How Lake Blend Line started

Kenji Matsumoto spent six years running paid search for a mid-size Tokyo agency, managing accounts for retail chains, dental clinics, and a handful of SaaS companies. The work was good, but the structure was not. Clients rarely spoke directly to the person touching their account. Reports went out quarterly. Budgets were raised without explanation. In early 2019, after one too many meetings where a client asked 'so what did we actually get for that?' and nobody had a straight answer, Kenji left and started Lake Blend Line out of a shared office in Shibuya.

The first year was three clients and a lot of spreadsheets. The approach was simple: weekly calls, weekly numbers, no hiding behind jargon. One of those first clients, a small orthodontic clinic in Setagaya, went from twelve new patient enquiries a month to thirty-one within four months. Not because of some secret technique, but because the campaign had been set up with the wrong match types and zero negative keywords. Fixing the basics, then testing methodically, turned out to be enough. That clinic is still a client today, in the summer of 2026.