Kyoichi Anzai: Paid note Sales From ¥10,000/Month in Year One to ¥1M/Month in Year Three — the "Tenshoku Devil" Curve

Selling paid articles on note (Japan’s leading paid-content platform) for ¥1 million a month, claims like that are not rare, but few people publish the year-by-year path that led there. Kyoichi Anzai, who writes career-change know-how under the pen name “Tenshoku Devil” (Job-Change Devil), discloses his note revenue trajectory as follows. Year one: his first paid article breaks ¥10,000 a month. Year two: a long-form paid article breaks ¥100,000. Year three: he launches a subscription magazine and passes ¥1,000,000 a month. By year four, ¥1–2 million comes in every month without new effort, and in year five his book “The note Side-Business Textbook” passed 30,000 copies in cumulative sales.

What deserves attention is less the amounts than the shape of the curve. ¥10,000 → ¥100,000 → ¥1,000,000: one order of magnitude per year. And these tenfold jumps did not come from working ten times harder at the same thing, each year, the form of the product changed.

Note also that Anzai shows neither his face nor his real name. He has kept selling paid content in the trust-sensitive genre of career change while fully anonymous, another defining feature of this case.

Revenue curve mapped to product form

Organizing his public disclosures by year:

A one-off paid article is a flow-type product that tends to sell in the month it is written. A “long-form paid article” (higher price, more substance) becomes an asset that keeps selling. And with the year-three subscription magazine, revenue switched to a recurring model. That the jump to ¥1M coincides with the magazine launch shows it was the structural change, price × recurring billing, that moved the revenue digit. Year four’s “¥1–2M without doing anything” reads as the back catalog and subscriptions running on their own.

This curve is not unique to note. The case of a single paid note article that sold for five years and ¥80 million is the extreme form of the “long-form article as asset,” while the seller who hit ¥400,000 a month within five months is the contrast in initial velocity. Anzai’s record sits between them: a stepwise, four-year climb.

Resolving the contradiction of selling trust anonymously

Career change is a genre where readers’ life decisions are at stake. Getting people to pay upwards of ¥1,000 to an author they cannot identify should be hard. Anzai, faceless and nameless, instead uses his track record as the identity guarantee, stating that “earning a stable income of over ¥1 million a month as a side business without revealing your face, name or background is entirely possible.” The brand is not a personal résumé but an accumulation of published numbers.

The year-five book reads as reinforcing that anonymous brand with external credit. “The note Side-Business Textbook” was nominated for Japan’s Business Book Grand Prix 2026; passing through the vetting of a publisher and an award supplies trust that in-platform numbers alone cannot reach. The book costs ¥1,540. His note know-how articles cost ¥1,980 each, or ¥5,000 for the three-part magazine. That inverted price structure, the paid notes costing more than the book, means note readers are paying a premium for the author’s first-hand account over a published volume.

A sales method that puts the skeleton in the free section

The know-how series used as sources here itself displays his sales design. The series has three parts, including “(1) Building Out the Account” and “(3) Running a Membership,” and the opening, freely readable, section of each article presents the yearly revenue curve and book track record first. Readers verify “this author’s numbers” for free, then decide whether the concrete steps beyond are worth ¥1,980.

The disclosure works as transparency and, simultaneously, as the strongest sales copy placed in the free section. What a prospective buyer of a paid note most wants to know is whether the author really achieved the result. Anzai concentrated exactly that answer in the free zone. The publication of the revenue curve is itself part of the product, understanding this nesting matters both for reading the numbers and for referencing the case as content-sales design.

How far to trust these numbers

Caveats apply. All revenue is self-reported, with no external means of verification, and there is a self-referential structure: the detailed know-how (“What I Did Until note Sales Passed ¥1M a Month”) is itself the paid product, so the numbers function as sales material and should be read net of that bias. On top of both, the revenue base rides on a single platform. Fees, terms, and algorithms are outside his control, and acquiring the book as an external asset also makes sense as risk diversification.

Conditions for repeatability, and the limits

Where this record becomes usable to others is the mechanism: in content sales, the revenue digit moves not with volume but with switches in product form, single articles to premium long-forms to subscriptions, converting flow into stock each time. The same structure is visible in the self-publisher who stacked 24 Kindle books into ¥50,000–70,000 a month in royalties. Building trust inside a platform and transferring it onto stock-type products is a sequence that repeats across media.

The limits are time and expertise. From ¥10,000 a month in year one to ¥1M in year three, Anzai spent two years writing at “unsellable” scale. Had he quit at ¥10,000 a month, this case would not exist. And while career change is a large market with willing payers, it works only because the author has real experience to draw on. The shape of the curve is transferable. Whether its slope is depends on the market size of your genre and the depth of your own accumulation. Finally, note that this article uses only figures visible in the free sections of his articles, the detailed monthly breakdowns sit in the paid sections.