Japan Dev

Eric Turner moved to Japan in 2013 after college, initially as an English teacher with a one-year plan. He'd fallen in love with Japanese culture and the language (which he'd studied since high school), but his engineering degree was "getting stale." After 12 months teaching, he bet his savings on finding a software development job in Tokyo with no experience, no visa sponsorship, and no money—just a $2,000 bank account and the desperation of a couple months' runway before going home.

The job search was brutal. "I got rejected probably by like 99% of the places that I applied," he recalls. He spent nights in McDonald's sipping $1 coffees, building crappy Rails apps on GitHub to have something to show hiring managers. The rejection spiral nearly broke him, but in the final weeks—when he was honestly considering giving up—a small Japanese startup of 40 people took a chance on him as a Ruby developer, even though his background was in mobile. It was the last-second reprieve that saved his Tokyo dream.

Over the next six years, Eric climbed the ladder: moving through several Japanese startups, eventually landing at Mercari (which would IPO at a $7-8 billion valuation). He was always building side projects, always dreaming of starting something of his own, but always struggling with motivation and going nowhere. In 2017, he built the first version of what would become Japan Dev—just a Trello list of vetted companies he'd researched, turned into a simple website. He showed it to no one, lost interest, and it died.

Two years later, in 2019, Eric was working as an engineering manager when he decided to resurrect the idea. This time, he rebuilt the site as a Glassdoor-style company review platform. "I built what I thought other people would want but really I was the only one who wanted it," he admits. He posted it on Twitter, got some buzz, but the feedback was clear: "Where's the apply button? I want actual jobs."

So he pivoted to a job board. But the real insight was his pricing model: instead of charging companies per job post (the standard $300-per-post model), he'd charge companies only when they made a successful hire—taking a bigger cut (less than the 30-35% that Japanese recruiting firms charge) but eliminating the friction of upfront costs.

With a two-sided marketplace, Eric faced the classic cold-start problem: he needed companies to have jobs before applicants would visit, but he needed applicants before companies would bother posting. His solution was brilliant in its simplicity: start with supply (companies), not demand (job seekers).

He went to his own employer, Mercari, leveraging his existing relationships with their HR team. "That is really powerful because it was my target customer and I already obviously had the network of people there." Mercari became his first customer. The second came from a Reddit DM to an HR person at Indeed. By having two recognizable company names on the platform, his pitch to company number three became much easier: "Don't you want to be where your competitors are?" It's a classic example of momentum.

But building the supply side was only half the battle. From the time Eric got his first signed contract to the first successful hire and payment, **12 months passed**. During that entire year, he was working full-time as an engineering manager by day, then coming home to work a second full day on Japan Dev with his wife (a designer). "I would like finish be like, okay it's over and then my wife did it. All right ready? Workday number two."

The breakthrough came through content and SEO. Eric realized that his target customers—people like him—were Googling "English speaking jobs in Japan" or "Python jobs in Japan." So he built out landing pages for different programming languages, created a salary guide for international companies in Japan, and wrote blog content answering the questions foreign developers actually asked.

Google organic search became his primary acquisition channel. When someone Googled the exact problem they had, Japan Dev appeared. By the time Eric started promoting Japan Dev on Twitter in July, the business had already achieved significant traction—though the revenue was lumpy. "We hit about $83,000 in [September]. So that was the magic number so far." But September to October dropped to $40,000 because his per-hire model meant revenue was dependent on hiring cycles, not steady streams.

What didn't work: Eric's early cold outreach was terrible. "Looking back at the cold LinkedIn messages... I cringe so absurdly. There's no way anyone would ever actually read these. They're so long." He violated every sales rule and somehow got customers anyway—a testament to how strong the product fit was, and how desperate companies were for talent.

By late 2022, Eric and his wife had grown Japan Dev to approximately **$83,000 ARR** with just the two of them—no employees, no outside funding. The business was proving that you didn't need VC money or a massive team to build a profitable, meaningful company in a niche market.

The platform had evolved from Eric's personal pain point into a meaningful solution for both sides: companies in Japan got access to English-speaking talent without paying 30%+ recruiter fees, and developers got a curated, transparent alternative to sending resumes into the void. Japan Dev was also quietly achieving Eric's original mission: improving the image of Japan's tech industry around the world by connecting ambitious engineers to better opportunities.

The lesson Eric had learned—and would tell other indie hackers—was counterintuitive but powerful: "Don't build for thousands of users. Build for a few companies. Once you have real customers paying you money, the distribution problem (getting users) becomes a sales problem, not a marketing problem. And sales is actually easier."