Hey, what's up, dude?
What's going on, man?
I am excited.
I just got a text on my phone that says my new Mediquest Pro is in delivery, so it should
be here in a couple of hours, I think.
I would love to also be excited.
My Mediquest Pro was supposed to show up today, but for whatever reason, my card got declined,
like the purchase got declined, and it also got declined right when I was landing in Arizona
for a four-day bachelor party for my friend.
Perfect.
So not only do I not get my Quest Pro, but I also was on vacation on this group trip.
This was last Thursday, right?
Yeah, last Thursday.
Because I had the same thing happen.
Not the bachelor party, but I got a message from my bank that was like, hey, we got a
sketchy charge from some company called Meta for $1,500.
We just went ahead and declined that for you, but if it's a mistake, let us know.
I think what's going on is no one is... These credit card companies aren't used to people
spending thousands of dollars on Facebook.
The typical stories, if someone spent thousands of dollars on Facebook, they got scammed.
Right.
They didn't buy a VR headset.
That's the place where people go to scam people.
Exactly.
But I don't even know what's in this headset, man.
I was looking, the reviews are out, because everybody's getting theirs delivered today,
who ordered this thing.
I literally don't know what the features are.
I don't know what makes it better than the previous headset that I already have.
I just know that it's like a new gadget, it's a new toy.
I like VR, and so I just bought it.
I do VR all the time.
I have the MetaQuest 2, and I play a lot of ping pong.
I bought the Quest Pro... I mean, you suggested it.
You're like, oh, hey, this is out.
I was like, whatever, and I just bought it.
I had no excitement about it, because I thought I was only going to be ping pong, but then
I realized there's one of these meeting room apps, it's not the one that we do, but it's
one that allows you to have multiple different screens.
I went into it with the Quest 2, and I thought it was really cool, but the problem is, if
you have two or three screens, the computing power of the Quest 2 isn't that strong, so
it's really grainy, it's really laggy.
You can't really navigate the screens very much, so I assume that the Quest Pro really
lets you engage with a bunch of different screens, lets you do things...
Yeah, it's got a higher resolution, but it's still not quite there yet.
You've got the resolution on the goggles, which is like, okay, here's how high the resolution
is when you're in VR, but then if in the VR world you're trying to look at a computer
screen in VR, that resolution can't be any higher than the resolution of your actual
VR headset.
Ultimately, if you really want to mimic having a bunch of different computer screens in VR,
you need to have a VR headset that has crazy resolution, so that it can have a slightly
lower resolutions in VR on your screens there that actually looks good.
That's I think probably five or ten years away before you have screens that are that
good.
I think way more interesting than that is your table tennis in VR, because every single
week I look at you in our group group and you have the highest strain.
Basically you burn the most calories every day because you're playing table tennis in
VR, and the only thing I do in VR really, besides the meeting rooms, is also exercise.
You do the supernatural app, which is kind of like Beat Saber or DDR to a beat, it's
like popular songs, but your table tennis is insane.
You play like, I don't know, how many hours of table tennis you play in VR every day?
Probably an hour on average, which is like, some days it's 30 minutes, some days it's
like, I just get addicted, and it's like hour and a half, two hours.
It's crazy that you can keep the headset on your head for that long.
I think I do an hour.
I think you get used to it.
It's like anything else.
I do it often, probably your brain acclimates to it in some way, but I'll tell you what
I'm actually way more interested in, and this is only because I listened to a podcast about
this new Quest Pro a couple of days ago, is apparently it's got AR, it's got augmented
reality as well, and this podcast went so far as to suggest that like, Meta and Mark
Zuckerberg's long play is actually augmented reality, and VR is like a cool toy that people
will enjoy for a while until the, ideally they just want glasses, but the hardware isn't
there yet, so for the time being, we have to have these big clunky VR headsets, but
they have this AR feature.
I think VR is way cooler than AR, because look at The Matrix, for example, The Matrix,
the whole premise of that movie is it's virtual reality, it's like if you put something over
your vision, and it's good enough, like we're not there yet, maybe we're 50 years away or
40 years away, but if you put something over your vision and it's good enough, you can
create literally any experience imaginable, like it obviates the real world, like you
don't need AR, like AR can only ever do what the real world does, plus a little bit, but
VR can do all of that, like you could literally create a VR app that demonstrates the real
world, and this like simulates you having an AR goggle, like literally VR can do anything,
and so I can't imagine like the super long term play being anything other than VR, and
I don't know, like Mark Zuckerberg's like, I don't know what's going on with his head,
but I would assume that that's like why he's betting the whole company on VR, and AR is
like a little bit earlier, hey, what's up, Eric?
Hey, what's up, not much, VR versus AR debate, do you have any thoughts, do you have a, do
you own a VR headset?
I don't own any of them, you know, I've checked them out at various times, I never quite felt
like they were there yet, but I think that I agree with you though, super long term,
I feel like VR is going to ultimately be the one that kind of goes the distance, and AR
is more of like a shorter term stopgap.
Yeah, it's a little plug in the hole until we get to crazy VR, but I don't know, I'm
a nerd, I think most people don't, most people think all of this stuff is extremely unnerving
and dystopian, and I guess that's the benefit of being a nerd, we don't.
I guess I should introduce you, you're Eric Turner, you're a software dev from the US,
you've lived in Japan since 2013, and you tweeted in July, so just four or five months
ago, that Japan dev, your startup, is a hyper niche bootstrap business, it has no employees,
just my wife and me, and it's earned $60,590 so far this month.
Yes, that's right.
That's pretty amazing, do you share your revenue numbers, has it changed since July?
Yeah, sure, we can go through and give an update on that actually, so I tweeted that
I guess back in August, so that was about July's numbers, where I said in July we made
about $62,000, I think was the ultimate number that we arrived at, and then the next month
we actually did even better, so we hit about $83,000, and that would be September, so that
was the magic number so far.
Every anti-hacker is the number 83, because $83,333 times 12 is a million dollars a year.
Exactly, but we actually did break that as well, so that was obviously a big moment.
One reason that I didn't go on Twitter though and talk about that was that I knew that this
trend was not actually going to hold, and the next month in September we actually hit
like $40,000 only.
That was going to be my question, how stable?
Exactly, so that's the thing.
What is it that makes the revenue fluctuate month to month with a job board?
Well, it's that I do billing a little bit differently than most indie job boards, so
usually they will be on like a pay per job post model, right?
You have a strike button, you click it, 300 bucks or whatever per post, very straightforward,
but the way that we do it is actually that we don't charge the company until they make
a successful hire through the platform, so it's free to join, free to actually post jobs
and everything.
We don't charge the startup costs, but then we do take like a kind of a bigger sum later
in the event that they actually do hire someone, so that is why the revenue is so spiky.
So I should probably describe exactly how your site works.
You're kind of doing it right now, so you run Japan Dev, that's japan-dev.com.
As we're talking about, it's basically a job board, and you describe it as a curated site
for tech jobs in Japan, for software developers and tech folks.
And I think what's smart about it is that it's English friendly, so that's kind of like
your niche, English speaking developers who want a job in Japan.
So basically, if I'm living in the US or Canada or whatever, and I'm thinking, you know what,
I want to move to Japan, check it out, but I don't speak the language, I don't know much
about the culture, how am I even going to find a job over there?
I probably Google something like, I'll Google it now, English speaking jobs in Japan, and
yeah, there you are, boom, number six, japan-dev.com.
I click that, and there you are, you know my browser site, I applied for a job before
I even moved there, I can find a job in my space in Japan.
How does that describe, does that actually describe like the bulk of what you do with
japan-dev?
Yes, that's perfect.
You know, I couldn't have explained it better myself, and we do cater, I guess, to our people
both in Japan and overseas.
So maybe that's the one thing I would add is that we do have some people already living
here who want to get a better job as well, but yeah, it's mostly focused on the English
speaking developer slash like kind of tech community, that's pretty much it though.
When you say we, you don't mean like a bunch of employees, you don't mean like a gigantic
team, you mean you and your wife, right?
Exactly.
So it is a husband and wife project, we built it together.
Now we are both working full time on it, we quit our jobs.
I was working as a software developer, she is actually a designer originally, so we had
this kind of complementary skill sets, which was really cool.
And yeah, so I write the code, she makes it look good.
And that's what we're doing now, we're both kind of working full time on it.
Japan is like, I think such a fascinating country, it's very ethnically homogenous,
which is pretty funny.
Like in America, like we're all about diversity, like I just watched this first season of the
Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon.
And it's funny because it's this fantasy world, but like, you have like this extremely diverse
cast of characters, like, you know, there's this family that's like, you know, owns the
fleet and they're like all black and blonde hair.
And then I watched the Rings of Power, which is the Lord of the Rings prequel series on
Amazon.
You know, black elves and Asian elves and all this stuff, and we kind of think of that as
like the norm in America, like even the tech industry is like, we should be super diverse
and try to represent everybody.
But then you go to Japan and Japan is like 98.5% Japanese, like, there is no diversity
in Japan.
It's extremely homogenous.
You're a white guy from America, like, where did you grow up, I guess, and what happened
to you that made you decide, like, you want to go somewhere where you're going to stand
out that much and be so different and not speak the language, presumably, and be so
unique?
Yeah, wow.
So you did some research, which sounds like and yeah, I'm not sure that I knew that 98.5%
figure when I first decided to move here, to be honest.
But yeah, I mean, I grew up in the US.
And I guess I just always loved, you know, to travel and, you know, I had parents that
really kind of impressed that value of travel on us and that we would, you know, go on family
trips and stuff growing up.
And I always had this idea that I really wanted to truly experience another culture rather
than just kind of being born in one place in the US and living there my whole life.
I just had that kind of idea in the back of my mind.
When I graduated from college, I knew that this was kind of my chance, you know, and
I looked into moving abroad.
And I guess just really by chance, I had been studying Japanese, the language of it, just
because I was kind of interested in it.
And in high school, actually, I took Spanish my freshman year, absolutely hated it.
And I kind of swore off languages the next year.
Yeah, like, I didn't take a language at all that, you know, as a sophomore, and then
my high schoolers added this Japanese program for the first time, and I was like, all right,
check it out.
See, it just seemed like so unique.
It's so different from, you know, English and what I was used to.
So I was like, yeah, I'll try it.
And I kept taking the classes from high school then up through college.
And at that time, I was like, you know, Japan, if you're gonna go just pick up your life
and go live somewhere, it's actually a pretty good candidate, you know, it's safe in a developed
country.
So no real concerns there.
It's got this unique kind of culture, which was something that I really was interested
in having grown up in the US, which is kind of this newish country, right?
We don't have that like super long history.
So I just really wanted to do it for at least like a year or so, learn another language,
experience a culture, and I just kind of ended up choosing Japan.
And the way that I actually moved over was not as an engineer, since I had no, I studied
computer engineering in school, but I didn't have an actual experience yet.
So I was like, you know, I'm actually just gonna take a break, I guess, and do English
teaching for a year.
So that was the original plan.
Yep.
So I moved to Japan, be an English teacher, just do a one year stint, basically, and then
go back to the US was the original plan.
Did you visit first?
Or did you just like, bounce over there?
I did actually, I had a homestay for a month during high school, just as this, you know,
there's this program with those like classes that I was taking.
So I had been there for a month and really enjoyed that.
And I felt like I wanted to do it for real and actually live there kind of as an adult.
So yeah, got on a plane, right after I graduated from school, and for what was supposed to
be a one year thing.
And now it's been almost 10 years since then.
It is such a cool country to visit.
I always say that Japan is like, it's my favorite country that I've never been to.
I don't even have plans.
It's not even on my calendar, but I know someday I will go.
And I know that I'll love it, because it's such a cool, almost like alien country, just
so different and distinct, the culture and so many cool things come out of Japan.
You live there.
What's something that, you know, someone who lives there, and it's lived there for quite
some time, that I wouldn't know is like a first time tourist, or what's something that
like, you know, any tourist might benefit from knowing that you appreciate about Japan?
Well, right now, there are actually a lot of tourists coming since the borders finally
opened up, they were closed for like almost three years.
And the Japanese yen right now is actually at a historic low, which is terrible for me
since I earned yen.
But if you're earning dollars right now, it's amazing.
So it's kind of a perfect storm right now if you did actually want to come visit Japan.
And yeah, I mean, I have some kind of standard advice that I give people who are looking
to come.
One would be make sure you get a train card like a Suica or a Passmo.
Don't mess around with tickets.
You know, don't tip.
That is one that Americans sometimes have trouble with like, it's not a thing here.
Just don't do it.
You know, be quiet when you're on the trains, you know, there's like this weird culture
where like, people don't really talk on trains.
And there's always, you know, whenever I come in with like a foreign friend or whatever,
they will be like that, that foreigner kind of on the train talking super loud.
I try to tell them not to do that.
Yeah, there's a lot of just random stuff like that, just like tips that I have, like, you're
going a long distance, it's usually better to take the train, like, I don't really recommend
getting a car and trying to drive around the whole country, like tends to get a bit slower,
and you don't really save much money anyway.
Everyone's a big pain.
The irony here is, I think I actually will make use of those tips, because I would like
to visit Japan.
And I'm shocked, shocked that Cortland won't, because Cortland's obsessed with anime.
I will.
Cortland has talked about how he thinks that Japanese is the most beautiful language.
Japanese is the most beautiful language.
Have you ever heard someone's like, watch an anime, and then turn off the subtitles
and just listen?
It's like ASMR.
I love it.
It's so good.
Wow.
Yeah, you're into anime and everything, so I was hoping that maybe you'd probably watch
100 animes.
The thing is, I can watch animes without going to Japan, so it's very easy to just
not go.
Cortland's going to visit in VR and tell me that his VR experience is better than my
real experience.
But anyway, Eric, I'm curious about, like, you went there and you were teaching English,
but I did a little bit of research and saw, like, eventually you started looking for a
software engineering job.
What was your experience with that?
Yeah, so I just did the English teaching for one year.
I pretty much time-boxed myself on that, said, I'm going to do it.
But then at the end of that, I'm either going to have to go home or maybe move to Tokyo
and find a software development job, because I just, you know, my engineering degree that
I had kind of killed myself to get was getting stale, I had not got any experience yet.
So I was like, you know, I'll give it a shot.
I'll go to Tokyo, see if I can find something.
And so, yeah, I just had, I think, like $2,000 in my bank account, something like that.
And I got on a train, basically, I was in this small town before, and Toyama Prefecture
and I just moved to Tokyo and got this like the cheapest possible apartment I could find.
It was like me and two other guys in this room.
And that was like 500 bucks a month.
So I was like, all right, I have at least a couple months before I literally run out
of money.
And I just went all in on literally searching for jobs.
And it was a struggle, especially back then.
I think the industry has improved a lot now, so it's a little bit easier.
But I had no experience, no visa, so a company was gonna have to sponsor me.
No money, like I said, so I had kind of a couple months to make this happen.
And I got rejected probably by like 99% of the places that I applied.
So that was a struggle that was kind of depressing.
But eventually, I, you know, I finally found this small Japanese startup, it was about
40 people.
And they, you know, were willing to basically hire me as a Ruby developer.
So that wasn't even my plan.
I was trying to be like a mobile dev at that time.
I built some like random Android apps and stuff, but I applied to, okay, we need a back
end person.
I was like, yeah, right.
Sure.
I'll write some Ruby code.
And so I got my first programming job that way.
But yeah, it was a struggle.
And obviously probably one of the most stressful periods of my life.
I can imagine.
So were you fluent in Japanese by that, by that point?
And are you fluent now?
And definitely fluent now.
At that point, I was already good enough to be doing interviews and stuff in Japanese.
So since I was really focused more on like the Japanese, like small startup companies,
they were all in Japanese.
So even that, that job, first job that I got, I was working 100% in Japanese, which is kind
of what I wanted at that point, because I really wanted to work on the language a bit
more.
I thought if I could get that programming experience while also learning the language,
I would kind of be able to kill two birds with one stone.
You know, I can imagine like, I think the experience of being scared, you know, like
I'm going to run out of money because I did the same thing.
I moved to San Francisco right out of college and I had like no money.
And I was like, oh, it doesn't matter.
I'll just build a successful startup because I was 22 and an idiot.
I was like, I can do it in three months, it'll be fine.
But I can't imagine having that experience, but then having it in a different country
where I'm like new to the language and there's also like not that many other, you know, foreigners
in the country.
So I'm like pretty much alone.
Like, what was your plan?
You know, if you didn't get rejected by 99% of companies, like, what was your plan if
the startup didn't hire you?
The plan was just to hopefully save enough for a return ticket home and then get back
to my parents house.
And then, yeah.
So I knew I wouldn't literally die.
I went, you know, on the streets of Tokyo because worst possible days, like I was just
go back.
And at least for like, you know, some period of time, you know, with my parents, but it
was like coming down to the wire though, because like I said, I had this visa that was about
to run out and I had to get a new visa from the new company and everything.
And I just remember I was trying to build these side projects and like at night I would
literally be like in McDonald's, you know, freaking these hundred yen, like $1 coffees
for like hours just trying to build these crappy like rails apps and stuff.
So I'd have something to show, like some code to show the companies and having some code
on my GitHub and everything.
So I didn't know if it was going to work or not.
And you know, I was getting to really like, you know, I had met some people in Tokyo and
everything.
I wanted to stay there, but I knew I had to find a job.
So it really just came through at the last second.
Like when I was honestly starting to think about getting up, I had like two or three
interviews left and one of them kind of panned out.
So it was really just luck.
Yeah.
What is, what is Japan's tech industry like, right?
So Cortland and I obviously we're in San Francisco when we were looking for jobs in our, in our
mid twenties and it's like, you know, there's the Googles and the Facebooks and all those,
all those things.
But in 2013, 2014, what was, what was that like for you?
I feel like in the US developers are super respected.
They have a lot of power, right?
Just because the demand is so ridiculously high and Japan is a little bit behind, I would
say on the software, especially like kind of internet tech side of things where there's
not going to be this guarantee really, where if you just choose a company and start working
as like a software developer, that it's going to be a particularly good work environment.
In fact, the average case is actually probably not very good, I would say.
It's more of like these older school Japanese companies that don't really respect software
as much.
They have this history of like kind of outsourcing and really being more focused on hardware.
Japan is really strong when it comes to hardware manufacturing, these things, but they haven't
really embraced software nearly as much.
So it's just a matter of being a lot more careful and trying to find that kind of pocket
of companies because there is like another kind of segment of the market where it is
really like international companies and the more modern Japanese startups.
So if you just focus on that, you can actually have a pretty good situation here.
So that's what I tried to do.
And I was researching, kind of building out this list for myself, I had just this trello
list of companies and when I found a good one or met someone at a meetup that was another
foreigner and they said, oh, this place is good to work at, I would kind of keep track
of that for my own job search.
Yeah, there's a line on your website actually, where you say that you started Japan Dev
in part to improve the image of Japan's tech industry around the world.
And I think I had the same image that you're describing that it's like a very conservative
place that, you know, like you said, on one hand, Japan is highly technically advanced
society.
They're leaders in electronics and manufacturing, entertainment, anime, as we've said.
But I can't even think of a single Japanese tech startup.
Like I guess they have SoftBank, which is invested in some other tech startups.
But besides that, there's like, there are no Japanese startup mobile apps that I use
or websites that I go to.
It's just, it's just not a leader in that space.
Why do you think that is that you think it is the culture?
Like why don't you think they respect software there?
And how are you sort of hoping to change that?
It's a really good question.
I think that back in like the 70s and 80s, Japan had this period of like miraculous economic
growth, right?
Where they had companies like Sony and you know, Toyota basically driving all this incredible
amount of growth, where they basically rocketed to the top of the GDP rankings and the world
where they're like the second biggest economy in the world.
And that was thanks to a lot of this like manufacturing electronics, this hardware.
So I kind of think that it is a remnant of that.
Because you know, you can quite point to that and say, wow, like, look at this amazing result
we had with these physical goods, we created all these processes and things to make them
more efficient and you know, build them faster and better than everyone else.
And it was amazing for us.
And people I think still kind of remember that bubble era of like the 80s and 90s.
And I kind of feel like that has remained very strong, because those are still kind
of the same main tech companies that people talk about today is like Sony and Toshiba
and these these types of companies.
And there's just been a lot more focus on that side of the market, unfortunately.
And then I would say really in the past decade or so, finally, there has been a lot of growth
on the startup side.
And you may not have heard of any of the kind of new wave of startups that have come out.
But they are getting bigger and bigger, you know, more and more profitable.
Like there's a company called Mercari, for example, they're actually reasonably well
known in the US as well.
I worked for them for a few years.
And you know, they had like a seven or $8 billion, I think, like IPO, they were a unicorn.
So I think there's like 10 or so unicorns now, maybe even like six, seven years ago,
they were literally none.
So it is growing.
You know, I'm hoping that we'll start to see more and more of those companies get bigger
and bigger and have maybe like a Google or like a Facebook level company come out at
some point.
But it has not happened yet.
So you were working at Mercari.
It seemed like it was kind of a nail biter situation where, you know, you really, really
needed to get that job.
And I'm sure it was great to get the job.
But then what is it five or so years later now?
And you know, you just posted an $83,000 a month milestone with your new company.
What happened?
Right?
Like, were you, you said you were building some side projects to find that job.
Did you know at that point in time that you wanted to eventually like try to build your
own thing?
How does your wife come into this too?
Like, is this someone that you met in America?
Is this someone that you met in the States?
And like, what was this conversation like where you're like, hey, we should start a
tech startup in this extremely conservative tech industry where like, you know, risk taking
isn't exactly rewarded in Japan or looked, looked upon very favorably.
So I'm curious about that part of the story too.
First of all, I did work at Mercari.
That was the last company that I worked at before I quit my job to go full time though.
So there were a few job changes that happened between the company that I mentioned, that
kind of tiny Japanese startup.
And you know, each time I switched jobs, I would learn a little bit more about kind of
tricks for finding the best jobs here, you know, interviewing all that kind of stuff.
And I was trying to get bigger, kind of more globally minded companies each time.
So I took, you know, a few of those kinds of steps until I reached Mercari, which was
the last company I worked at.
And somewhere in there, I did meet my wife.
Actually we met pretty soon after I moved to Tokyo and got that first tech job.
And yeah, she was one of my kind of first friends here in Tokyo, I guess, grew into
a little bit more than that and ultimately got married.
It's not like we had this plan to start a startup together or anything like that.
It was more just, I was getting more and more interested in that.
And you know, it was really more that she agreed to kind of support my vision that I
had for basically a job board that was the service that I wish had existed, you know,
because I, like I said, I really struggled when it came to mind in that first tech job.
And even subsequently, and I was like, you know, it'd be really cool if we had a job
where those folks on the needs of people like me where you can go and see, does this company
sponsor visas?
Are they, you know, do they have that kind of international environment, things like
that?
And my wife kind of really shared my enthusiasm for that idea.
She thought it was a great, great business idea and basically agreed to help out with
me.
There's a lot of people, I think, who are working jobs, who want to transition to become
an indie hacker.
I think it's like a tough path to follow, like financially, how do you support yourself
and socially, you know, it's like not necessarily the most acceptable thing.
It's a big risk.
And I think a lot of people just get inspired sufficiently that they want to do it.
For you, like, where was that inspiration coming from?
Was it, you know, you were just generally inspired to start a startup and do your own
thing?
Or was it specifically related to you just want to solve this problem to help people
find jobs in Japan?
I think it was more that I was always kind of building side projects and never actually,
you know, promoted them or made any money from them or anything.
But I always had some kind of like side coding project that I was building.
And I guess just in the back of my mind, I knew that one day I would like to try being
an entrepreneur.
And as I was going through my career here in Japan, changing jobs every couple of years
and learning more about the industry and that kind of thing, I guess I kind of zeroed in
on this one idea.
And there were kind of a few false starts before I ended up actually building it for
real.
Like, I think the first version of the site that I ever actually built was back in like
2017 or so.
And that was basically just like I said, I had this Trello board literally that I was
maintaining of good companies that I thought, you know, were basically good places to work
for people like me.
And I essentially took that and turned it into a website.
And there weren't even any jobs, actually.
The MVP that I originally built was just a list of companies.
So that, you know, that initial version, I did the typical developer thing, didn't show
it to anyone, kind of just built it, just wanted to write the code, whatever, you know,
and then stopped, dropped it.
And then, yeah, I actually didn't go back to it until about two years later.
I don't know why.
I think I was just kind of looking at my life at that point, I had actually switched from
being a developer to a like an engineering manager.
And just think about my career and like whether I wanted to kind of continue on that path
or try something else, I realized that, yeah, I kind of want to do something else.
And I came back to that idea and built it for real, rebuilt that site.
And again, it was still just like this job, not even a job, but it was like this glass
door kind of like review site at first, actually.
So that was a mistake.
I built what I thought other people would want, but really, I was the only one who wanted
it.
So that is one thing that I would tell people who are interested in trying to build a business.
Yes, scratch your own itch.
That's great.
Do try to make sure that other people have that itch too.
Because I don't know, for whatever reason, I was really into, you know, companies and
learning about them.
And I had this like list of like 50 plus like companies and all this data about that and
this stuff.
And other people don't do that.
I realized for whatever reason, I was kind of going a lot deeper than that, than a lot
of people would, and built it.
And I actually showed it to some people, I tweeted out, and it got some initial buzz
originally.
And some people were like, Oh, that's really cool.
Where's the apply button?
Basically, it was what it was like, I want actual jobs, like, I don't want to like go
digging through all this information of these companies.
And so I pivoted toward being a job board.
I love that you're in this sort of career space, hiring space, job board space, because
there's just a lot of money there.
And it's a lot of there's a lot of important decisions being made there that change people's
lives, that change the nature of companies.
And so like, if you have something that doesn't quite work, like you had this idea that you
thought would work, but it didn't quite work, it's easier to pivot into something that will
work because you're in like a really good space.
It's like one of the things I tell any hackers the most is like, look for a place or a space
where people care a lot and where people spend a lot of money.
I think every indie hacker wants to build a product where people care so much that they're
going to use their products, they're going to tell their friends about it.
Every indie hacker wants to build a business that people care about so much, they're going
to pay money for it.
I think like the shortcut is just like, where is money changing hands, right?
And like the job sort of career industry is like, obviously, we're a lot of money changing
hands, because it's like, companies are hiring people and paying their salaries.
Like it's hard to even imagine an area of the economy where there's like more money
being spent.
And on the flip side, you have people like you who are like, you know, out there looking
for jobs, and like they're stressed about it, it's emotional, it's important, it's
going to change where they live and how they live.
And so like, they care a ton about that.
And so I think it's like such a great place to build a business because like, even if
you mess up, you know that like, you're only like one or two steps away from like doing
something that has real value to people.
And that was one thing I thought about a lot was like, kind of trying to think about the
flow of money within the industry.
And you know, how actually in Japan, it's a little bit unique, and it's mostly from
recruiting firms more so than job boards.
And that's one of the reasons that I decided to do the kind of unique per hire model as
well is to be a little bit closer to that.
But you know, if you just look at the companies, and you know, a lot of that money is going
to do these recruiting firms, essentially.
And when you look at how much they charge, it's kind of eye opening, actually, because
usually it's a percentage of a person starting salary and in Japan, it's actually even higher
than it would be in like the US places like that, it's like 30 to 35%.
So that's a lot that coupled with the fact that, yeah, so my idea also was to be curated
and focus on kind of the top of the market as well.
So we kind of couple those two things, it was like, I'm only, you know, really working
with these good companies that pay a lot of money.
And they're primed to be paying like 30%, 35% of people's salaries.
So to me, that seemed like a huge opportunity.
It's like even if I am less than that, I can still charge a lot per hire and build a good
business that way.
So as far as pivots go, this is an interesting one, right?
Because you pivoted from basically like a company, like a company discovery platform
into this job board.
And secretly, what that means is that you pivoted towards a two-sided marketplace, right?
Which is like notoriously difficult.
You have the cold start problem, right?
This chicken and egg problem.
So even if you were better addressing the actual demand and the opportunities here,
now you've got this problem of like cold starting.
So what was that like, you know, did it take a long time or did you figure out any secrets?
So you're always going to run into this.
And one thing I tell people is if you do want to build a job board, then have a plan for
the cold start problem, right?
Because it's this catch 22 where to get applicants, you need companies posting jobs, but to get
companies posting jobs, you need applicants.
So as I mentioned earlier, I did have this initial version of the site where it was basically
just this glass door site where people go out and see, okay, here's 50 good companies
or whatever, you know, vetted companies that I was kind of backing.
And that got enough buzz, I think, where when I started to reach out to these companies,
they at least had seen the site once.
So that was actually really nice.
But I do think actually the main hack that I used though, was I was still working at
the time I was a software developer myself, and I went to my own company.
And that is really powerful, actually, because it was my target customer.
And I already obviously had the network of people there who I knew, so I was able to
just break into HR very easily and have kind of a frank discussion with them, like, what
kind of features would you need?
And obviously, it's just a little bit easier of like a sales pitch and everything when
you know the people.
So that was my first customer actually was the company Mercari that I was working for.
Then there's still the question of like, what about company number two and number three?
And I do think that initial bump in traffic that I had helped, because I think HR people
especially had at least seen the site once or twice, they kind of knew the name.
So it wasn't a completely kind of cold introduction then when I was trying to email them or whatever.
The second person I actually found on Reddit, they mentioned that they're like an HR person
at one of these companies.
It was actually Indeed, which is a big presence here in Japan.
So I DM them on Reddit, and they would get an interview with their HR people that way.
And it was really nice to be doing the model that I am doing, because I'm a developer,
not a salesperson.
And it made the pitch so much easier.
Because it was basically a no brainer where I could walk in and be like, hey, I'm gonna
post your jobs on the site, you're gonna get a bunch of traffic from me.
I'm gonna build out a company profile page as well, all in English, like native level.
I've worked at these big companies here.
I know what we want.
I'm literally the target customer for it.
So I'm gonna build this out for you for free.
No upfront costs whatsoever.
I'm gonna make you look good.
And you're not gonna pay me unless someone actually joins.
And even if that happens, it's still gonna be less than you're currently paying these
recruiters.
So that was the only way I was really able to get them to agree was like to make the
pitch such a no brainer, but they just couldn't really come up with reasons to say no.
So that was a big part of it.
And that's why I got my second company is I just went and talked to them.
And I had this kind of warm intro from someone literally on Reddit.
And once I had those two companies, I think the third one was a lot easier.
And then from there, I've had like four or five, and they were pretty well known companies,
then it just got a lot easier.
Ultimately, I also got some testimonials, which took it kind of to the next level to
the point where like, it's not even difficult now.
I get most of my new companies now from like inbound, I don't even really go out and like
search out company that maybe occasionally if I if I hear about a new company, it's like
really cool.
But now that part that side is not a problem at all.
The other side of the applicants, yeah, that was the problem.
Right.
Right.
So that took kind of Yeah.
So I had some companies now at this point, and some jobs actually on the platform.
So someone were to go on the site, we had an apply button, you could actually get value
as a customer, but that process of actually gathering more and more applicants way longer.
And that was an absolute like a real struggle for us.
And actually, I think, from the time when I got our first signed contract with the company,
and the first job posted to the time that we actually got the first payment was about
12 months.
So basically a straight year.
Wow.
12 months.
Yes, exactly.
And the fact that I had contracts meant that I was already, you know, it was a business
and I had to, you know, listen to the demands of these companies, right?
Because they're, in theory, they had a contract to pay me as long as they hired someone, right?
And so the amount of work was increasing.
And I was still working as a, you know, an engineering manager, managing a team, basically
at one of these companies.
So I would basically work a full day, wake up, have 9am meetings, all that kind of stuff,
do my full day as a manager, and I would like finish be like, Oh, okay, it's over.
And my wife was like, all right, ready, ready to start like work day number two at Japan
dev?
And I was like, Oh, yeah, okay, it's insane.
And so yeah, literally, we did that for 12 months.
I love that there, there could be that 12 month lag, right?
Like you have this marketplace, it's the cold start problem with the chicken and eggs, like
how do you get both parts?
But like, if you do the supply side first, and you have this awesome pitch to them, that's
like, they can't really say no to, they don't care how long it takes you.
Like at some point, you're finding them customers and that gives you the time to kind of do
one side, and then move to the other side, at least they didn't churn, but yeah, yeah.
And then I also love that you started with like sales, I think a lot of indie hackers
have the opposite sort of mindset and intuition, they think, Oh, I'm a software engineer, that
thing I'm in the worst at in the world is calling anyone or messaging anyone and doing
sales, like that's impossible.
And I certainly can't sell to like a really big company, like what I need to do is find
lots of individuals to sell to you, and I'll do marketing, like it turns out like that
is actually the hard part, getting 1000s of people do your website super duper hard takes
years for a lot of people.
DMing a few companies sending some cold emails having a few phone calls, almost anyone can
do with really no experience.
And it's kind of shocking, like, I don't want to say that it's easy, but like I've had experiences
when I was selling ads for indie hackers, where I would call up companies with no sales
experience.
And then like an hour later, I would have made $5,000 because like, yeah, we'll buy
an ad on your podcast, and I've had friends, my friend Len, who started key values, it's
kind of similar to your first idea where it's kind of a job board, but based on, you know,
more glass door vibe.
She did the same thing, same process as you called up a bunch of companies.
The first few were like, okay, I guess we don't have anything to lose.
And then after she had five or 10, it's super easy, because she has all these brand names
and everyone's like, our competitors are doing it, like, sure, we'll do it too.
And so I think starting with that sales approach is so much better for any hackers than starting
with trying to find thousands of users, but eventually you have to do that.
At some point, you have to find the applicants.
And that's when it actually becomes a business until then, you know what I mean?
People you might think it is because you have so much code written or whatever it is, but
nope, not a business until you have a customer.
But first of all, I love that episode with Lynn from key values.
That was actually one of the companies that we definitely looked at when we were first
kind of deciding how to build the site and everything.
And I think I just done it wrong enough times.
Like I mentioned that I've always kind of been building stuff on the side and doing
the usual mistake of the software developer where I am building it, showing it to no one,
it just dies because of course I lose motivation, it's not earning any money, no one's giving
me feedback on it.
And then I did that probably five, six, seven times.
And this time I was like, all right, you know, I listened to things like indie hackers, you
know, and I think I realized finally, like, okay, in order to actually do this, then we
need to go out and talk to some people.
It was still incredibly scary.
I still did a horrible job at first.
Like when I go back and look at the like cold LinkedIn, you know, LinkedIn messages and
stuff that I was sending, I cringe so hard because they're like absurdly long.
There's no way anyone would ever actually read these, they're so long, you know, talking
all about the service, not talking about the customer at all, they're not benefit driven.
It's just like, we're building this really cool thing.
Like, here's why it's like so awesome, you know, and like, no, like multiple CTAs is
just terrible.
I broke every possible sales rule and it's amazing that anyone even responded.
I love that though, because you can break all those rules and it works.
Like you did it, you did it all wrong.
And it still worked, which is so encouraging to other people who are just getting started.
I feel like your business matches up really closely with one of my favorite strategies
for starting a business, which I've talked about a couple times.
It's a strategy that I use for indie hackers, which got acquired by Stripe.
It's a strategy that Peter levels use for Nomad list.
He's making millions of dollars a year in revenue from that and it's been our products.
Same strategy that lent I used in key values, which I think she makes like around 400 grand
a year with key values.
And it's just her no employees.
And I think if you go through this process, you have a pretty good chance of building
a profitable business.
So I want to like to share it with you and you tell me what you think and whether it
applies to you.
It's kind of a three step process.
So the first step is you notice something in your life that's important to you and where
you're doing a lot of research.
So in my case, I wanted to start a bootstrap company as important to me, I started doing
a ton of research to find other people who had done this so I can learn as much as I
could.
It's like you wanted a job in Japan, so you're doing all this research, looking at all these
different companies who are applying and getting really familiar because it's just a lot to
take in.
In Peter Levels' case, he was a digital nomad and he was doing a ton of research about places
to go and live and be a nomad and he wanted to know how safe it was and how what the cost
of living was and how fast the internet was and that just required like a ton of different
research all over the web.
So that's step one.
Step two is you got to take all your research and you got to make it presentable.
And that means like number one, other people have to care about this research, it can't
just be you, but then step two involves you need to put it on a website somewhere, you
know, in a list or a grid format, I think the grid is pretty popular, and the hackers
in its early days are just a grid of interviews, nomad lists is a grid of cities, Japan dev
is sort of a grid of just jobs, and what's important really isn't the grid, what's important
is that you know your target audience and what they want so that your research and you
put it online is formatted in a way that gives it to them and then you have step three, which
I think is the hard part, which is what we're about to talk about, which is you got to distribute
it.
It's got to be discoverable.
So it's not a good enough for you just to like have this all on the web, but you need
to somehow get it out there in front of people who are doing the research that you were trying
to do.
But now when they're doing that research, they'll stumble across your thing, hopefully.
And so with ND hackers, like I knew that like, hey, everyone who wants to do this is looking
at hacker news.
So I'll post it there.
But nomad lists, I think Peter levels is in all these different like, basically Twitter
threads, where he's posting nomad lists and like these different articles or targeted
digital nomads, and so people who are doing research would find his website.
And with you, like you mentioned SEO, right?
If I'm trying to find a job in Japan, and I'm, you know, Farner, what do I do?
Like I do research for going to Google and searching for it, just like I did earlier.
And like, that's where you need to be for people to find you.
So like, I do want to dive into that, like, how do you execute this third third step of
the process?
Like, how did you get yourself found by Google?
Well, first of all, I think that framework is totally on point.
Like, that's exactly what I did, and like you said, the third step was definitely the
hardest for me since I had never really died marketing.
And unfortunately, it was also the slowest, because I was relying, I would say the main
distribution channel that we ended up using was SEO, especially Google.
Because like you said, that is pretty much where the traffic comes from for this kind
of news that I am focused on.
So you know, a big part of that was just writing blog content, basically related topics to
getting jobs.
I mean, because the job board itself, those pages will target keywords, like, you know,
if you search like Python jobs in Japan, or PHP jobs in Japan, all those kind of, I created
pages, separate pages, basically, to cover all of those for all the different programming
languages and that kind of thing.
And then next step was just basically writing content for our blog, which answered questions
that people like me would have.
So you know, one of the most popular ones I had early on was the salary guide that I
wrote.
I was like, focused really on these like more international companies.
And you know, here's what you can actually earn as a software developer, you know, based
on the level that you know, your seniority and all that kind of thing.
And another one was just an overall guy that I had like moving to Japan as a software developer.
So I was writing, you know, lots of blog posts.
And also, just the page structure matters a lot as well, making sure you have kind of
separate pages, like I said, rather than just like one big page that is going to be only
hiring, you know, only really targeting one or two keywords.
So that was something that I learned.
Peter Levos, who you mentioned, is another good example of this with numberless.
He has like 10s of 1000s of pages, I'm pretty sure, because like each filter is its own
page.
And I read this article about that and go, wow, I see.
So you guys split the pages up.
And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other stuff I did, like posting on the Google jobs, you
know, like the Google jobs network, or there's this feature where it'll show the jobs in
the search engine result.
So adding the markup to enable that gave me a pretty good boost, actually in traffic.
I guess those are probably the main things that's impressive.
But the problem is that it is slow compounds, and you change something and you see the fruits
of that literally three to like six months later.
So that is why I had this really long lag time.
And during that time, I was definitely improving the UX and everything as well, to just make
it super easy to find the apply button.
And the other thing, I guess, was the email list.
I didn't know this at first.
I didn't know when I first put the site, but for job boards, I would say it's a big thing
right now.
You really need to be collecting emails from the start.
And you know, I got better and better kind of sending those emails and figured out how
to write a compelling email to those people when I would post new jobs.
So I was doing that myself, kind of learning that copywriting as well.
And this kind of the two biggest distribution channels that we had, of course, posting on
social media as well, especially Twitter and LinkedIn, I would say LinkedIn actually worked
quite well.
And after a year, basically, it started to pay off.
And then from there, things got a lot easier.
What was that journey like emotionally?
Because I think a lot of indie hackers are in this state where they're trying to make
their thing work.
They built the website.
They built the product.
They're trying to get customers.
It's not working.
And they get discouraged and quit.
Most people will quit after a month or two of writing articles, and it's not generating
a lot of traffic.
Most people definitely quit after like four months, or six months, or eight months, or
11 months.
They get like a year, like what kept you going, and how do you keep going in that situation?
One thing that actually helped was COVID because I didn't have to commute to the office anymore.
And I kind of just needed something to do, to be honest, where, I mean, at least here
in Japan, things were pretty locked down for like kind of that year that I was struggling.
So it was kind of nice to have it.
That doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle, because it was definitely exasperating to see the
numbers go up, and more and more people apply.
I had more and more kind of high quality jobs, and yet we still just weren't earning any
actual money.
And if it weren't for being at home and not going out anyway, it's kind of just being
stuck there regardless.
I probably wouldn't end up quitting.
But yeah, we were able to keep going just long enough to finally get our first actual
payment from a company.
And then from there, we kind of had that extra motivation.
We're like, okay, it works.
We've got to scale it.
We've got to keep doing what we're doing.
We have work to do yet, but this is viable.
There's a success story to job boards with the vast majority of people that have started
job boards have failed.
So what do you think you know that they don't know?
What are people who starting job boards doing wrong?
So there are so many job boards now, and I've actually heard people say that like, they're
kind of played out at this point.
They don't recommend creating job boards.
And I actually think there's still a lot of potential personally, but I do think you definitely
need to niche down.
I don't think you should create another like remote job board at this point.
I wouldn't recommend doing that.
So definitely choose a niche.
And from there, I do feel like there is still this playbook that has worked relatively well
for me where you do have the cold start problem, as you mentioned, they're having a way to
get past that.
And a way that a lot of people do it is to just crawl jobs so that they already have
the supply, and then that affects users.
And if that is like focus is like curated, I still think there's a ton of value in just
taking the like sea of jobs that exist and saying, okay, I went through and I did the
research for you.
And I found, you know, these good ones are these ones that fulfill this criteria so that
you don't have to basically.
And here they are.
But if you do that combined with like some crawling to just get the jobs, because normally
companies don't necessarily mind when you do that, they have these applicant tracking
systems that have APIs, in fact, that you can kind of just crawl that data from pretty
easily.
That's what most people are doing these days.
So as long as you do that, and then really focus on SEO, make it really optimized, like
I said, separate pages for all the different keywords and stuff, post it on Google jobs,
basically all those things that I did, I think that that will still work.
And then yeah, you just really need to go hard on the marketing side of things, make
sure you're sharing it.
So yeah, I'm actually still very bullish on job boards in general.
In fact, I just started a new job board because I was kind of getting a little bit lonely
over here in Japan, just having this kind of Japan specific product.
And I wanted to try building something more for the international market.
So I actually bootstrapping this new job board now to work in progress, but it's called rocket
chips dot IO.
So it's basically a job board for mid stage companies in this kind of growth period between
small startup and big established company.
But the idea basically being that these are the companies that are kind of growing the
fastest, they have the best risk reward, because they have kind of the best of both worlds.
Similar to breakout list, if you've seen that breakout list, or like on this, this other
podcast, my first million, they talked about this, this concept of Sarah's list.
I don't know if you, yeah, if you heard that, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
So I built a job board for that.
And my idea now is basically to take my playbook from Japan dev, just apply all that stuff.
And yeah, that goes for like us slash international market.
I love that the idea of Sarah's list kind of under explored like way to make money and
life essentially.
I think if you if you go online and you Google like, Oh, what what job should I get, you
know, you're gonna get like, you should be an engineer, you should be a doctor, what
about a lawyer or a plumber, you can like have like the most generic thing.
But if you ask around on Twitter, you ask people in the know, you ask like people who
are in the industry, they'll tell you about these like unique paths that can make you
a lot of money, like, oh, you can be an Andy hacker, or you can work part time job, save
up your money, then invest in real estate, like, or you could like, go to the tech industry
and look for these rocket ship companies that are undervalued at the time.
And if you pick well, get a lot of stock and like become a millionaire just by working
a normal job, right, which is what Sarah, Sam Parr's wife did.
So that's a such a cool job board idea.
I'm curious about the business model.
So you mentioned earlier, your business model is that you essentially only charge companies
when they actually make a placement similar to a recruiter.
But you're not a recruiter.
So you're not like hand holding the applicants through the process.
No, so the product is a job board, and it's monetized kind of like a recruiting firm.
How do you ensure companies pay because I imagine like, you know, that year long, when
you're like, okay, people are coming to website, I'm trying to get, you know, applicants, like,
I'm not making any money, like, maybe the companies are hiring people and just not telling
you, because there's really doesn't seem to be a way to enforce that.
And yet, like, here you are, like, clearly, they are telling you and paying you.
How does that how does that work?
That is a very good question.
And as time went on, I basically created more and more ways to prevent that and keep companies
honest.
So the first way that I do it is in the contract that I make them sign there is a late fee
and increases the longer that they go without paying.
That's kind of the first line of defense.
The next thing is that I keep track of all the applicants.
So we have two ways of applying, you can go through email, in which case, I have your
resume and your email and all that kind of stuff.
So I know exactly who you are.
Or they can link directly to their like ATS, their applicant tracking system that they
have.
And if I use that way, then I basically show a model and I force everyone.
It's like a fairly strict modal where they ought to put in like some data, like email
name and a link, like usually it's like a GitHub or LinkedIn URL.
So that is the next kind of next place, like I kind of have that data at the very least.
So then I can look at that and say, okay, this company has had all these applicants
and they haven't hired anyone yet.
That's kind of weird.
So I can use that as a heuristic.
And I do one other kind of thing that I do, which is I have this actually this gift card
now that I give away.
So I have this form actually on the site that you'll notice there's a bunch of like, um,
you know, uh, joined a company through Japan debt or whatever they found a job.
So on there you can click and you can basically tell me about a job that you found.
And then I send you a like a 3000 yen Amazon gift card.
So just as another incentive and also to kind of show companies and be like, Hey, I'm asking
them to send this.
So yeah, it's that I have all that data.
So I can also just go back to, like I said, if a company is kind of looking a little suspicious
and I can kind of see some crawling or at least look at people's linkedins, talk to
some people, that kind of thing as well.
In practice, I actually think that the community is so small that companies don't really want
to burn bridges.
And since like I said, they are used to paying high fees for recruiters.
It's not that expensive to begin with.
Like they're already getting a pretty decent deal.
So I don't think it's really worth burning that relationship with us, um, over that and
not being able to use the service anymore.
So I think that keeps them real, to be honest, and if not, I have a few other kind of tactics
that I use.
That's awesome.
Well, Eric, this has been really cool.
You mentioned you, I think two months ago you were at 83 K and then you kind of had
a down month.
So I'm, I'm hoping for a 100 K month for next month.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, obviously you've had a lot of, you've had a lot of experience.
You've learned a ton, but a lot of our listeners are new.
So what's your advice for people who are just starting out?
Yeah.
I mean, I alluded to this earlier, but I think if I could concentrate my advice into one
thing, it would be find a customer because when you don't have a customer, you don't
have a business.
Right.
And before that point, there are like an infinite number of things that you could do all these
things that you could optimize and you could write code.
I made this mistake myself.
I literally was building this Kubernetes cluster for six months, all this, all these APIs and
stuff.
And ultimately like, like a product that no one really wanted.
And it's so easy to just do that and be in their kind of comfort zone.
You know, I was a programmer, so I just wanted to write code.
But then if you just say, okay, forget that, close the laptop, you know, whatever, commit
your code, quit trying to mess with the design or whatever, it's fine.
You don't need a logo.
Just literally get on the phone, talk to some people and just get a customer because from
that point on, once you have that, then everything, all that kind of like uncertainty, all the
other unimportant things, not fall away.
And you can just focus on what matters, which is that customer getting the next customer
and you know, scaling from there.
And you'll see like what actually matters in a business, right?
And it goes from being a project to really like an actual business.
And so that is the one thing that I would simply do is like, not next week, not next
month, today, right now, literally just go get a customer right now.
And I think that's the most beneficial thing you can possibly do.
Go get a customer right now.
Eric Turner, thanks a ton for coming on the show.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and about your
new job board, also about Japan Dev?
Yep.
So my main project is japandev.com.
Yeah, there's a hyphen, but even if you forget, it's okay, I have both.
And then rocketships.io is the other one.
If you are looking for a job, it's right now kind of a state between like a prototype and
actually useful, but there are already some jobs and stuff.
So if you want to see a list of companies where I think, you know, there's a better
kind of risk reward profile.
Yeah, check that out.
Otherwise, just hit me up on Twitter, underscore ET dev, ET dev was taken.
That's where I, what's up, what I am on everything else, I get everything, but yeah, twitter.com
slash underscore ET dev.
And also, if you're in Tokyo, I know a lot of people are coming right now because the
borders are opening up and everything, hit me up because I'm always looking to meet other
indie hackers.
A hundred and it was a dollar when you and McDonald's, he just checked 168 cents.
I'm going to come and just buy that insane.
It's ridiculous.
It's such a good deal right now.
Seriously.
Yeah.
Well, I'll see you out there.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Bye.