This was incredibly well-written and an enjoyable story. Congratulations on pushing through and getting traction.<p>Something that resonated:<p>> We had to put 5 million JPY (~$45k at the time) in our business bank account and leave it there. For... some reason.<p>Living in Asia I've come across this bizarre government obsession with "money in the bank" when dealing with them:<p>"You need $15k in a bank account to apply"<p>"Ok well I have 20x that in an index ETF and it's been sitting there for a decade is that fine?"<p>"No you need to put that much in a bank account and leave it there for 6 months to qualify"<p>"What happens after the six months? I can simply take it out again?"<p>"Yes, that is acceptable"<p>[Confused Face]<p>No one seems to know why the rules exist, but everyone is certain there's a good reason for it.
> So we share your jobs on our site. A candidate applies. You interview them and decide to hire them. You notify us you hired them. We send you an invoice. You pay us a fee.<p>I'm absolutely stunned that this works.<p>> For one thing, our contract imposes a late fee for failing to notify us of a successful hire. And the fee increases every month that they don't tell us. This is a pretty good deterrent.<p>Is it? It sounds like a pretty good deterrent to being honest...!<p>Anyway, I can't argue with the figures, if true.
It's kinda funny how strategy and tactics can cross over between totally unrelated businesses.<p>We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.<p>Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.<p>The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.<p>Enjoy the read!
> But as a foreigner, most of the companies weren't a good fit. Some were too domestic. A lot didn't have any other westerners working there.<p>This is a great way to think about how important an inclusive company culture is to you - do you want your org to be thought of by non-natives like many HN posters would think of an old school Japanese one? In what ways is it unattractive to non-natives and do you actually value those characteristics?
People interested in this article might also like this list of salary figures for japan. <a href="https://opensalary.jp/en/" rel="nofollow">https://opensalary.jp/en/</a>
Thanks for helping surface these. The sad fact, though, is that Japanese IT salaries even at the "good" companies are still a fraction of the global market rate.<p>I was recently approached for an engineering management role at the innovation wing of $JAPANESE_MEGACORP (and I see they're one of your customers!). Alas, the top of their range was around half of what I'm getting paid in Singapore, and that's before accounting for much higher taxes etc.
So to summarise: A dev turned dev recruiter who can write good content (capable of going viral) and who works with only the best companies.<p>You developed a simple product (extremely well tested business model and done 1000 times), used your reach and writing skills to kickstart the supply / demand and profited.<p>A mundane idea but executed brilliantly.
Well done and congratulations.
Off topic: if you’re a private business owner - why share your revenues?<p>It seems like more negative than good can come from it.<p>(A) if you’re in enterprise software - potential customers might be scared away by how “little” your revenues are<p>(b) you’re inadvertently begging for new competition when another solo developer thinks I can do better and cheaper.<p>Etc.
Considering cost of living, what salary would someone need to maintain a similar lifestyle as a senior engineer making ~$170-230k while living in a major U.S. city?<p>Some of the jobs on that site have salary ranges below 9 million Yen, which seems to equate to about $67k. Given that consumer goods are generally pricier in Japan, and that cost of living is generally quite high in Japan, that salary seems quite low.
I created a physician employment company which operates on the same model. I think Japanese culture has been the unsung hero here, when considering the OP company relies on an honor code of sorts.
"We're sorry but Japan Dev doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue."<p>Nope. You want people to read your stuff? Don't force javascript onto them.
Awesome job! Job boards are incredibly hard (I should know, I've made a couple)<p>Interesting business model too - either it makes nothing or big amounts of money when you get a referral
I really enjoyed reading this and I hate reading.<p>How did you go from 12 months of no revenue to actually generating revenue? Did you provide your service for free w/o any payment options? I imagine job seekers were free to use the board but companies were required to pay to post on your board. Did it basically take 12 months to gain enough traction with job seekers to entice employers to post on your board instead of manually adding them for free yourself?
Nice work! I honesty never would have considered a job board to be able to bring such a large amount. Especially in just a few years.<p>Good job.<p>I don't think you mentioned how many employees you have? Not very many I assume if your headquarters is your apartment. Good work keeping overheads low
This seems to have been a real passion project, and seems to nearly be retirement money if the growth continues for just a few more years. Have you considered what an exit would look like?<p>Such a lovely write-up. Congratulations.
I'm getting a blank page. Looking at the source, there is no static content on it, only JS. I have JS turned on, but it seems CORS is blocking loading of JS.<p><pre><code> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v652eace1692a40cfa3763df669d7439c1639079717194. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).
None of the “sha512” hashes in the integrity attribute match the content of the subresource.
</code></pre>
Edit: works in Chromium, but not in Firefox.
Japan has the highest income tax bracket, horrible working culture (confucian hierarchy, ijime, overtime expected to be norm), no mental health support and to top it off a non-competitive corporate taxation.<p>All of my native Japanese engineers who can speak modicum of English is leaving it to work abroad. I know many startups and companies have pulled out due to the inflexibility of the government (you need to be profitable with your highly failure prone venture by year 2 or you are booted from the country).<p>I don't know why any sane person would want to work and pay taxes there. Hell, even Japanese don't want it. Japan had 30+ years to recover from its economic slump and I don't see it improving anytime soon.<p>On the other hand, great place to visit, and on a different type of civilized citizens that you is tough to find in most Western countries these days.