Behind the Scenes
Sharing business learnings
This is the behind-the-scenes blog of Candy Japan. The idea is to share any data and learnings from running a Japanese candy subscription box.
Revenue reports
April income report was the first one ever, it's from 2012. The post was so popular I got encouraged to write more. Now I try to share how well the site is doing at least once a year. More often if we hit any milestones or if I just happen to be in a reflective mood: 2013, hitting $10000 MRR, 2014, 2015 Q1, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. I've also done an interview with Indie Hackers.
An outline of all the online services I'm spending money on can be found in Running costs for Candy Japan.
Credit cards
Accepting card payments and not only PayPal was a big thing for us, so I wrote a two-part post on Accepting my first credit card payment without PayPal. Here's part two.
In Candy Japan hit with credit card fraud I described what credit card fraud is and why it has been a big issue for us. After battling with it for some time, I wrote How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control.
A/B tests
I'm a big fan of doing split testing, which means not changing things based on your gut instinct alone, but trying it out to only a portion of customers and gathering real data to see which choice is better. It's science! I wrote a report on trying this out on varying our box design in Results from Candy Japan box design A/B test.
Marketing
In Sales results from getting 3 million views on YouTube I described how millions of people seeing your product on YouTube doesn't necessarily turn into any sales.
I'm active on Hacker News and gathered some data to see what the best time to do Japan-related posts would be. The conclusion was... that there isn't enough data. I wrote it up anyway in Do articles about Japan do better at night?
Coding
One night I got bored with packing boxes and tried to write a bin packing algorithm. The algo isn't in any use now, but it left me with a better appreciation for the complexity of the problem.
In How many lines of code is Candy Japan? I went through the codebase behind this site and tallied up what all of the Python code is there for.
Others
As the years passed, I realized I don't necessarily have to do every single thing myself and wrote Delegating a task successfully on oDesk.
One time I got a bit surprised after seeing many similar services popping up and wrote Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea, which turned out to be a massive hit.