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How and why I built Japan Dev
- atwood22 4y agoCongrats on the traction. Somewhat unrelated, but it seems a lot of bootstrapped success stories are job boards.
- kubb 4y agoWe (developers) are the product.
- etdev 4y agoThanks! Yeah, the space has gotten pretty crowded but it can still work really well if you niche down imo. And I niched down hard.
- Varqu 4y agoYes, it's probably because this is a proven business model and if you niche-down enough, you will be able to serve the audience better than the bigger competitors. 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://swissdevjobs.ch & https://devitjobs.uk 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).
- namdnay 4y agowhen there's a gold rush, there are a lot of successful hardware stores :)
- flerchin 4y agoThis 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? Such a lovely write-up. Congratulations.
- etdev 4y agoThanks a lot! 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!
- sparsely 4y ago> 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. 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?
- yakubin 4y agoI'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. 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. Edit: works in Chromium, but not in Firefox.
- atraac 4y agoIt works in Firefox for me
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- etdev 4y agoWeird... 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!
- yakubin 4y agoI've tracked down the root cause: I needed to disable two uBlock Filters in order to successfully load the page: Fanboy's Annoyance and Fanboy's Social. It seems that they block some JS related to social buttons (https://japan-dev.com/assets/socialButton.9ddbb1cc.js https://japan-dev.com/assets/socialButton.9ddbb1cc.js) and that makes the rest of JS responsible for the rest of the page to not execute (due to a failed request). Sorry for the false flag.
- emptyparadise 4y agoDoesn't load in Safari for me with ad blockers.
- Grimburger 4y agoThis was incredibly well-written and an enjoyable story. Congratulations on pushing through and getting traction. 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.
- gjulianm 4y agoThat's weird. I've heard of requirements that business need to have a certain amount in cash reserves, just to guarantee that they can pay severance packages and other guarantees, to stop the owners from declaring bankruptcy too late. But asking for that and then letting them remove it from the account is just weird.
- bl0rg 4y agoMaybe it's a 6 month long test to prove that you can handle your finances without that bit of extra money? That said it sounds like a really stupid test.
- bfuller 4y agoWell yeah, its to see who has to dip into their money that is supposed to be locked in. If I was in the business of usury I wouldn't want to lend to people who couldn't keep the collateral locked up for 6 months.
- foepys 4y agoIn Germany there is a similar thing where you need to deposit at least 25,000 € as collateral to be able to create a GmbH (similar to an LLC). This is meant to pay for debts in case the GmbH goes bankrupt. 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.
- totetsu 4y agoPeople interested in this article might also like this list of salary figures for japan. https://opensalary.jp/en/ https://opensalary.jp/en/
- incahoots 4y agoGood to see the Japanese are in line with western society's unreasonable job expectations. 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
- trhoad 4y ago> 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. 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.
- julienfr112 4y agoin Japan only
- jsty 4y agoNot sure how prevalent LinkedIn or a similar service is in Japan, but I'd imagine it'd be pretty easy to track how many clicks a customer was getting and investigating any that had anomalously high click / hire ratios.
- etdev 4y agoYep this is a major part of my strategy (Hi, I'm the guy who built the site). 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.
- elktea 4y agokeep reading, candidates get a little something if they tell the site they used it to get hired
- Adrig 4y agoI heard a similar story from a guy who put in relation brands with professionals of the event industry. According to him, not having to put in place and enforce a strict control gave him a lot of bandwidth to work on more impactful parts of his projects. Surprisingly, he made good bucks with this approach... I guess even businesses can be more honest than expected.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coldtrait 4y agoWebsite does not load.
- etdev 4y agoIs it possible you have Javascript disabled? 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.
- stronglikedan 4y agoLoads just fine. Probably something on your end.
- kairozu 4y agoMy company recently started using this site and I’ve been pleased so far with the applicants for the positions I screen for.
- etdev 4y agoGreat, really glad to hear that!
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThanks 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. 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.
- harpratap 4y agoJapan's tech job market is not similar to other countries though. I can bet you that $JAPANESE_MEGACORP you speak of is well known for paying below market rates. 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)
- incahoots 4y agoSo basically they're in line with western society and it's disconnect to real wages
- harpratap 4y agoIn normal high-tech countries the domestic software megacorps match or exceed FAANG salaries. Spotify & Booking in Europe, RazorPay & Flipkart in India, Gojek in SEA all match or exceed FAANG salaries but not in Japan
- incahoots 4y agoWhich is incredibly odd, makes you think what was compensation like during Japan's early tech boom of the 80s and 90s?
- kartikkumar 4y agoIt's kinda funny how strategy and tactics can cross over between totally unrelated businesses. 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!
- AmazingTurtle 4y ago"We're sorry but Japan Dev doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue." Nope. You want people to read your stuff? Don't force javascript onto them.
- jokethrowaway 4y agoSo to summarise: A dev turned dev recruiter who can write good content (capable of going viral) and who works with only the best companies. 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.
- alberth 4y agoOff topic: if you’re a private business owner - why share your revenues? 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.
- blueflow 4y agoI think its for Self-Promotion.
- simonswords82 4y ago100% this - it allows the author to get away with posting what is otherwise a total fluff piece promoting their website. Without hard data, interesting anecdotes and other facts the post won't gain as much traction on sites like HN/Twitter etc.
- chadash 4y agoWell, it sure got me interested in hearing more about the story. As far as competition, as the article makes clear, it wouldn't be that easy to compete. You'd need to be located in Japan, read English (or you are unlikely to have read this article in the first place), and then go through all the hurdles that they went through.
- risyachka 4y agoOption B really never works. 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.
- janmo 4y ago
- presence1 4y agoSite looks really good. What tech stack did you use?
- etdev 4y agoThanks a lot! 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.
- conanbatt 4y agoThis is so complex! Wouldn't just vercel next.js + prisma be simpler?
- etdev 4y agoYeah definitely. 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.
- fogx 4y agoCan you explain more about these headaches? So far i'm still convinced of client side SPAs :D
- etdev 4y agoTo see your page content, crawlers need to load your JS and wait for it to hydrate the page. 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.
- Rackedup 4y agojapan-dev.com requires javascript to show any text... I guess it makes sense since they want to show us that popup...
- etdev 4y agoThe site is a Vue.js single page application. 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!
- adventured 4y agoIf you don't mind answering, what service are you using to manage the weekly job alerts email (if you're not self-hosting that)?
- etdev 4y agoSure! I started out on MailChimp, but recently switched to Bento (https://bentonow.com/ https://bentonow.com/) I really like it.
- exnz 4y agohttps://japan-dev.com/companies/indeed https://japan-dev.com/companies/indeed
- keepquestioning 4y ago
- upupandup 4y agoJapan 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. 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.
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- kakujuyo 4y agohr has the authority to pay 30-35% yearly charge ?
- etdev 4y agoYeah they do. 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.
- Pete-Codes 4y agoAwesome job! Job boards are incredibly hard (I should know, I've made a couple) Interesting business model too - either it makes nothing or big amounts of money when you get a referral
- godmode2019 4y agoNice 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. 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
- why_only_15 4y agoI think he mentioned it was just him and his wife.
- Panther34543 4y agoConsidering 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? 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.
- mym1990 4y agoCan you expand on the last sentence? According to https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Japan 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).
- ricktdotorg 4y agomy wife's parents live in Sangenjaya (Setagaya), i've had an eye on apartment rentals in that area for about 5 years, with a view to a perhaps/potential move over there. the prices (yen-usd translated) honestly look like ballpark NYC (Manhattan, not BK or Q etc) apartments from when i lived there 1997-2004. the prices are cheaper than NYC/SF/SEA/LA, but of course as you point out, the salaries are lower. i've not "lived" those expenses month-over-month as a local would do, but my gut feeling after several months "living" there [spread over a few years] in a local apartment is that food/eating costs are lower, but overall, other costs (perhaps not including than commuter travel) are higher. somehow, i think it balances out. edit for clarity
- etdev 4y agoCost-of-living comparisons get complex, but I can give you my personal opinion. 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.
- djitz 4y agoI 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.
- lovetocode 4y agoI really enjoyed reading this and I hate reading. 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?
- etdev 4y agoWe made it free to post jobs, and then charged a fee upon successful hire. 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.
- lovetocode 4y agoAh ok, thank you for the response and congratulations on your sucess!
- RedditKon 4y agoWhat % of first year salary do you charge on average?
- bamboozled 4y agoQuestion, why did you choose Japan specifically ? Feels like it would be wildly more successful in USA, Europe etc?