and for a long time I aimed that worry at job titles myself. What moved it was running a software development company in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, and watching my own AI and my own people side by side every day. It isn’t job […]

Where Cross-Border E-Commerce Actually Gets Stuck: Entry Design Lessons from Vietnam

“I want to sell my products overseas. With cross-border e-commerce, we can start small, right?” I hear this from Japanese founders all the time. Sake-based drinks, cosmetics, specialty foods. Japan is full of good products, and every time I listen to one of these founders, I think: this could work abroad. My answer is always […]

“I Don’t Know What I’m Allowed to Put Into AI” — Safety Isn’t Decided by Where the Tool Comes From

“I honestly don’t know what we’re allowed to put into AI.” I hear this a lot. The moment the conversation turns to where the data goes, executives get uneasy. I get it. For a while, “servers overseas sound risky” was my own reason for being nervous, without me ever examining what that actually meant. This […]

While you’re chasing AI, AI doesn’t get deployed

AI adoption stalls not from vague goals but from chasing tools. I stopped comparing, closed one gap, and an hour of work became ten minutes.

Choosing a Vietnam Market-Entry Firm: Who Runs It After You Enter?

If you’ve talked to more than one Vietnam market-entry firm, you’ve probably noticed something: they all sound reassuring, they all have a deck, and you still can’t tell them apart. That’s not because you’re bad at evaluating vendors. It took me a while to see it, but the reason is simpler: the deciding factor rarely […]

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