How and why I built Japan Dev
japan-dev.com
japan-dev.com
Something that resonated:
> We had to put 5 million JPY (~$45k at the time) in our business bank account and leave it there. For... some reason.
Living in Asia I've come across this bizarre government obsession with "money in the bank" when dealing with them:
"You need $15k in a bank account to apply"
"Ok well I have 20x that in an index ETF and it's been sitting there for a decade is that fine?"
"No you need to put that much in a bank account and leave it there for 6 months to qualify"
"What happens after the six months? I can simply take it out again?"
"Yes, that is acceptable"
[Confused Face]
No one seems to know why the rules exist, but everyone is certain there's a good reason for it.
But the government recognized that this was a problem so the "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" was made possible where you are only required to deposit 1 € initially and than can deposit more each year until you can convert to a GmbH. The UG obviously has to pay more interest on loans if it gets any at all but you are not required to be wealthy to be able to protect yourself from bankruptcy.
it’s like a warning message or something
In practice it becomes an invisible glass ceiling, you just work/pay your way through it when it's time, otherwise keep playing in the shallow end for as long as you want.
Win-win, surely, but patronizing nevertheless.
IMHO, UG are a fudge. They recognised that the barriers to GmbH formation are high but at the same time did not want to drop them so they created something new that allows people to start a company before being able to afford a GmbH.
This contrasts to, for instance, the UK where limited companies (Ltd) are extremely easy and cheap to create and maintain (£1 capital and about £15 cost) so that there is no need for multiple types.
https://www.gov.uk/set-up-limited-company
and here’s the registration form:
https://www.gov.uk/limited-company-formation/register-your-c...
(“It costs £12 and can be paid by debit or credit card. Your company is usually registered within 24 hours.”)
This is only partially correct. It is to ensure that you can pay your first bills without going bankrupt after the first week or so. You can actually use the money right away to pay for bills. Also, if you pay in cash, you only have to deposit 12,500€.
The CEO can use the capital to establish the business. It can be used to pay wages, buy hardware etc.
Of course there are obligations for the CEO to not let the GmbH go bancrupt.
(The risk of course being when I renew and it’s way higher)
Technically you can pay off some of the mortgage early, split a new loan account, borrow from that new account, and then use that to invest, and claim the interest of that against tax. So basically those with more money pay less tax, of course.
As an additional cross-cultural observation, 20-something western young men routinely insist on debating the merits of this policy with the impotent clerk processing their business. I've never seen the clerk unilaterally alter government policy, but the mutual exchange of Confused Face continues just the same.
"Documents such as a bankbook to prove that the applicant’s savings is more than 30 million Japanese yen along with the records indicating the current balance as well as deposits and withdrawals for the past 6 months."
https://www.mofa.go.jp/ca/fna/page22e_000738.html
30 million yen is currently 225k USD, but rates can change rapidly so you need significantly more just to be safe as the visa application process is long. In my experience, the "such as a bankbook" is strictly interpreted as a bank account, a stock portfolio isn't acceptable.
Now the Visa is a 1 year visa, but it issued for six months and then renewed for six months. When renewing you must meet all the original requirements. So, you can withdraw the money after getting the visa, but you need to have it back in the account when renewing! The records for six months appear to indicate that you need the money in the account for six months, but I'm not certain if this is the case.
There are also many other visas available, a two year student visa is probably one of the easiest to acquire, but it does require attending a certified school and the visa is invalidated should you stop attending school.
“To the state, one of the most important goals is legibility. The state has an enormous burden of regulation in its various enterprises, and the less variance the easier the job. This certainly isn’t ideal in many, many cases, but in this case a person who likely didn’t make the standards quite rationally trusts a vetted standard over one small trivial test given to them by a company they’re evaluating. FIPs standards are probably much more exhaustive than just a hashing performance test on one piece of hardware.”
Amusingly I was not even required to incorporate there to get the visa unless going into certain industries, was clear with them that domiciling in Singapore makes far more sense for a saas startup and they had no problem with that.
...who am I kidding, this happens everywhere all the time and 15K is a low amount to put in a bank account if it means someone can dodge taxes and responsibilities, lmao.
I'm absolutely stunned that this works.
> 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.
Is it? It sounds like a pretty good deterrent to being honest...!
Anyway, I can't argue with the figures, if true.
Like I mention in the post, I have emails, names and URLs for everyone who applies.
I also know how many applicants it normally takes to get 1 placement. So I can easily check which jobs are getting a suspiciously high number of applicants with no successful placements.
And I can reach out to all those applicants with the gift card offer, or take other measures to gather data about them and cross-check it with the company name etc.
This plus the late fee plus the fact that I'm in Japan makes the business model viable.
I guessed that they got paid at least partly as a function of hires, and this incentived disclosure from hirees was a way of keeping its customer companies honest.
Keeping in mind that the employees are likely staying much longer than 2-3 years, because Japan.
And on top of that risk a potential legal action?
Being from Spain I'm 100% a lot of the companies here would try to cheat this, but he made some good points both in the tweet answers and article; it's better to pay early and low, than being caught very late and having to pay a huge amount (don't know how much better though).
If a company retires a job without paying, I'd def spend few minutes tracking possible candidates (those who clicked "Apply" and put their data, Linkedin/Twitter/etc, follow up emails to the candidates, as he said Amazon gift card, etc).
Some might still fall through the cracks, but seems like if they get enough % of them that's probably good enough.
They see it two ways:
1) Easier to pay, than review the legal recourses of not paying
2) If they sourced one good candidate from your site, they may source another. So best not to get booted from the platform for delinquency.
Presumably they charge much less (10% yearly salary) than a normal recruiter would.
Everyone knows each other, it’s a high trust environment anyways, and it’s hard to recruit in the first place!
And like the article says, recruiting in Tokyo is kind of insanely expensive, mainly cuz it’s scaled to salary and a big chunk.
But I think the fact that this is… I mean it’s a lifestyle business? I don’t believe this is gunning for Indeed… it makes it easier
Rent in Tokyo for a 2BR apartment: $1,903/mo
Rent in NYC for a 2BR apartment: $2,909/mo
Rent in San Francisco for a 2BR apartment: $3,631/mo
Src: Deutsche Bank https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD000000000049...
NOTE: I wouldn't trust most sources of this kind of data you see online (I can't open your link so I can't verify it) because you simply cannot compare rent prices like that "across cultures".
And I don't mean just "Japanese apartments are small" (this is mostly a myth, although they are smaller on average), I simply mean that it's pretty much impossible to define what "city center" is in Tokyo, and having a good public transportation system and multiple city centers (Tokyo is 23 cities, and more) means that it's kinda hard to find a uniform measure that is comparable to most other cities in the world.
Tokyo is incredibly cheap for such a massive world capital/megalopolis. I can't stress this enough, as someone who's moved to Tokyo from one of the most expensive (yet incredibly small) capitals of Europe as far as rent goes (Dublin). It was amazing to see the contrast.
$1900/mo in Tokyo for 2 bedroom apartment (I assume it'd be a so-called 2LDK) is actually quite overpriced if you know which neighborhoods to look at (and yes, you can still consider them "city center"). I live 20 minutes away from Shinjuku, 30 minutes away from Shibuya, 10 minutes away from Ikebukuro (all three massive city centers) and I pay the equivalent of $1300/mo for a 3LDK apartment (3 bedroom, one living/dining room, one kitchen).
Obviously, if you want to be fancy and live in cool or pricy neighborhoods like Ebisu or Daikanyama or most of Setagaya-ku you're gonna pay much more, still... Definitely waaaay less than other places like San Francisco or New York.
Same. But this is published by a large global financial institution, not a crowd-sourced low-quality web site.
Also, as I said, Tokyo really isn't one city, it's a huge gigantic collection of multiple cities with an incredible public transport system that really doesn't make you feel like you're not living in a "city center" even if you aren't in one. I can step out of my house and be in a "downtown" area in less than 10 minutes by just taking one train and there is one train every 2-3 minutes.
If anything, I found https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ usually has a much more nuanced breakdown of actual living expenses across cities, although their rent metrics also are quite incorrect because the way rent and housing space is measured in Japan doesn't quite fit a western standard unit of measure.
That being said, I think what you're saying about being unable to compare rent prices more or less boils down to "ceteris paribus". Of course, not all else is equal, but it's still relatively meaningful to compare rent statistics, especially considering that it tends to be a dominating cost term. And, directionally speaking, the figures they quoted ultimately led them to a conclusion that I believe is right.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/world-most-expensive-citi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonytellez/2022/06/29/these-...
The average difference in cost between buying in Chicago versus buying in the suburbs of Chicago is the price of two median cars (~$60K difference total). Over a 30 year mortgage, in the suburbs, you'd probably buy 2-3 cars per adult. If living in the city let's you go to down to 0.5 cars per adult or even 0 cars per adult, then you've broke even or saved money. Heck, even just having a reasonably priced car in the city, driving less, and having leisure use insurance on your vehicle because you don't commute via car can result in thousands per year in savings even after you pay for parking.
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.
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.
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.
Enjoy the read!
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?
This first one was pretty typical of the job market and it's complete disconnect of what these positions truly pay.
* Additional Information
* Gender: Male
* Education Level: Masters Degree
* Age: late 20s
* Wage 31k annually
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.
The salary bands in Japan are the following- gaishikei (FAANGs) > Japanese Startups > Japanese Software tech Megacorps > Japanese non-Software tech Megacorps > Everyone else (basically minimum wage)
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.
A mundane idea but executed brilliantly. Well done and congratulations.
It seems like more negative than good can come from it.
(A) if you’re in enterprise software - potential customers might be scared away by how “little” your revenues are
(b) you’re inadvertently begging for new competition when another solo developer thinks I can do better and cheaper.
Etc.
Without hard data, interesting anecdotes and other facts the post won't gain as much traction on sites like HN/Twitter etc.
Those who have a relevant set of skills (and it is a lot of skills from different disciplines required to run a business) - can easily estimate how much you can earn from website like this, so if they didn't do it before - they won't start now.
Those who didn't know how much businesses like this makes - lack a ton of other skills to compete. And you can't cheat a ton of time and money investment. If they didn't start a business like this, 99,99% they won't. And if they will, there must be a ton of stars aligned to make it into any viable competition.
And I niched down hard.
The biggest problem though is still bootstrapping the demand side (job seekers) of the platform (supply side is fairly easy, as you can even handpick the initial jobs).
We (https://swissdevjobs.ch & https://devitjobs.uk) started with articles how to migrate from other countries to find a job in Switzerland / UK and at some point the organic traffic picked up (but it also took years, as in the case of japan-dev).
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.
According to https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou..., cost of living in Japan is a good bit lower than the US, and I would consider 67k as a decent wage when in medium COL cities(pandemic times have changes this a bit obviously, but I was able to live quite comfortably at 55k in a MCOL city in 2017).
edit for clarity
Let's assume SF vs Tokyo.
To live the same lifestyle and have the same amount of disposable income as someone earning $170-230k in SF, you'd need to earn ¥12-18M or so in Tokyo.
You can live in a nice apartment in the center of Tokyo and still save a lot of money as a single person earning ¥12M a year.
Also the yen is super weak against the dollar right now (historically so). So converting to dollars doesn't give an accurate value imo. As long as you earn and spend yen, what matters is purchasing power parity. Not the exchange rate.
To me, living in Japan, ¥9M still "feels" roughly like $90k despite the exchange rate.
The same amount of disposable income, measured in dollars or yen without PPP adjustment? That's a big gap and I don't think it can be made up with cost of living savings.
> So converting to dollars doesn't give an accurate value imo. As long as you earn and spend yen, what matters is purchasing power parity. Not the exchange rate.
If you ever want to leave Japan, then the value of your savings does matter. Your savings don't get PPP adjusted down if you move.
There are tons of caveats with cost-of-living. But for me personally, I worked for a company HQ'd in Palo Alto from Japan. And I looked into moving. I calculated that I'd need an extra $50k or so on top of my Tokyo salary to maintain the same lifestyle in Silicon Valley.
That's for me though. If you want a car no matter what, or you buy all your food at import markets, or want a huge apartment in the center of town exactly like the one you had in the US, Tokyo gets expensive. International schools for your kids can also get really pricey.
But if you live relatively closely to how locals do, it's cheap as hell. Seriously. The rent for my nice, new 2BR in central Tokyo is ¥190,000 a month. That's $1,416 at the current exchange rate.
The going rate I saw in Silicon Valley for a similar place was around $4k. And you absolutely need a car there, which means gas and insurance too. Here you can get anywhere super quickly via train, and companies pay your commuting costs if you're not WFH. Plus food is WAY cheaper here in my experience (I paid ¥950 for a big lunch today, tax included, no tip. 7 bucks all-in.)
So YMMV but that pretty much covers the $50k for me.
I'm really interested in learning more about that and getting your advice on how to start. Is there any way that I can contact you for that, or can you send me a ping at "<my user name> at gmail"? Thank you very much.
Nope. You want people to read your stuff? Don't force javascript onto them.
Interesting business model too - either it makes nothing or big amounts of money when you get a referral
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?
So that made it a win-win for companies. We promote your jobs for free, if you don't hire anyone you've lost nothing, and even if you DO hire someone, it's for a lower fee than you're used to paying recruiters.
So the hard part was actually attracting applicants. Ultimately we used SEO + blogging, our email list, a bit of paid advertising and a few other channels to get a good amount of traffic. But this takes a long time when you start from pretty much 0.
Here's the basic stack:
• Rails API
• Vue SPA w/ ViteJS
• MySQL
• K8s on Digital Ocean
• Cloudflare worker + caching
• Bento for emails
• Algolia for search / filters
I wouldn't recommend using a client-side rendered application for a project like this though... that was a mistake. Tons of headaches with SEO, social media sharing etc.
I just used the stack I was used to, didn't really turn out to be the best stack for the job...
Kubernetes is completely unnecessary, although I do enjoy using it.
Having a separate API is kinda nice. I could easily spin up a different front-end like an iOS app and share the same API. And I can write all the server code in Ruby instead of JS, which I prefer to do.
But yeah overall, way over-engineered.
Google does this (but it's still not ideal). Most other crawlers don't. That means they won't see your rendered content.
This becomes an issue with sharing on social media, because your meta tags won't be read properly. If you share a blog post on Twitter for example, it won't be able to fetch your og:image, title etc so it won't look good.
To fix that, you have to use prerendering or server-side rendering. I'm doing hacky stuff with prerendering inside a Cloudflare worker where it detects that it's a crawler and prerenders the page if so.
SPAs also tend to have slow initial load times, which is becoming increasingly important for SEO. You can't avoid at least one additional network call after loading the initial HTML, and if you're not careful you can end up with chained requests for different components etc.
For sites like mine that rely on SEO and social media, it's a pretty big annoyance.
The only thing i haven't fixed yet is hiding the cookie banner for bots :/
Good job.
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
Such a lovely write-up. Congratulations.
I'm not really thinking too deeply about exiting yet. But I guess if I wanted to work on other things, the main options would be:
(1) Automate + delegate as much of the work as possible to decrease my time commitment and gain some freedom
(2) Try to sell the business
But for now I'm just focused on improving + growing the business!
Unfortunately it's an SPA so it requires JS. I regret this decision...
If not then it might be due to an ad blocker issue (specifically triggered by social share buttons) I just discovered from this thread and need to look into.
That's just the front-end stack I knew the best — I realize it's terrible for those who don't want to run javascript. Sorry!
I really like it.
Established companies will have at least one senior HR person who can OK that level of spend.
Small startups might need approval from from an exec like the CTO.
30-35% is pretty standard though so most companies will have a process for it.
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.
I did recently switch to hosting through a Cloudflare Worker, so maybe it's a caching issue. Is it possible you've viewed the site before? If so maybe you have an old version of the index.html file in your browser cache that's linking to the wrong assets.
Either way thanks for reporting — I'll look into it!
Sorry for the false flag.
I should probably restructure things so that one component failing doesn't bring down the whole site if I can...
I also get a sha512 mismatch on the CF script.
(Degrading gracefully so content is readable even without client-side JS is an even better idea but that obv takes more effort to sort out on an existing SPA)
Looking forward to reading your article but my reverse-engineering stops here for now (:
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).
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.
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.