Small Start
Real revenue and exit numbers from businesses that started small.
Real numbers from small businesses, solo founders and micro-exits in Japan and beyond
406 cases published, every figure linked to its source. JPY amounts are approximate conversions at ¥150/USD.
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VMagicMirror: ¥10M on BOOTH While Giving Away Nearly Every Feature for Free
VMagicMirror, a Windows app that puts a VRM avatar on your desktop, passed ¥10 million in cumulative BOOTH sales four years after launch — with nearly every feature included in the free edition. No ads, no social account, no analytics, and the developer kept his day job.
Native: A Lawyer Who Couldn't Read His Deodorant Label Sold His D2C Brand to P&G for $100M Cash in About 2.5 Years
Launched in July 2015, D2C deodorant brand Native sold to P&G for $100M in cash in November 2017. It raised just $500K, leaving founder Moiz Ali with over 90% ownership. At exit: $30M annual revenue and $1M monthly net profit. A numbers-first look at 2.5 years of one product, one channel, one ad platform.
10Beasts: An 8-Article Amazon Affiliate Site Hit $80K/Month in 9 Months — Sold for $570K, Google Penalty 17 Days Later
Student Luqman Khan's Amazon affiliate site 10Beasts reached $80,000 a month in commissions with just 8 articles, nine months after launch. In December 2017 it sold for $570,000 via Empire Flippers — and 17 days after handover, a Google penalty struck. A case where timing the exit made all the difference.
Repsona: Five Years Solo, ¥12.4M Total Revenue — The Open Ledger of a Task-Management SaaS Its Maker Calls a "Startup Failure"
The developer of Japanese task-management SaaS Repsona published five years of numbers: total revenue of ¥12,403,567, 5,873 registered spaces, 14,641 cumulative users. Ads cost ¥500 per signup, but free-to-paid conversion was about 1%. A look inside his self-assessment: "a great success as a hobby, a big failure as a startup."
Bargaineering: From Cents a Day to a $3M Sale in Five Years
Launched in January 2005, US personal finance blog Bargaineering was earning "a few cents to maybe a dollar a day" at the six-month mark. Five years later, in 2010, it sold for $3 million. Founder Jim Wang has kept publishing the details himself — here is what the numbers say about the slow start and the eventual exit.
kan.kikuchi: ¥5,913,887 a Year from Solo-Built Joke VR Games — With the ¥420K Build Cost and 813 Hours All on the Record
A solo developer's VR games grossed ¥5,913,887 in their first year, netting ¥4,490,828 — more than 80% of it from a single title, Chupa Chupa VR. He published the build cost (¥420,544), the hours (813) and the refund rate (14.1%) too.
Columns
Columns →Only 10 of 431 cases disclose churn. At 3% a month the ceiling is 33x new MRR, at 10% it is 10x
Only 10 of the 431 published cases state an actual churn figure, and only 5 of them measure the same thing. The range runs from under 3% a month to under 10%, which turns into ceilings of 33x and 10x new MRR. The three that brought churn down never touched the product.
ColumnsChiikawa took ¥16.85 billion at the box office in 66 days. It started on a shelf anyone could stock
The top-grossing Japanese film of 2026 grew out of four-panel strips posted on X, taking ¥16.85 billion in 66 days. The starting point was a shelf LINE opened in 2014 for anyone to stock. Sort twelve years of figures by who published them and the author never appears.
ColumnsAffiliate revenue per pageview runs from ¥0.1 to ¥417. Across 33 cases, the writer was not the one setting the rate
We counted the 33 cases on this site (20 Japanese, 13 overseas) whose main revenue is affiliate commissions. Where both monthly revenue and pageviews are published, revenue per pageview ranges from ¥0.1 to ¥417, a 4,000-fold spread with a median of about ¥4. The gap was set not by writing quality but by what advertisers pay per customer. Nine cases record a drop of 50% or more.
ColumnsAdSense pays ¥386 per 1,000 pageviews. What 225 blogs sold on Rakko M&A say about the distance between PV and revenue
We counted every sold AdSense-monetized blog and media site on the Japanese marketplace Rakko M&A, 240 listings in all. For the 225 with both monthly pageviews and monthly revenue, the median revenue per 1,000 PV is ¥386, and half the listings fall between ¥200 and ¥800. Above 300K PV the rate drops, to ¥179 for sites with 1M PV or more. Listed prices (the asking prices set by sellers) ran 19 months of revenue.