Columns
Individual cases only show so much. Aggregating the cases published here reveals the shape of the market: what exits actually sell for, how far one person can get, and where AI businesses stand right now.
Every figure is either an aggregate of our sourced case archive or a clearly cited public source. Nothing here is advice.
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.
Chiikawa 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.
Affiliate 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.
AdSense 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.
Our Own Record #6: 33K monthly users, and 44% of the growth came from two articles about an October price increase
Five weeks after Our Own Record #5, the personal-finance content site reached 33,244 active users in the last 30 days (16,758 in the 30 before) and 4,088 search clicks in 28 days. Two articles on an October price increase carried 44% of the growth, and one of them accounts for 20% of all users. The Korean edition overtook English, and we explain why.
¥1M a Month in 6 Months, 13 Months and 14 Years: the Fastest Cannot Step Away from the Work
Seven of our 385 cases record monthly revenue of exactly ¥1,000,000. All are Japanese, all solo or side businesses. Even among those whose period can be pinned down, a case that took six months sits next to one that took 14 years. The faster they arrived, the harder it was to step away.
5 owned-media success stories: from a ¥1M/mo blog to a $5.8M exit, and they split into 3 models
Five cases from our archive where a self-owned media property is the core customer engine, all with published figures: a side blog at ¥1M a month, a newsletter grossing $900K a year on 75,000 readers, a SaaS built on 10 landing pages, a course with a 300K-strong list, and a comparison site sold for $5.8M. They share one label and run three different businesses.
We counted the causes of death in 11 closures. Platforms and "profitable but unsustainable" beat running out of money
Of our published cases, 11 carry status: closed. Classify the causes of death and the running-out-of-money type is a minority: three closures trace to platforms and terms-of-service, and three businesses were folded while profitable or even high-earning. Operating spans run from 4 months to 10 years. The scarcity of failure cases is itself survivorship bias, and that is part of the analysis.
How True Is "My Only Employees Are AI"? 26 Solo-and-Side AI Businesses, Median ¥1.5M/Month
We fact-checked the "one-person company staffed by AI" narrative against our archive. Across 26 solo or side-project AI businesses, the 20 with disclosed revenue have a median of ¥1.5M a month — higher than the all-solo median (~¥900K), but the same order of magnitude. What AI replaces is development and support; distribution and judgment remain human work.
Median monthly revenue is ¥250K in Japan and ¥4.5M overseas — what divides the 18x is not the border
Splitting our 346 published cases into 135 Japanese and 211 overseas, the median monthly revenue of operating businesses is ¥250K against ¥4.5M, an 18x gap, while median sale prices are ¥2M against ¥130M, 65x apart. Reading that as a difference in ability is premature. The two distributions are missing different halves.
Word of mouth ¥7.5M, marketplaces ¥260K. Median monthly revenue lined up by acquisition channel
We aggregated the 235 published cases that disclose monthly revenue by their main acquisition channels. The highest median is word of mouth and referrals at ¥7.5M, the lowest marketplace-driven at ¥260K, a spread of roughly 29x. Read it the other way round: the business model chose the channel, and this gap is the result.
menu shuts down September 30 and the announcement has no numbers. The buyout was for liquidation, not operation
On August 19, 2026, KDDI announced that the food delivery service menu will close on September 30 and that menu Inc. will be dissolved and liquidated. We read the structure — buy the company outright on August 31, then wind it down — alongside a market that peaked in 2023 and the widening losses of the operators who survived.
The median business sold for 25 months of revenue — 20 disclosed deals, 7.8 months in Japan against 29.3 overseas
Across the 20 published deals that disclose both sale price and monthly revenue, we computed "how many months of revenue the sale was worth." The median is about 25 months; Japan's median is 7.8 months against 29.3 overseas. What moves the multiple is not the border but the repeatability of the revenue.
Our Own Record #5 | 11,136 monthly users, and the top 6% carried 63% of the traffic
A follow-up on the content site from Our Own Record #4. Active users in the last 30 days: 11,136 (vs 1,971 the 30 days before); search clicks went from 122 to 1,432 over 28 days. In July we found that the top 8 articles — 6% of the total — carried 63% of traffic, froze that analysis into seven topic-selection rules, and here review the measured result.
Over 60% of 167 exits were direct deals with no broker
Tallying the deal routes of 167 listed exits: over 60% were direct deals with no broker. Platform deals: Batonz 27, TRANBI 9, Rakko M&A 8. Buyers and pricing differ by route.
Our Own Record #1 | We started four businesses and three broke. Why this site is publishing its own numbers
A series in which a site that has only ever covered other people's numbers publishes its own. Between 2024 and 2026 we started four businesses; three stopped. We line up commit counts, active days and the dates things died, and record what differed — in four parts.
Our Own Record #2 | The funding and the fireside talks were fine. What broke the 2-person SaaS was the cap table
A B2B SaaS started with a friend from our graduate intake. VC and angel money came in, a talk with a Big-4 firm and a partnership with a major company were set. What broke was the equity split: the fundraising-driven need to concentrate shares in the CEO, against an equal workload, accumulated into a sense of unfairness.
Our Own Record #3 | 277 commits, 17 languages, and two apps that quietly stopped
The stoppage record of two mobile apps started in the same month. One was polished for 51 days — 277 commits, 17 languages; the other was fully rewritten and shipped within 17 days. Neither ever included a step to check demand, and both stopped when the commits stopped coming.
Our Own Record #4 | 226 articles and 9,103 monthly users, with a six-week lag before the traffic moved
Real numbers from a content site started May 15, 2026. We published 226 articles; active users in the last 30 days were 9,103 (vs 1,457 the 30 days before). Between the week we shipped the most articles and the week traffic took off, there was a lag of about six weeks.
In 2026, the AI businesses that work are strikingly mundane. What wins is replacing expensive human services
Cases that ran on nothing but the first rush of the boom, and cases that were folded, are recorded here in equal number. Across the published cases built on generative AI, what held up was never AI itself but the replacement of existing, expensive human services.
Monthly revenue varies 50x by type — a median map across 12 business types
Median monthly revenue varies over 50x by business type — SaaS at about ¥9 million vs. YouTube at ¥170,000 — but the gap isn't about which field "pays."
One person, 121 cases, a median of ¥900K a month. The ceiling is not set by hours worked
121 solo/side-business cases with disclosed revenue: median ~¥900,000/mo, max ~¥175M. The gap was labor decoupling, not hours worked.
37 disclosed exit prices and no single going rate. The median is ¥30M, the top quartile clears ¥600M
The smallest was ¥1.2 million, the largest ¥4.8 billion. Of 168 published exits, 37 disclose a price. The bottom quartile sits at ¥3 million and the top quartile above ¥600 million, and the same words, "selling a business", cover worlds that differ by orders of magnitude.