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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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...
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?
Presumably they charge much less (10% yearly salary) than a normal recruiter would.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without hard data, interesting anecdotes and other facts the post won't gain as much traction on sites like HN/Twitter etc.
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).
And I niched down hard.
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.
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.
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).
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.
edit for clarity
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.
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 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)
Nope. You want people to read your stuff? Don't force javascript onto them.
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
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?
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.
Interesting business model too - either it makes nothing or big amounts of money when you get a referral
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.