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How and why I built Japan Dev

japan-dev.com

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Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#11

Post by foepys »

Grimburger wrote: post #4

This was incredibly well-written and an enjoyable story. Congratulations on pushing through and getting traction. 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…

In Germany there is a similar thing where you need to deposit at least 25,000 € as collateral to be able to create a GmbH (similar to an LLC). This is meant to pay for debts in case the GmbH goes bankrupt.

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.

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#12

Post by [deleted] »

atraac wrote: post #9
yakubin wrote: post #3

I'm getting a blank page. Looking at the source, there is no static content on it, only JS. I have JS turned on, but it seems CORS is blocking loading of JS. 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…

It works in Firefox for me

[deleted]

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#13

Post by etdev »

yakubin wrote: post #3

I'm getting a blank page. Looking at the source, there is no static content on it, only JS. I have JS turned on, but it seems CORS is blocking loading of JS. 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…

Weird...

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!

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#14

Post by lkois »

Grimburger wrote: post #4

This was incredibly well-written and an enjoyable story. Congratulations on pushing through and getting traction. 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…

Probably to prove it's unencumbered, liquid collateral. Which makes sense if you disregard all the other ways to determine that

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#17

Post by etdev »

jsty wrote: post #10
trhoad wrote: post #6

> So we share your jobs on our site. A candidate applies. You interview them and decide to hire them. You notify us you hired them. We send you an invoice. You pay us a fee. 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 l…

Not sure how prevalent LinkedIn or a similar service is in Japan, but I'd imagine it'd be pretty easy to track how many clicks a customer was getting and investigating any that had anomalously high click / hire ratios.

Yep this is a major part of my strategy (Hi, I'm the guy who built the site).

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.

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#18

Post by etdev »

atwood22 wrote: post #15

Congrats on the traction. Somewhat unrelated, but it seems a lot of bootstrapped success stories are job boards.

Thanks! Yeah, the space has gotten pretty crowded but it can still work really well if you niche down imo.

And I niched down hard.

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#19

Post by elktea »

trhoad wrote: post #6

> So we share your jobs on our site. A candidate applies. You interview them and decide to hire them. You notify us you hired them. We send you an invoice. You pay us a fee. 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 l…

keep reading, candidates get a little something if they tell the site they used it to get hired

Re: How and why I built Japan Dev

#20

Post by jand »

foepys wrote: post #11
Grimburger wrote: post #4

This was incredibly well-written and an enjoyable story. Congratulations on pushing through and getting traction. 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…

In Germany there is a similar thing where you need to deposit at least 25,000 € as collateral to be able to create a GmbH (similar to an LLC). This is meant to pay for debts in case the GmbH goes bankrupt. 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 conver…

And: In order to keep the spirit of protecting the creditors of GmbH/UG - while having only to deposit 1 EUR to the UG (haftungsbeschränkt), the UG has to "warn" all potential business partners by carrying the "(haftungsbeschränkt)" (limited liability) suffix as part part of the company name in all written communication (roughly).
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