Financially

Your first thought might be that would have been financially tough for me.

Net income from the site has always been very low, lately usually around $2000 / month, which after tax is just about enough to pay for necessities when you live outside of major cities in Japan without having expensive hobbies. But I've learned from the past that living from your own projects means alternating times of feast and famine, and had planned accordingly.

Luckily now it looks like I might not even have to dip into savings after all, because the Japanese government is providing some great support. They gave every sole proprietor a one-time aid of up to $10000 (if you knew to apply for it), depending on how much they were affected by the measures taken to fight the virus. Since I was fully affected I was able to get the full amount.

Between the aid and having planned for times like these, I didn't need to stress too much.

Mentally

Candy Japan wasn't super time consuming to run. As shipments are sent twice a month, there are certain tasks that need to be done on the same schedule. These are: finding and buying the next candy to send, confirming they get sent to the correct people (taking into account refunds, changing addresses etc.), dispatching the shipment, taking product photos, writing the newsletter, customer support, bookkeeping/tax stuff, and finally marketing.

All of them can be done in less than 2 hours per day if I'm focused, because I've done them a hundred times before and have systems in place to help do them faster. For instance part of my bookkeeping is done by scripts, shipping labels are generated by a script as well.

But projects don't just take clock time, but a chunk of your mental resources as well. You might be running a business that takes a fourth of your time, but it can still take half of your mind. There is always the desire to find "the next stage" for the service. Trying to find something to make it more fun so customers would subscribe for longer, some way to cut costs, some way to reach more customers. You can think about this stuff nonstop.

It's been pretty great having about 2 hours of extra time each day, but half of my mind back.

Thanks for reading

For a more personal update, I also wrote a post about what I've been doing lately instead of running Candy Japan.

International shipping halted

Twice a month we prepare a batch of boxes, then haul them to a nearby post office for shipping. This time after finishing the batch, for the first time ever, it's the hauling part that failed. When trying to send them off at the post office we were informed that because of the coronavirus situation, mail could not be sent out at all by the shipping method we use (SAL). Besides this, the more expensive airmail option was also shut down for 100+ countries.

I took this to mean that international shipping has basically been turned off, and acted accordingly.

I informed customers of the stoppage, and refunded around ~$3500 in prepaid orders since it was unclear when shipping could resume. My hand-crafted subscription system wasn't built with this in mind, so it took about 10 hours of work just to send refunds and pause the service, including hand-customizing hundreds of emails.

Stuck with hundreds of boxes of candy

Up to this point I was only concerned with telling everyone about the situation quickly and promptly issuing refunds. What I had tried not to think too much about yet was what to do with the ~200 boxes of candy we had already packaged, now sitting in storage, unable to be sent.

I do have a way to resell it in Japan, but at about a quarter of its original price, and now the work put into packaging it would become more work of unboxing everything again.

Not wanting to waste perfectly good sweets that I had already paid for, I started to look more carefully about how many of them I could ship out, only including the countries with working postal systems for airmail. While I had already refunded everyone, if I could get some of the shipments through, I could at least adjust their accounts such that I would owe them one less box in the future.

I guess one option would have been doing an epic hours-long joke "unboxing" video where someone unboxes two hundred boxes with exactly the same contents every time. Maybe not.

Some shipments can still be sent?

The list of stopped countries I received from the post office had over 100 countries on it, but actually cross-checking this list against subscriber countries, I discovered that I could actually still ship to about 80% of subscribers.

With most shipments still possible, perhaps I overreacted by stopping everything. I could have just temporarily suspended the affected 20% and taken the hit for the increased shipping cost for the rest. But thinking it over it felt like the right choice, as shipments might be unreliable now and the closures would still likely expand to more countries.

After sending out the shipments, exactly that happened. Except much sooner. Between revising the batch to include only the people with functioning postal systems and then handing only those boxes to the post office, the list had already expanded, now standing at 124 countries. I discovered this by having two large bags full of boxes delivered to my apartment, with the mailman regretting that actually, they could not be sent.

It's just a flesh wound

I don't really feel too bad having to pause the service for a while, as this is the first time I've had any kind of break from running Candy Japan in close to 10 years.

I also got to discover that all of my customers are incredibly cool people, being nothing but supportive when I had to inform them of the candy they now wouldn't be receiving. Some even showed personal concern for us having to pause the business (don't worry, we'll be fine).

One reply noted that the timing for the pause was good, as the subscriber also just lost their job as well.

Thanks for reading

If you find the idea of getting random Japanese sweets interesting, please subsc... oh yeah, you can't right now. But you can put your email address in the little box on the front page and I'll get back to you when subscriptions are open again.

Hi, I run a site called Candy Japan, which ships surprise boxes of Japanese candy to subscribers around the world up to twice a month. The site launched in 2011, and as the new year approaches, it's been my tradition to do a yearly review of how things are going.

So here's how 2019 went. Spoiler: it was mostly full of fail.

Key stats

Avg. monthly sales were $6,560 - expenses $5,270 = profit $1,290 (vs. $1,470 last year).

Number of subscribers fell by 34%, going from 314 in January down to 207 in December.

The site had 130k visits from start of the year to mid-December, down from 145k in the same period last year.

Of these visitors 43k came from organic search (vs. 35k in 2018), 32k from links on other websites, 21k direct, 10k social, and 7k clicked on paid ads.

Cutting costs

The monthly profit of $1,290 was down from last year, but not as much as you might expect from the subscriber drop, because I was able to cut several costs here and there.

For example, about $100 / month was saved by switching from Recurly to Stripe subscriptions. I didn't start with Stripe, because it wasn't available yet when I started the site, and they only added subscription support later on.

Top expenses

Buying candy is unsurprisingly my largest cost at $2,450 / month. This year I spent more time finding the best prices for the candies I ordered, so that should have resulted in some savings as well.

The second largest cost is shipping at $1,800 / month, which doesn't seem possible to improve upon right now (there are volume discounts, but I'm far from getting those).

Do or delegate

I let go of my two freelancers who had been tasked with customer support and newsletter creation, saving $120 / month. With less customers it is easy enough for me to do the support myself. Writing the newsletter and taking photos for it is a bit more work, but I feel good about communicating with people directly, and enjoy the photography.

There is always overhead when having help. Instead of just doing something, you need to explain the task, verify the work and pay for it. For the newsletter I also needed to ship products to the author every time, leading to delays and confusion sometimes.

I think in the future I wouldn't delegate small tasks I am able to do myself, if they only take a few hours each week to do.

YouTube advertising experiments (fail)

I spent $310 / month on ads on average. It's a different type of expense, as I would gladly spend infinite dollars on it if it just had a positive return. Spend is very low now, simply because I have not yet found an advertising channel I could scale.

I'm a bit obsessed at trying to crack paid YouTube ads, because if I could make even a little bit of profit, it would be very scalable. I tried this before, but the cost was always more than I could hope to make back in a reasonable timeframe. I gave YouTube ads two more shots this year.

Attempt #1

Fiddled with targeting settings, streamlined the ordering process, then re-ran the campaign for a bit. Campaign still didn't seem to be profitable.

Attempt #2

Figured that with only one subscription option I might not be making as much as I could from each visitor. Potential customers looking to spend a different amount than the $29 / month option I had wouldn't be able to order at all, leaving money on the table.

Adding multiple tiers meant writing code, as I my homegrown Python subscription system didn't support it. Still, it wasn't as painful to make the change as I had feared, and in just a week I had two new tiers available: get just the first box of each month at $12.95, or the second one at $17.95 / month.

After this I was ready to try the campaign again, and decided to do more careful analysis this time. Sadly I was still a few dollars short from merely breaking even.

Next attempt?

Since I'm close to breakeven now, these ad experiments are no longer expensive. Even if I spend thousands showing my ad unprofitably, I still get most of that back. So I want to keep experimenting, and already know the next thing to try.

YouTube charges for an ad when it gets clicked OR watched for over 30 seconds. My ad happens to be 30 seconds long, mostly because creating the animation was expensive. But that might not be the optimal length.

There could be a large percentage of people who are not really that interested in Candy Japan, but still watch the entire ad, as it's short enough that you might just wait and fiddle with your phone instead of clicking the "skip" button.

I'm curious if making the ad artificially longer would get these uninterested people skip it before I get charged. If someone sees an uninteresting ad begin and see that it is, say 3 minutes long, then they'd be more likely to skip it quickly, as just waiting through it would take too long.

I could extend the ad by adding an unboxing video at the end, and would be curious to see if the added length would make more people skip it during the first 30 seconds. If that made it just 20% cheaper to run, then it would make the campaign profitable. Besides the skip effect, talking more about the service might also convert more of the people who watch the entire thing.

Messed up a major A/B test (fail)

Embarrassingly during 2019 I messed up a major A/B test where I tried to compare two completely different landing page designs against each other. The test ran for 3 months to get enough data, after which I spent a fair bit of effort analyzing and writing up the results. I thought the test was an improvement at 91% confidence.

Except that someone pointed out later that the result was completely invalid due to a stupid little bug: I set the Set-Cookie header in two different places, overwriting the variable that was supposed to control my A/B test! facepalm

The big thing I learned from this was that running what was effectively an A/A test still managed to convince me that I had found an improvement. Without knowing about the bug, following the winner of the test made sense, but not my unwarranted inner confidence of its validity.

I haven't re-run the test yet; it will be interesting to see which design was actually better.

Social media tests (fail)

Instagram

I didn't have Instagram for Candy Japan before, because honestly I don't really understand it. Maybe because I spend more time reading content, and don't really see the appeal of scrolling through a feed of pictures.

Still, "start posting on Insta" is possibly the top suggestion whenever I mention trying to find ways to promote Candy Japan.

Fine. I started posting.

Six months and 51 posts later… 40 followers. No sales.

Looks like I can't cargo cult my way into Instagram success that easily.

Flipboard

On Flipboard you can curate your own magazine on a topic of your choice and "flip" articles to it. It's a bit like starting a subreddit, except you control it completely. Figured I'd try to start a Flipboard for Japanese candy, to which I flipped articles relating to Japanese candy once a day for a little over a month.

I figured if it gained readers, then I could occasionally post some of my own content there as well.

It didn't. Not a single reader in fact.

Content marketing test (promising)

I was curious if by adding a "news" section to the site and using the proper schema tags I could get Google to consider it to be a news site and surface that in its results. I figured I could summarize candy-related articles that originally appeared in Japanese news sites.

Surprisingly this trial worked, and Google Discover sent me 15,000 clicks, but the article they picked up was about North Korean sweets, so it didn't lead to any new subscribers.

However now I rank #2 in Google for "north korean candy"! Not sure if success.

Side-project marketing test (success?)

Now to wrap things up, here's something that worked.

I was inspired after reading this post about launching side projects as a form of marketing: create small fun / useful things and launch them under your main domain. Hopefully each launch will then get backlinks from sites that wouldn't otherwise have linked to you, and hopefully improve the ranking of the main site.

Seems like a great fit, as I just love short programming projects with a quick payoff. For example I often participate in Ludum Dare just for fun. So I started thinking about what to create, and realized I already had something perfect that I had created just weeks before as just an experiment: a candy animation generator.

I already had it on its own site, but after reading the post I moved the widget under my main domain and submitted that to Product Hunt. Result: 6000 visits, a handful of backlinks and even two sales. Yatta!

Conclusion

It seems hard to grow Candy Japan now, there are many things going against it. There's a general fading of interest towards japanese candy and harsh competition.

The other day my wife wanted to show the site to a friend, but actually couldn't find it because there are so many similar ones.

Personally in 2019 I was in study mode, doing online courses on Swift and deep learning, filling holes in my math background, and continuing my long journey of learning the kanji.

Explore-exploit

For 2020 I will go back into "exploration mode" again and spend more time launching small projects. During my life I've released around 50 random projects, of which 5 were some level of "successful". Based on that, if I try 10 small new projects I would have a fair (~65%) chance of success with at least one of them.

I will keep running Candy Japan as before and improving it when I come up with things to try, but in my mind this has downgraded from "the project", to just "a project".

Thanks for reading, and do subscribe if you'd like to try some candy for yourself.

How I got into animu and Japanese

Back in the 90s I was one of those annoying anime geeks who would obsess over any piece of animation, as long as it was made in Japan. Anime entered my consciousness after getting my first Internet connection, and suddenly finding that 1) it's a thing 2) there's a subculture of people obsessed with this thing.

At that time downloading video was a ridiculous idea (would there ever be such bandwidth?), but I found a German guy online who'd mail me VHS tapes of Ranma 1/2.

I found some basic Japanese writing and grammar information online, and managed to just about learn hiragana and some extremely basic vocabulary that way, but it was too hard to make progress from just my bedroom. I was pretty much stuck until several years later when at the university I was able to take actual Japanese classes.

I probably annoyed everyone there, including my teacher with my overeagerness, but my enthusiasm pushed me through all the classes we had. After those I applied to become an exchange student and was accepted. I won't get into that story here, but suffice to say I learned a ton during my two years in Tokyo, and probably annoyed a whole new batch of people.

How I got work as a manga translator

I had learned a few hundred basic kanji, and was progressing through Heisig's famous book "Remembering the Kanji", so I thought I was almost done with this whole kanji thing and pretty much ready to do actual translation work.

Here's me back then, probably thinking I'm just wicked smart.

This was incredible hubris on my part, as now 10 years later I STILL feel like I'm nowhere near "finished" with my kanji study. But it worked for my advantage in that I believed in myself enough that I managed to convince others to believe in me as well.

I made a small work sample where I translated just a few pages of a manga from Japanese, and sent it to two manga publishers. They did not advertise vacancies, or in any way indicate that they were looking for new translator; I simply sent them a letter out of the blue. I had the work sample very sleekly packaged, and used Photoshop (well Gimp actually) to really typeset my translations into the speech bubbles, so it looked almost like a real published thing. It must have made an impression, as BOTH of the companies agreed to hire me on a freelance basis.

It was rather surreal going to the offices of these famous publishers, and meeting with their professional translators, and somehow no-one shot me down and I was actually allowed to proceed with the work.

Doing the translation work

Pretty soon after actually getting the first task, I realized that it's actually a lot of work to translate even a single book.

It turns out that Japanese is very compact, and it was my job to somehow creatively fit a translation into the limited space of the speech bubbles. Another challenge was all the onomatopoeia: in Japanese there are sound words for everything, even silence ("shiiiin").

Perhaps it was a vision softly creeping that left its seeds while I was sleeping, but after a lot frustrated attempts, somehow I managed to find a passable translation even for the sound of silence (no, I don't remember what it was).

Now I was finally face to face with the reality that I didn't actually know Japanese nearly as well as I had convinced myself that I did. But it turns out that once you are committed, with people relying on you... well, you find a way to do it. Which in my case meant relying heavily on my electronic Japanese dictionary (no smartphones back then), and whenever there was anything slangy or colloquial also on the help of my back then Japanese girlfriend (now mai waifu).

Thanks to her help and just relentlessly consulting the electronic dictionary (and accidentally smashing one), I was able to make a passable translation that resulted in little complaints from the editor, and even got decent reviews.

Why I stopped

My limited ability made it hard to keep up with the deadlines. I had imagined translating perhaps a book a month at most, but their expectation turned out to be the completion of three books each month. My editor was constantly complaining about the work being late.

We kept up the work through 14 books total, including the complete Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne series and 7 books of Yu-Gi-Oh, but eventually the pace was just too hard to keep up with.

Thanks for reading

I learned three things from the experience.

Getting to live my dream of being a manga translator was a great experience to have, as it taught me how little I really know. The humility motivated me to study harder later, which I am still doing daily. I'm still not even through all junior high school kanji, and need much more reading practice. Kanji for names? I know nothing.

On the other hand I also learned that sometimes you can get something you want simply by showing up and asking for it. It's bizarre that if I had known accurately how little I know, I would never have thought myself qualified, and would never have even tried to apply for the work I managed to get.

Final learning? Perhaps that if you do put yourself in a difficult situation out of ignorance, just the commitment of it can help you push through.

To make our spending habits clear to myself, and to share with anyone who might be thinking of living in Japan, here's a list of everything I could think of that we spend money on here each month. My wife is very good at keeping track of these things, so they are mostly based on actual receipts.

Internet: $28 / month

We have 125Mbps down, 82Mbps up fiber to home for $28 / month. Our Internet actually became cheaper since last time, and we didn't need to do anything. One day we just received notice that our Internet connection will now be 25% cheaper than before.

Such gradual discounting has been happening ever since we subscribed to this. The current price is almost half of what it was when we signed up. Thanks NTT West! It really seems to be unlimited, never hit any caps or mystery fees during our years of usage. Also very reliable, I can't recall it having ever been down.

The speed was measured over WiFi, I haven't tried how fast a direct connection would be. I am connected through an AirPort base station at 5Ghz. Decided to switch to this fancy base station after several of our neighbors were on the same contested channels. Having 5Ghz all to ourselves has been a noticeable improvement.

Phone: $73 / month

We are both on B-Mobile now, making our combined phone bills $46 / month. I assume we will buy a new phone costing about $650 each every 4 years, so that's $27 / month for upgrading phones. These have unlimited data, but after reaching a certain monthly cap (3GB in our case) the connection becomes slower.

If you are looking to get a phone in Japan, don't enter into a contract in any shiny sales office (DoCoMo, SoftBank, AU etc.). Besides being ludicrously expensive, you might find yourself locked into a 2-year contract which you are only allowed to cancel one specific month every 2 years. Instead buy your SIM online, or use a global eSIM that also works in Japan.

According to a friend (Tiago, the guy behind TV Streams) who recently comparison shopped various eSIMs (HK, Ubigi and GigSky), the best was GigSky and the cheapest was Ubigi. There are now also Japanese competitors even cheaper than B-Mobile, so maybe comparison shop a bit. To buy a SIM from a Japanese low-cost provider, you'll need to upload your official ID and then get the card in the mail.

Gas, electricity and water: $222 / month

Even with our son in the house, these haven't gone up almost at all.

Gas: $105 / month

Gas is for cooking, and for the water heater. I keep thinking if going all-electric wouldn't be cheaper, but we don't own the place and I doubt the difference would be big enough to bother anyway.

Electricity: $93 / month

Electricity is mostly for air conditioning, which means cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. Looks like heating costs a bit more.

Water: $25 / month

Looks like a sawtooth wave because it is billed every other month.

We are now filling a full bath tub to bathe our son each night, but that water can be reused as grey water for the washing machine, and is a negligible part of the overall bill in any case. The fee is also structured such that additional water usage doesn't affect it much.

Rent: $750 / month

For about 750 USD we are able to rent a decent 70 square meter / 750 square feet apartment. Rent here is much cheaper than it would be in Tokyo, where the same size & quality place in the outskirts would be about +$1000 more expensive. In very central Tokyo such as Shibuya, possibly as much as +$3000 extra.

For our area this is actually a bit on the larger side of apartments on offer, based on browsing local listings. I spent a lot of time browsing all the possibilities, and so far this seems to be our best option. Below you can see what it looks like.

Land in Tokushima is cheap, and we could also rent a small house for almost the same cost, but the difference didn't seem significant enough to bother moving, as it is shockingly expensive to move from place to place in Japan. You usually end up paying around 4 months rent, and possibly professional cleaning and moving fees. You also have to move your fridge, stove and air conditioning units to the new place.

If you don't mind living in a house built in the 70s, you could even buy one with land included for less than $40k. More modern options tend to cost around $300k, but unlike much of the world, the value of the houses tend to go down over time, not up.

Health insurance: $627 / month

This would probably not apply to you if you came to Japan as an employee or as a student. But I am self-employed, so I need to cover my own healthcare. The exact formula for calculating this is explained here, but to simplify the yearly cost is roughly $500 per family member plus 10% of income.

This seems more like a tax, as it makes no sense to me that income should affect healthcare costs. After all, if you get sick, the real cost of drugs and doctors is just the same regardless of your earnings.

While the insurance is expensive, doctor visits are not, typically costing about $10 a visit. Even without appointment, you can also just pop in with almost no wait time. The doctor usually is not a cat.

Food: $700 / month

As we now have a new third member in our family that eats as much as we do, our food bill also went up by 50%. We eat out maybe once a week, if that.

$500 is our family food bill, additionally I included the ~$60 / month I spend on buying drinks from vending machines and about $140 / month for my lunch and for small snacks to enjoy while playing Factorio at night — just got the railroad and logistics network operational!

Car: $205 / month

So we bought a new car.

Public transport is not great in Tokushima, making having a car a necessity. We had a Suzuki Wagon R before, bought used and drove it ~6 years on top of that.

I'm not sure how many years we'll get out of the new Mazda Demio, let's say 8 years. I also included $50 / month for fuel here.

Old Suzuki Wagon R:

New Mazda Demio:

Childcare costs: $560 / month

The cost of day care is significant, about $500 / month, but now our son is old enough that the cost is soon going down to $300 / month. Additionally in October a new law is introduced in Japan where daycare is becoming free.

Besides daycare, there are some misc. childcare related costs of about $60 / month.

Online services: $23 / month

Spotify: $6 / month

Netflix: $12 / month

Buying games on Steam: $5 / month

Total: $3189 / month

The total comes to $3189 / month, but you might notice I didn't include any travel costs, as those aren't strictly "living in Japan" -related fees.

We fly so that our son can spend time with his grandparents, meaning trips to Finland about once a year, and to Tokyo about three times. One trip to Finland from Japan costs about $3000, while the Tokyo trips are about $500. If you do include these, then the total becomes $3564 / month.

Thanks for reading

I hope this was interesting or helpful to you. Feel free to email me@bemmu.com or tweet at @bemmu if you'd like to ask anything.

Oh, and if you'd like to have me send you some Japanese candy to try (and help offset some of these costs), check out Candy Japan as well.

After that post I was contacted by a developer called Max from Germany who told me that he had noticed there was something odd going on with how I was choosing whether to show the new ThemeForest template or my old hand-coded template.

Cookie trouble: lpab

Max correctly noticed that the lpab cookie determines which template to show. It would be set to "new" to show the new ThemeForest template, or to "old" to show the hand-coded template.

Or so it should be, but he told me that sometimes he would see this cookie set to "old" but would still be served the new template, and sometimes it would be "new" but he would still get the old template. Uh-oh.

His report sounded solid, and he had extensively tested that this was happening, but I was unable to reproduce it despite trying to clear the cookie dozens of times.

Accomplice: session_id cookie

Now I might have given up trying to track down the bug, but only minutes later Max gave me a critical hint: to reproduce the bug, it wasn't enough to just delete lpab, in addition another cookie called session_id also needed to be cleared.

That sounded really odd to me, as these two cookies were not related to each other at all. But when I tried to do as he instructed, lo and behold the A/B test pinning stopped working. I hadn't been able to reproduce it before, because I had only tried deleting the lpab cookie, while he had probably been deleting all cookies.

Long-winded explanation of the cause

Reading through the code, I was quickly able to find the issue.

(1) First, lpab cookie is set randomly to "new" or "old". Then template is served based on the result. No problem there.

(2) Next, if session_id doesn't exist, it is initialized and saved to a cookie. This would be fine too, except... The way I saved the cookie was to directly alter the Set-Cookie header to a completely new value, erasing any cookies set during the same response, including the cookie from (1).

In other words, (1) says "in the response, write header Set-Cookie such that lpab is set to 'old' or 'new' randomly". (2) says "actually forget about lpab, overwrite Set-Cookie so it only sets session_id".

So lpab is never set because setting session_id immediately overwrites it. But in my tests I was always seeing that lpab did end up getting some value, where was that coming from?

Well it just so happens that in an AJAX call that happens ~100ms later, the above is run again, this time lpab is not set, so it is set randomly to "new" or "old" again. But now session_id IS set, so this time it does not overwrite the new lpab value.

So yes you end up having a random lpab cookie (yay), but it does not reflect the template that was actually shown (argh). Often you will have a cookie that says "new", but you still get the old template or vice versa.

Why would you even do that?

Why I would set the Set-Cookie header in a way that overwrites everything else set before it?

I wrote the session_id part of the code ~6 years ago, with full intention to store everything in a Session object, so it did not matter if I deleted all other cookies, as there should be no other ones if I just put everything in the Session.

However later on I forgot about this intention, and started putting things into separate cookies instead.

When using these separate cookies I was a bit smarter after having learned how to use my framework properly, such that I was no longer overwriting other cookies set during the response. But the old session_id code was still there, like a time bomb, just waiting for me to dare try to set cookies before session initialization.

What prevented me from noticing the issue was that it would only be apparent to new users with no cookies set. I am decidedly not a new user, and while I did test my code by deleting cookies relating to any code I was working on at the time, it didn't occur to me to test deleting all cookies.

Conclusion

This makes the previous A/B test result invalid. Worse yet, new visitors had often been served a different template on their first and second visit, which must have been quite confusing. On the positive side, it is great to know this (even if slightly embarrassing), as I can now re-run the test correctly. But it will take at least another 3 months to know the real result.

I ate a cookie while writing this post to make myself feel better.

I run a Japanese candy subscription service called Candy Japan, and periodically try to improve the landing page. It's dark magic to me, as I don't really have a great feel of what convinces someone to subscribe. The best I can do is to try to imagine what might improve sales, then compare a change against the original to see if it really is resulting in more sales.

Little data

It would be most satisfying to do this one small tweak at a time, as then I could know exactly what change drove the improvement, but with limited amounts of data this is rather hard to do. For example if you want to test a tweak that results in 5% more conversions, you need about 3000 sales to detect it! For Candy Japan this would mean waiting for about 10 years for the test to complete.

Even if you never reach statistical significance, all things being equal it is still better to follow the result of the test. If you had to play one of two slot machines and someone told you that they played each one 30 times and machine A paid out 10% more than machine B, would it not still be the best choice to choose machine A even if you can't be very confident about the result?

Why test entire landing pages at a time?

My mental model of the landing page is that every little element (and its position) on the page will have its own impact on sales. Most changes to these elements make very little difference, but some will have much bigger impacts. Perhaps there are dozens of elements on the page that each have a small ±1% effect, then the occasional ±10% one. If I picked an element at random and tested it, it would likely be one of those small effects.

But what if I just tweak everything and test that? The small effects would likely end up partially canceling each other out, not resulting in a big effect. But I would likely also end up flipping those larger elements as well, and with a bit of luck not in completely opposite directions. It's possible I could introduce one change that does a +10% and at the same time another one that does -10%, roughly canceling each other out, but it seems it's still a better test than picking just one element at random.

If I pick an element at random I only have a small chance of hitting a significant change, but mixing everything up I'm bound to change some big things as well. Besides that the results would also be more exciting, as I mess both up the result would be disastrous, but if I happened to improve both they would multiply each other, resulting in more than twice as big an impact.

Test setup

With this justification, I put in about 2 weeks of time to test a completely new landing page design. To get something completely different, I bought a landing page template off of ThemeForest and customized it. That was a lot more work than I thought it would be, as I discovered that trying to understand someone else's HTML and make it do what you want can be as much work as just writing it from scratch.

Besides changing the code, it also required new photo assets and copy that I did not have, so I had to sidetrack a bit to create those as well. But finally I managed to customize it to be mostly as I wanted it to appear. To see the difference, you can see the old landing page here, and the new one here.

Below you can see them side by side, but it's better to click through the links above to see each properly, as the pages are quite tall and narrow.

It would be confusing if you got a random landing page design every time you refreshed the page, so when a visitor came to the site, I would pin them to a randomly assigned landing page design, such that on subsequent visits they would be served that same design again.

Results

I personally thought the new design looked better, although I was not very confident about that. I hoped it would win, because that would mean an increase in sales. On the other hand I wouldn't be too disappointed if it lost, since I preferred working with my old familiar HTML rather than the newly adopted one.

I let the test run for a bit over three months. During this time there were a total of 67 new subscriptions. Of these 58% (39) came from the new design and 42% (28) came from the old design. Looks like the new one is likely to be an improvement.

I neglected to record how many views each version had, but should be at least 3000 since the conversion ratio is about 0.5 - 1%. I used http://www.abtestcalculator.com/ and entered 3000 participants -> 28 conversions and 3000 participants -> 39 conversions.

There is a 91% chance that Variation B has a higher conversion rate. You can be confident that this result is a consequence of the changes you made and not a result of random chance.

At first I took this to mean that the result was statistically significant, but many on Hacker News pointed that it probably is not.

Conclusion

I'm pretty happy with the results, the test took longer to set up and run than I would have hoped, but it seems likely that this it increased conversions.

It seems that for a developer like me, customizing a ready-made template is at least as good a way to go as trying to design everything from scratch by yourself. It could be that the difference was just in the assets I had to create in order to be able to use the new template, but in any case it pushed me to create a better landing page.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to receive surprise boxes of Japanese candy, you can subscribe here.

Candy Japan subscribers receive a twice-monthly newsletter that describes the contents of each candy box. Up to about a year ago, this content was never available anywhere except by email, and only to paying subscribers.

Experiment

Putting it online would mean I could link to it from social media, it could get indexed, and possibly bring some search traffic. While the content was never written for searches in mind and does not answer any particular questions users might enter in Google, there is a lot of information in the newsletters about specific candies that may not exist anywhere else in English, so the chance was non-zero that some people might be searching for them.

It was some effort to reformat them from Mailchimp to be suitable for the web, but they have now been available here since the end of 2017.

Results

Now with 2018 gone, there is one full year of data. So what happened? Lots of search traffic? Not really.

That's right, 240 total clicks during one year from adding 102 pages of original content and photos. Google did actually index all of them, as all have some impressions appear in Google search console, although only half appear in site: search.

Conclusion

It wasn't useful to put the effort into trying to get this kind of newsletter content indexed.

Granted there was zero link building, apart from links to each from Facebook and Twitter every time a new one was published. Rearranging the content to answer specific questions would likely improve results. That way instead of a hundred posts about random arrangements of candy, they could be presented as 20 posts listing the best Japanese chocolates or other types of candy for example.

Despite being useless from a SEO point of view, for purposes of linking from social media and being able to show potential customers what to expect, continuing to put the newsletter online still seems like the right choice given it isn't that much effort to do.

Thank you for reading. If you were looking for any information not answered here, feel free to contact bemmu@candyjapan.com.

Candy Japan 2018 Year in Review

Candy Japan ships surprise boxes of Japanese candy twice a month to subscribers around the world. I moved to Japan and started the site in 2011, and it has been supporting my life here ever since.

At the end of each year I publish a post to reflect on how the past 12 months turned out. You can read the previous one here, including more background on how the site got started.

2018

The service works on subscription basis. People sign up and pay monthly to receive candy. The chart below shows the number of subscribers over time. As you can see, this was another down year, during which I lost 16% of subscribers. The year started with 385 and ended with 323 paying subscribers.

Sales stats

Sales net of refunds: ~$100,000

Expenses: ~$86,000 (candy 44%, shipping 34%, boxes 8%, ads 4%, other 10%)

Profit: ~$13,000 (down from $38,374 last year)

Big part of "other" expense is paying freelancers for newsletter writing, accounting, translation and customer support.

Worth it?

I would estimate spending around 3 hours per day this year running the service. The main tasks are finding and curating candies, shipping, customer support, content writing, tweaking marketing campaigns, doing bookkeeping (in three currencies), taking product photos and improving the website.

Hours spent: ~1000

Wage per hour: ~$16

Hourly wage is down from ~$50 last year, as profit was less, but I spent more time trying to turn things around.

Site stats

Visits: 147,424

Unique visitors: 127,447

Page views: 231,651

Traffic sources: Search engines (28%), Social media (34%), Paid ads (5%)

What went wrong

Shipping issues

Germany

This year most of the packages sent to Germany started to bounce back with no clear explanation as to why, so I decided to stop shipping there. As 10% of customers were from Germany, this alone explains most of this year's decline.

Sweden

Swedish post apparently got tired of paying for last-mile delivery of cheap items from China, and decided to block that by introducing delays and fees to customers.

Most countries have a "de minimis" rule when it comes to online shopping. If you order something very cheap from abroad, you'll pay no duties on it. Sweden also had this rule, but removed it this year. Now Swedish shoppers have to pay duties on everything, even if the tax is just 1 krona. There is also an "administrative fee" of ~8 USD added on top. In my case, Swedish customers are charged $8 for the pleasure of being able to pay a $4 duty. These fees combined cost almost as much as the subscription itself.

For some reason a single e-commerce platform is exempt from this: Wish. They have a special deal allowing VAT prepay, such that customers get their packages directly. I have emailed PostNord to ask how I could also do this, but was told that it is not possible.

I am still allowing new orders from Sweden, but have stopped advertising to Swedish customers. The packages do make it to their destinations in the end, but with significant cost and annoyance for customers there, leading to more cancellations.

Failed at getting customers from YouTube unboxings

As I wrote in "YouTube Marketing Horror Story", to promote the service I contacted 180 YouTubers to ask them to make an unboxing video. Many agreed, and I spent a lot of time shipping many sample boxes, but in the end the unboxing videos resulted in no new subscribers.

The experiment cost about $1000 and was more work than I had expected. I knew the chances of success were very low. However if it had worked, the reward would have been high, as I could have expanded the promotion 10-100x. I figured I had a 10% chance to make $100k, so it was worth spending $1000 to give it a shot.

Unboxings DO work, as other companies keep pouring money into working with bigger channels, which I doubt they would continue to do month after month if it wasn't giving them a return. Just my particular approach of trying to work with tiny cosplay channels turned out not to work at all.

SEO failures

To get more content indexed by search engines, I put all of our old newsletters on the site, but Google decided not to index many of them. The ones that did get indexed only sent 227 clicks, and resulted in no conversions.

I also tried making some of those annoying listicles such as "29 Mouth-Melting Japanese Chocolates". Only one of them sent a conversion: "8 International Candy Subscriptions You Must Try At Least Once". I'm sort of glad these didn't work, as they aren't much fun to write and they are way overdone already.

What went right

SEO successes

I noticed that some searches were not for a Japanese candy subscription, but rather just a one-time order.

I created an article explaining how to buy a gift card for yourself to get only one month's worth of candy, and other articles describing the service from different perspectives. These articles sent 6 conversions during the year, but should keep doing the same year after year with no extra cost, giving a nice return on the time spent writing them.

The traffic has buying intent and the content is about the service itself—not about something tangential. This might be widely applicable to other businesses as well; can you describe your service from another point of view to capture more search traffic?

Faster shipping

I used to only batch ship twice a month, and while this worked well to keep costs in check, it also meant a long wait for the first package. The shipping days are 14th and 28th of each month, meaning that if someone happened to subscribe on 15th or 29th, there would be a two week wait before work on the batch would even start.

To improve on this, on top of the two monthly batches, when possible I made daily trips to the post office to airmail boxes right away to new subscribers that join. Many new members got their first boxes up to four times faster than before.

Package tracking

Since I was already making trips to the post office, I figured I might as well use tracking for these first packages as well. While I cannot afford to track every single package (it costs $5 per shipment), when I am available to send the first package, I also pay to track it and wrote a little script that sends the customer the tracking code.

I would lose money if I always used tracking, but for a new customer's first shipment $5 seems like a worthwhile spend to build trust.

Better customer support

I started doing all customer support myself, and turned getting to inbox zero a daily habit. Average reply time is now less than 24 hours, and this way I should get a better feel for any preventable common issues.

I've tried asking anyone who cancels for a reason, but I haven't gotten much insight out of the responses. It might be better to ask on the website, as people might be more honest with a computer than when being questioned by the guy running the site.

Cut costs by switching to Stripe

I now save about $2000 / year by using Stripe subscriptions, instead of doing recurring charges through middleware and charging through a separate gateway.

When I started the site, I needed both a payment gateway and a recurring payments solution. I was paying about $2000 / year ($69/month + $0.10 cents per transaction + 1.25% of revenue) for middleware that did the recurring charging bit. On top of this I was also paying fees to the (non-Stripe) gateway I was using.

Later I switched to Stripe, which has built-in subscriptions, so the middleware was no longer necessary. I estimated that removing it would take about a week, but in reality the transition took me about 3 weeks to do (should have multiplied my estimate by π).

Waiting around for export & import to finish, taking the steps to shut down the existing middleware gracefully, and making new signups go directly to Stripe. I didn't want to mess up the transition, so finally I carefully went through all accounts to make sure that the transition worked properly. Finally when I thought I was done, I realized that I also had to create my own page for entering new card details when a card expires (middleware used to provide this).

I finally completed the change in June, and have enjoyed not receiving middleware bills ever since.

Got better at YouTube ads

As I wrote before in "What I Learned Burning $13,867 on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan", I've lost money with YouTube ads so far, and for a long time had the campaign paused. While it wasn't running, I still kept going through the data to see if I might be able to improve the campaign.

I was able to get conversions 33% cheaper by studying the failed campaign run and aggressively excluding anyone unlikely to convert. The little bump at the end of the subscriber chart is from trying out the new tweaked campaign.

I may have reached breakeven now, but the erratic nature of conversions (randomness is clumpy) and unknown quality of subscribers makes it difficult to be sure. I wouldn't be surprised if customers from YouTube tended to stick around for a shorter time than people actively looking for the site. I want to be a bit more careful this time, and so haven't gone all-in on the new campaign yet.

One interesting thing I found is that if I cut the awkward "konnichiwa" from the beginning of the ad, people are almost twice as likely to watch it. As ads are paid based on view count, that might not be a good thing, but it's still interesting how such a little thing has such a big impact. For some reason YouTube prefers to show the uncut ad, and AdWords doesn't let you split-test video ads evenly, so I'm not sure which actually works better.

Conclusion

While Candy Japan is still a great side project, it is no longer enough to completely cover my cost of living in Japan. There still are many tweaks to make to the service that could improve it, so I doubt I'll be able to resist working on it, but I will also start spending more time launching completely new ideas as well.

Thanks for reading, and do subscribe if you'd like to try some candy for yourself.

PS. Visiting my home country Finland for Christmas gave me inspiration for the first thing to try. BBS-like realtime splitscreen chat: https://sysop.chat

Happy Halloween. Here are the results from a (not really that horrible) little marketing test: is it worth it asking tiny YouTube channels to make unboxing videos for you?

I run a site called Candy Japan, which ships boxes of Japanese surprise candies to subscribers around the world, twice a month. I've been trying to find an approach to promote the site effectively through YouTube, as it seems great for reaching a lot of people looking for new things to try. Earlier I tried YouTube ads. When that didn't work, many commented that instead of burning money on ads, I should just send YouTubers free samples instead.

I had already done this before with some YouTubers. One unboxing video ended up getting millions of views, but didn't result in any sales. I still believed that if I just tried different approaches, eventually something would work.

Sending samples to a lot of tiny channels

Here's what my thinking was for the current experiment. Huge channels may occasionally agree to feature Candy Japan, but it will be a bumpy ride with a small number of videos, some not working out at all. Doubling down on the ones that do work (if they exist) would be hard, as there are only so many big yet relevant YouTube channels out there.

On the other hand there are probably thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of channels out there in the 1-10k subscriber range. If each just brought in two customers on average, there are so many of them out there that scaling would be straightforward. I would get a stream of sweet sweet data to analyze, enabling me to improve the approach over time.

Starting with a small-scale test

180 channels contacted

Since I had no idea if this would work, I wanted to start small, but still big enough to learn something. I decided 180 would be a decent number of channels to contact. I could at the least get a good idea of the response rate, and maybe even run a split test.

I wanted to pick a category where I could easily find a lot of related channels, and one that might have an audience interested in Japan. I decided to go for cosplayers. I found websites where cosplayers were uploading their costume photos, and many users linked to their YouTube channels from their profiles. I wrote a quick Python script to find more of them and entered them into a spreadsheet.

I manually visited each channel to make sure I knew how to address the YouTuber properly by their name or the name of their team, and also to find out how to contact them. Finding contact information turned out to be quite time-consuming, as someone might only link to Tumblr from their channel, then Tumblr would link to their DeviantArt page, which might then finally have their contact information. At first each channel took me close to 10 minutes to go through, but after doing about a hundred I got good enough at this task that I could do each in 2 minutes.

50 channels agreed

After I had a large list of people to contact, I wasn't sure what to say in my email, so I wrote a bunch of different versions and tested them. To get someone to agree to an unboxing, the most important thing turned out to be not asking for their shipping address up front. Instead first explain the service briefly, then ask if they are interested to do receive a sample for a video. If they say yes, only then ask for the shipping address. Asking for the address in the initial mail seemed to be off-putting and resulted in less people agreeing. I tested other things as well, but that was the most impactful finding.

I guessed that around 10% would agree, but in the end 50 channels (28%) out of the 180 contacted agreed to make a video and gave me their shipping address.

42 samples shipped

In the end I did not ship to everyone. Some responded so slowly that I considered the whole experiment over by the time I received their shipping address, for others I made mistakes, such as noticing their Facebook messages too late.

33 boxes reached destination

Not every box sent actually made it to the YouTuber. I also found that international package tracking often (24% of the time) does not actually work, so it was impossible to be sure exactly how many packages got delivered. I know for sure that 4 got returned back to me, and that at least 33 arrived.

On average it took 2 weeks for an airmailed package to be delivered, ranging from 4 to 42 days.

17 videos made

With the boxes delivered, I waited 2 months before tallying up how many people actually made a video. I also periodically nagged people to ask how their video was coming, and from the responses I felt this helped people to remember to do it. From getting the box, it took on average 20 days for a YouTuber to make a video. The fastest person made theirs in 1 day, slowest after 2 months.

You can see all the videos here.

Since only a fourth of people actually made a video, to get one video made I need to send 2.5 boxes. That more than doubles the cost of goods and shipping, meaning that the results from these videos would have to be very good for this to be scalable.

Results

The entire process of finding YouTubers to contact, figuring out how to contact them, having back-and-forth discussions with each to discover their shipping address and answering any questions they had, preparing and shipping the boxes, nagging people to make the videos, and finally compiling the results was very time-consuming. Because of delays in messaging, shipping and making the video, this is also a process that dragged on for about 3 months before it finally felt "done".

After videos had been out for about two months, I went to check their view counts. Each only averaged 166 views, for a grand total of 2826 views. This would have been OK if these small channels had such a devoted subscriber base that each would have resulted in a sale or two, but that did not happen. No noticeable change in traffic from YouTube, no uptick in sales, and no-one mentioned buying because of the channels (I ask everyone).

The hardest evidence is that not a single new customer claimed any of the 10% off coupons I gave to the YouTubers.

Buying all of the goods and shipping all the packages cost about $1000 in total. Buying the same number of YouTube ad views would have cost less than $10. On a CPM basis this was actually ten times more expensive than advertising on prime-time TV.

Conclusion

Considering the results, I am becoming pretty reluctant to send out free samples for unboxing videos. I would love to be proven wrong though, so if you run a decent sized channel that you believe could be a good match, do drop me a line.

If you'd like to try some Japanese candy for yourself, you can sign up here.

I previously wrote about an experiment where I spent $13,867 on YouTube ads. Many suggested that instead of spending money on ads, I should just send samples to YouTubers to get them to cover the service for free.

All right, I'll try it.

Gathering a contact list

Being new at this, I decided to start by contacting a larger number of small YouTube channels to learn what kind of an approach would work the best.

I assumed the response rate would be low, so I would need to find a lot of channels to contact. I wanted them to be relevant to people with a strong interest in Japan, and after several evenings of work managed to put together a list of several hundred small cosplay channels. At this point I only had their channel URL, but no way to contact them.

Many list their email address directly in their YouTube profile, while others only have a link to their Tumblr page for example. That page might then link to their other social media profiles, one of which might eventually have a way to contact them. Besides just finding an email address, I also wanted to find names. I read all channel descriptions and watched the beginning of video introductions to make sure I was addressing each recipient appropriately.

This was mind-numbing work that took me close to 10 minutes per channel initially. It's also distracting work in that I needed to spend a lot of time on YouTube and in various social networks without getting sidetracked. To be able to focus, I turned it into a little game for myself. How fast can I go through the next 20 channels? What can I do to improve my time? In the end I had improved enough that I was able to find the name and contact information for a channel in less than 2 minutes.

A little setback happened along the way: Google removed private messaging from YouTube.

I had hoped to use YouTube private messages as a fallback for channels that don't list their email address anywhere. Just as I thought that I had gathered enough channels to contact, private messaging became impossible, and I had to redouble my efforts to make up for all the channels that had now become unreachable.

In the end I had a spreadsheet of 180 cosplay YouTubers with a way to contact each. The average channel in the list has less than 4000 subscribers, with a total of 664k subscribers – power law at play here, combined these roughly match a single popular YouTuber in impact. I wasn't sure if a tiny channel could send enough sales to exceed the cost of sending them a sample, but if it did, that would scale nicely as I could keep sending more and more samples to similar channels.

A/B testing message content

I decided to amuse myself with a little multivariate test and send everyone a slightly different message to learn what works best.

Choosing a title

I tried two different subject lines for the email, but the difference was minor. The worse one turned out to be "Want a Japanese candy review box?" and the slightly better one "Free Candy Japan sample for unboxing video". Of the people who received the former, 25% agreed to do a review. Of the latter, 28.26%.

Message body

I started each message with:

Dear so-and-so,

Would you like to receive a Japanese candy review box for your YouTube channel?

I created five snippets of text, randomly including them in the messages I sent out. Below you can see each snippet, along with what the response rate was when each was absent or present.

Snippet 1: clarifying what I want them to do

I was hoping that if I send you two boxes, you could unbox and try the candies and introduce the service to your subscribers.

With the above snippet included, 29.55% agreed to do a review. Without it, 23.91% agreed. Takeaway: be clear about what you expect people to do for you.

Snippet 2: longer self-introduction

I run a site called Candy Japan, which sends surprise boxes of Japanese sweets to members twice a month.

With the above included 27.63% agreed, without 25.96% did. Takeaway: including an elevator pitch of your service may help.

Snippet 3: appealing to popularity

These types of "trying Japanese candy" videos tend to be very popular, many having millions of views.

With the above included 24.72% agreed, without 28.57% did. Takeaway: don't be patronizing?

Snippet 4: offering their viewers a discount

I can also give your viewers a discount coupon.

With the above included 27.38% agreed, without 26.04% did. Takeaway: it doesn't really matter if you offer a discount or not. In the end I still gave everyone a discount coupon anyway.

Snippet 5: call-to-action

If you would like to receive a review box, please let me know your mailing address.

This had the highest impact: with the above included 21.11% agreed, without 32.22% did. Note that even without this line, in the end everyone still gave me their mailing address, so this only means that it's better not to ask for it right away.

I can think of two reasons for this. Either people need a bit more back-and-forth before parting with such personal information, or possibly it's just more work to reply to this email, so more people will think "I'll reply later", and then forget about it.

Include image or not?

Another variation I tried was attaching the above image of the candy I might send them. I expected this to be a no-brainer in that having the picture would be better, but this actually turned out not to matter. Out of those who got the image 26.97% agreed vs. 26.37% for those who did not get it.

My guess here is that it may actually be beneficial to have the image, but that it is balanced out by more of these emails ending up classified as spam.

Overall response rate

I sent out 180 messages, and guessed that perhaps a dozen people would agree to do a review. In the end 48 YouTubers sent me their shipping address. Only 5 people outright refused to do a review, and even they still wrote polite responses.

Having 26.67% agree to do a review was a much higher rate than I had imagined, and I ended up annoying my wife by having a larger than expected pile of samples in our apartment. I was taking the samples to the post office by bicycle. Below you can see one batch that I was able to carry at once. For some reason it takes close to 30 minutes for the local post office to process each batch, the UI in their POS must be pretty terrible.

One wrong assumption I had was that more popular YouTubers would be harder to get to agree to do a review. Splitting my list of YouTubers evenly into "less popular" and "more popular" groups of less or more than 2290 subscribers, the agree rates were 27.78% and 25.56% respectively – a difference of only two more YouTubers agreeing in the less popular group.

Thanks for reading

It is a fair amount of work to find enough relevant YouTubers to contact, to correspond with them and to actually ship samples.

If you need to ship a YouTuber a physical product sample, don't ask for their address until after they have replied to the initial email. Include an elevator pitch of your service and be clear what you want them to do in the video.

With this approach when contacting relevant less popular YouTubers, you may expect around 30% of recipients to agree to do a review.

I have now sent out most sample boxes, but not everyone has made their videos yet. It will also take some time to know how popular the videos will turn out to be. I will do a part 2 later once I have data on how many sales these videos actually resulted in. Until then 👋

Oh, and if you'd like to try some Japanese candy for yourself, you can sign up here.

Reaching potential customers might just be the single hardest thing in running a subscription box. My start might not be that helpful, as the world has changed from then and what worked then probably wouldn't work now, but here it is.

For the first two months or so I only had 2 customers. They were people I already knew from previous sites I had, who I asked by email if they'd like to subscribe. Specifically I had an online manga store with a few hundred customers who I could contact to tell them about this new service I was starting, and that's where those two people found about it from.

For what comes next it's useful to understand that there was no such concept as a "subscription box" back then. There were some monthly box services, but no trend existed of starting such services. Only one I can recall definitely existing back then was BirchBox, so the whole idea was still noteworthy.

After about 2 months of sending candy to just these 2 people, I posted about it on the startup link sharing site Hacker News, where I got very lucky in that the post happened to do very well and led to 100 new subscribers. It helped that it was a novel concept, I had already been an active member on the site for years, they generally like posts related to Japan and lastly... well just pure luck that the first few people who saw the post decided to upvote it before it dropped off the "new" page.

Some bloggers saw my post on Hacker News, and decided to write about it on their sites. I think it massively helped that the service was a new, interesting concept, making it a fresher story to write about. Since those sites were very focused on Japan and pretty popular, they sent a lot of good traffic.

Then, as a result from getting backlinks from those posts, I started ranking well on Google. In fact it rose to #1 for the search term "Japanese candy". I was winning by default, as there wasn't much competition for that term, and zero subscription boxes about it. While that great ranking was temporary, it did last for months and helped a great deal, as soon Japanese candy started to trend in general, and lots of people were searching for it.

So that's how after the first year I ended up with 300 subscribers.

At one point I was thrilled when I was suddenly seeing a lot of new orders coming in. But then, weeks later, I noticed a problem. A lot of these new orders turned out to be fake. Dealing with the chargebacks, I started wondering how I might have noticed such orders before accepting them.

I've written before about getting hit by credit card fraud and how to make your store less attractive for fraudsters. In this post I'll share some of the warning signs I've learned to pay attention to. These merely signal you to pay particularly close attention to an order – there can also be real orders that match some of these.

Address is in the US... or is it?

Some countries will have more fraudulent orders originating from them than others. Fraudsters also know that their country can raise suspicion, so sometimes they will enter their address otherwise correctly, but just change the country to "United States".

If you just casually browse your new orders, you might not notice this and accidentally ship the order. Later on when the post attempts to deliver it, they will at some point realize that the country is wrong and reroute it to the correct country -> fraudster gets their package.

Address is nonsensical

Sometimes addresses just make no sense. For example the street address isn't within the ZIP code provided, or the address has huge parts of it missing. For example something along the lines of "Maple Street, 10001 New York".

In these cases the purpose of the order might not be to actually get the package, but rather just to check whether a stolen credit card number works or not.

Using reshipping centers

One time I received an order with other warning signs, but that had a valid US shipping address. I decided to look it up on street view.

There were shipping trucks parked outside. Googling the address revealed this to be a reshipping center – a company that accepts packages inside the US and then ships them forward to other countries. There are perfectly valid reasons to use these companies, I've used them myself. For example you might have moved abroad, but still want to have an address in your home country.

Another reason would be that you might want to place an order with a store that doesn't do international shipping. However I do have international shipping, so there should be no reason to use a reshipping center. Unless of course you are trying to hide your actual location, which is a big warning sign. Nowadays I look up any suspicious order on street view, just to see if it might be a reshipping center.

Using throwaway email addresses

There are sites that offer disposable email addresses. You get limitless instant inboxes for any names you want, and can check them without having to register separately for each. Again there are good reasons to use these, for example for avoiding spam when you have to provide an email address for a site that demands it, but that you don't want to have your real email address.

Still I have found that if an order originates from one of these, it usually has other warning signs as well.

Using an inconsistent and unlikely email address

By "inconsistent" I mean that the first and last name implied by the email address does not match the name in the shipping address. By "unlikely" I mean one that no reasonable person would want to have, usually containing a big batch of numbers in it. An example that would be both inconsistent and unlikely would be john.smith.938924@gmail.com even while the name in the shipping address contains a totally different name.

Again not a sure sign, but this tends to be a feature of fraudulent orders. Often you just can't be quite sure and have to make a judgement call. One time when I tried googling for an address, I found that the person was also active on a forum for trading stolen credit card details. That was a bad sign. More often I will find a legit-looking personal blog which mentions their email address, that's great sign that it's a trustworthy subscriber.

Thanks for reading

Two bonus signs for the end. You can use a Geo IP database to check if the shipping address country differs from the IP address country. That's a weak sign (people do place orders while traveling, or to friends in other countries), but can break the tie if there is another suspicion. Another one is seeing if the order happened during a batch of other fraudulent orders. If you suddenly get 6 orders and 5 of them are fraud, and 1 you're not sure about, it's more likely to be fraudulent as well.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to try some candy yourself, you can sign up here.

Candy Japan is a service aimed at people with some interest in Japan, and there is an endless supply of videos aimed at the same audience. While the chances of success seemed low due to the high cost of advertising there, the promise of hitting a major new source of customers made it worth a shot.

Here's what I learned along the way from creating the video all the way to tweaking the ad campaign and finally looking at the results.

Creating an ad for YouTube

With AdWords you just need three lines of text, but to advertise on YouTube you need a video to show.

The major types of videos are screencasts, live action or an animation. Screencasts might work well if you were trying to sell an app or a game, but wasn't really applicable for my candy subscription service.

I considered a live video showing the candy boxes being delivered, or an animated explainer video. Since the people viewing my ad had a high likelihood of also liking anime, I figured an ad in a similar style might be a good match.

Process & cost of creating an animated ad

I found some examples indicating that an animation would cost about $100 - $150 per second to make. Given that a typical YouTube ad is 30 seconds, you can see this gets expensive fast.

I found two options: either hire an animation studio, or work with a freelancer. Since I had already worked with an artist to create the manga illustration for the site, I asked him if he might be able to create an animation too.

Me and my wife came up with a quick storyboard, just using stick figures. I compiled them into a slideshow, wrote the voiceover dialog and mumbled it out while flipping the slides to create the timings.

Based on our stick figure slides, the artist drew up keyframes. That moved things forward, as we could now discuss particular changes we wanted.

Based on my mumblings I ordered a voiceover with a professional actress reading out the lines properly. The voiceover cost was about $100, which seemed relatively cheap now, as I was already paying about $3000 for the animation.

With rough sketches and a voice track timed to them, work could start to turn them into final animation assets.

The whole process from finding someone able to do this to actually having an uploadable video took 4 months. I imagine that going with a studio might have been a better choice, as the cost would have been similar but the turnaround time would likely have been much faster.

Here's the end result.

You've got to spend money to spend money

Now after spending a lot of money to create an ad, you can finally get started spending even more money showing the ad to people.

YouTube itself is used to upload the video. You can make it unlisted if you want. Then to get the ad to appear before videos ("In-stream ad"), you use AdWords to create a campaign. The YouTube video ID is used to link the AdWords ad with the video.

How YouTube ads are priced

Just like AdWords, the cost of an ad view is based on an auction between advertisers. However the auction is not based on clicks, but on views. To enter this auction the minimum bid is $0.01 per view, which might sound low, but isn't really.

Internet advertising is usually priced in terms of 1000 views, called the CPM rate. The low end starts at much less than a dollar, for example advertising on Explain XKCD costs about $0.20 per 1000 views. Mid range would be single digits, say $3 for showing an ad on Cult of Mac. The upper range is low double digits, for instance a banner on bitcoin.com costs $30 per 1000 views.

Translating the YouTube ads "per view" thinking into CPM: $0.01 per view would be $10 CPM. And this is just the minimum bid that it is possible to pay. Bidding this low probably wouldn't get you many views, and I found myself bidding much higher (equivalent to actual TV ad prices) to get just enough views to determine whether my campaigns were working at all.

Now the good news: you don't have to pay if someone quickly skips your video! So if you manage to come up with an ad that is completely uninteresting to people outside of your target audience such that they skip it immediately, you don't have to pay for those views.

I found that 30% of people would actually watch our ad (70% skip). When you take into account that only 30% of people will watch the ad, a more accurate comparison with banner ads would be an interstitial ad with a $3 CPM minimum (1000 impressions * 30% view ad * $0.01).

Now you might understand why I want to get people not in my target audience to skip – it's cheaper because you don't pay when people skip your ad!

Targeting options

Compared to TV advertising, YouTube really shines with all the options you have for showing your ad to only your desired audience. The main targeting options are topics, placements and audiences. Topics and placements control which videos your ad is shown against, while audiences allow you to show ads based on who is viewing the ad.

Topics

It would be a huge pain to have to individually select thousands of videos to show your ad against. That's where topics come in, as they are pre-made groups of videos relating to a certain subject.

For example if you are trying to market a strategy game, you are in luck, because there is a topic just for that.

Placements

With placements you can show your ad before a certain video, or before all the videos of your chosen YouTube channels.

For instance if you were selling an app for creating bingo cards, you could find all the "how to make bingo cards"-type videos and show your ad before those.

Sadly in practice I found that it was difficult to get views this way, at least for any price I was willing to test. Even when listing thousands of videos, I wasn't able to get any meaningful amount of views for my ad. It could be that a lot of the videos I tried were either unpopular, had monetization disabled or my bids were just way too low.

Audiences

With audience matching Google tries to figure out what type of a person is viewing a video, and if that matches your selection then your ad can be shown.

There are a lot of options here. You can target investors, cooking enthusiasts, people into DIY, pet lovers, gamers and more.

Audience matching finally gave me enough clicks to find out whether anyone ever buys anything through YouTube ads.

Keywords

In the beginning I said there are topics, placements and audiences, but actually there is another targeting method. One where I still have no idea how it is supposed to work: keywords.

I assumed to trigger a keyword match, the video title or description would have to match it. This turned out not to be the case.

For example when I tried the keyword "anime", my ad got shown before these videos: some Lithuanian song, a tutorial on how to make gnomes and some german rap video. Not exactly anime.

"Keywords can trigger your ad to show when people view related content on YouTube, websites or apps".

Apparently this "related content" is defined more broadly than I had assumed.

I know what video you saw last summer

Oh yeah, I wanted to mention a cool tracking thing YouTube provides. As you might assume, you can easily track when a click on the ad results in a sale. But the cool part is that you can also track when someone views your ad, and then a bit later types in your web address to make the purchase without ever clicking the link.

In other words you can track both people who click through an ad directly, or who see your ad and then visit your site a bit later (this is known as a "view-through conversion"). It's magic. Magical enough that you'll have to take Google's word on it that these customers actually did view the ad, since you won't be able to detect it yourself.

Besides purely trusting the reports given to me, I also added a field to my order form where I asked people "where did you hear about Candy Japan?". This confirmed that YouTube really was sending these new customers.

Tweaking the campaign: exclude!

AdWords gives you a lot of interesting data about which of your targeting options converted and which did not. Looking carefully at the data AdWords gave me, I did find a few simple ways for lowering the cost of a sale.

The key realization here is that advertising is as much about showing your ad to people, as it is about NOT showing it to those less likely to buy. An easy start is to just stop all topics or audiences that don't seem to be working.

If that still doesn't make your campaign profitable, there are broader exclusions and bid adjustments you can make based on age, gender, device, location, parental status and household income. For instance you might find that people in certain locations or age groups are less likely to buy than others.

With these adjustments I was able to significantly lower the cost per conversion for the campaign.

In conclusion, did you break even?

Nope. I lost money.

Many viewers did place an order after seeing the ad, but not enough to justify continuing the campaign. This was true even taking into account the full lifetime value of a customer. While I was not able to make the campaign break even, by tweaking the targeting options I was able to get pretty close.

For now I have stopped the campaign and will reflect a bit on what went wrong before possibly trying again.

As advice for someone else who wants to try advertising on YouTube, I'd say your product or service should make at least tens of dollars in profit to have a shot at making the numbers work. Advertising an app with a flat cost of only a few dollars would be unlikely to work even at the lowest bid levels.

If you do have a suitable product, be prepared to spend thousands while you tweak your campaign towards profitability.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to try some candy yourself, you can sign up here.

Hello internets, Bemmu here.

I run a site called Candy Japan, which ships boxes of Japanese surprise candies to subscribers around the world, twice a month.

Five years ago I started writing these annual review posts after being inspired by patio11's year in review posts. They are a great way to reflect on each year, and inspire me to improve. In this one I'll start off with some background for those who haven't been following the previous ones and then proceed to the numbers for this year.

My background

As a computer science student in Finland I had a lot of side projects, with some of them generating some income as well. Learning Japanese has always been a major life goal for me. My minor subject was Japanese, and as part of my studies I spent 2 years as an exchange student in Tokyo. I was still eager to continue to improve, and wanted to live in Japan again.

After graduating and having saved up some money, in 2011 I decided to make it happen and moved to Japan with my wife. She is from Japan, and I first met her when she was an exchange student at my university. We settled in Tokushima, which is a smallish city (by Japanese standards) in Shikoku island. The reason for picking Tokushima was the company she entered after graduating.

Even though I had no job waiting for me in Tokushima, I could follow along as some online projects I had started in Finland were still generating revenue. Pretty soon however they started to dry up, so I had to come up with something new.

Starting Candy Japan

Starting to look for a new project, I recalled bouncing around some ideas with a friend while we had been on a holiday together. I had mentioned to him this website I had heard of called BirchBox, a service that sends people makeup samples on a monthly basis. I thought it was an interesting model – a subscription not for software, but for surprises.

Is there anything we could send like that? Maybe introduce items from around Asia.

Since we were both busy with other projects at the time, we didn't end up doing any of the ideas we had bounced around. But now that I found myself in Japan with free time to start something new, I decided to try it.

With my wife's work locking her here in Tokushima, I didn't want to start traveling around the world to hunt for items, so I decided to find something I could just send from Japan instead. Anything would be fine at first, I could always expand later (never did though). What would be easy to try to send? I saw a lot of unique candies here, and looking into it I discovered that they were also trending on YouTube. So candy it was.

While I was an exchange student I had a side income from selling comic books (by using the university post office no less) from Japan to Finland, so I emailed those past customers to see if they would be interested in subscribing to candy. Two people agreed, so I started sending stuff to them.

Next I put up a simple website. At first it was just a landing page, but over time as it grew, I wrote a bunch of code to automate things (no readymade solution existed back then). I submitted the website to Hacker News, where some bloggers spotted it and posted about it. Other bloggers saw those posts and reblogged it. This in turn caused the site to rank #1 in Google for the head term "Japanese candy", sending even more visitors to the site.

Story up to 2016

The Hacker News post, blog mentions and Google rankings combined to mean that by the end of 2011 a total of 300 people had become subscribers. It turned out to be a stable number that lasted all the way to 2014. It wasn't just that people were subscribing for that long, but also new subscriptions were roughly matching the number of cancellations to keep the subscriber count stable.

Here's a chart showing the number of members subscribing to Candy Japan:

You might notice that in 2014 something wonderful happened: the subscriber count roughly tripled. I didn't do anything clever to make that happen, rather I got lifted by a wave as the whole concept of Japanese candy started to trend.

Below is a chart from Google Trends showing how many people were searching for japanese candy:

As you can see the number of searches slowly builds, but from 2014 to 2015 it rapidly doubles, making it about three times as much as it had been in the early days. This was directly reflected in our subscriber count.

By no means was this still a big business, but Candy Japan alone could now cover our living expenses, and I started to get hopeful that it could get bigger still.

Next year in 2015 it seemed that my hopes were coming true; the subscriber count crossed 1200. Or so I thought. What seemed to be the best year ever turned out to be miserable: I discovered that I had been hit by credit card fraud. All those new subscribers beyond the first 800 were actually fakes who had subscribed with stolen credit card numbers.

I had already sent them the items, but now had to return all the money and on top of that pay a bunch of fees. Add insult to injury a lot of shipping addresses turned out to be fake as well, so I had hundreds of boxes returned to my address. Our mailbox was constantly swamped and our apartment was littered with returned boxes I had to manually examine to see if they were from legit subscribers or fakes.

While this fraud issue was going on, I was also in the process of moving my tax residency to Japan. It was a stressful year spent dealing with fraud and taxes. I even got a phone call from a US police officer after someone had complained to them about an unknown charge on their card, because their number had been stolen and someone used it to place a candy order.

Fraud is something that affects any business that accepts credit cards, even charities. Even if everything seems to be OK, make a habit of reading through new orders as they come in. Pay attention to email addresses, shipping addresses and bursts of failed payments. You can spot suspicious behavior if you do this.

I thought I didn't have a problem, until thousands of dollars started getting reversed. While I did know that a small percentage of all ecommerce is fraud, I always understood that as fraud being interlaced with legit orders. 100 real payments, 1 fake payment, 100 real payments, 1 fake payment. But that's not how it played out. Rather it was 10000 real payments over years lulling you into believing that everything is fine, then suddenly getting hit by hundreds of fake payments in a matter of days.

If 2015 was a high-anxiety year, 2016 was rather quiet by comparison. Subscriber numbers did continue to slide, as competition was getting tough while also the overall interest in Japanese candy was waning. I ran some marketing experiments, but was unable to find any good channels.

2017

This year was a bloodbath. From the start of 2017 to the end, subscribers declined by 40%, going from 636 to 385 members.

Here's the subscriber chart extended to include 2017:

Sales stats

Sales net of refunds: $141,220

Expenses: $102,846 (candy, shipping, boxes, ads)

Profit: $38,374

Wage per hour (assuming ~2 hours per day): ~$50

Site stats

Visits: 138k

Unique visitors: 114k

Page views: 241k

Traffic sources of note: Search engines (30%), Social media (22%), Paid ads (13%)

What went wrong?

This year I didn't have as much to blog about. In 2016 I had five popular posts (1 2 3 4 5), while in 2017 I only managed two (1 2). The posts tend to send a lot of high-quality traffic, so the impact was bigger than you might expect. I haven't figured out how to invent posts from thin air when I simply have nothing new to share.

Organic search traffic declined from 68,383 clicks in 2016 to 41,358 clicks in 2017. I think the reason for this is twofold. First, competition is getting tougher, meaning there is fierce competition for head search terms. I have been pushed off the first page completely for some.

Secondly overall searches for Japanese candy declined by 33% according to Google Trends, while on YouTube it more than halved. There was a point when a lot of YouTubers were doing a video showing their reactions to eating strange Japanese candy, but now that is ancient history.

Changes in USDJPY exchange rates made me decide to increase USD prices. Naturally a higher price leads to less conversions.

Another major hit was that all the packages we were sending to Germany started bouncing back. After this continued for several shipments, I decided just not to ship to Germany any more. This meant losing 10% of subscribers and needing to send a lot of refunds for packages that never arrived.

Things I tried

Tried paid YouTube ads, and while I did get some subscribers, in the end they were just too expensive to keep running. Tweaking the ads was very time consuming and expensive (but fun). I learned a lot though and gave a presentation about it at a Hacker News meetup in Osaka. I managed to decrease their cost, but not enough to break even.

Tried putting all of our old newsletters on the site. Had to reformat them by hand from ill-defined HTML newsletters to MarkDown. Attempts at automating with BeautifulSoup failed, as there was no coherent layout. I submitted them to webmaster tools, but this resulted in… silence. Less than one organic search click per day.

Improved response time by serving the landing page from a static file served by Google CDN instead of from Python. This may increase conversions slightly and could improve SEO, but there is still a lot of work to do to make the site faster.

Tried to branch out by asking my customers if they would like to subscribe to Gashapon capsule toys, but the result was near-silence. I have a bimonthly newsletter with a great open rate, I wonder what other ideas I could throw at them?

Tried redesigning the site to be more colorful and not so gloomy, but am not sure if it helped or hurt. I don't have enough data anymore to say for sure, as you need hundreds of conversions to say anything meaningful.

Tried to learn how to take better product photos for putting on the site to match what my competitors are doing, but was unable to take decent shots by myself. In the end hired a photographer to do it.

The pictures look good, and will probably boost conversions a bit. Again I can't be sure of the impact due to lack of data. Who knows, maybe visitors might feel that seeing the products ruins the surprise or something.

Conclusion

I wish I could report having discovered some kind of a breakthrough marketing trick to reverse the decline, but sadly no.

For the time being Candy Japan is still popular enough to keep running, and since I have most things automated I see no reason to shut it down. If the trends of declining popularity of Japanese candy and increasing competition continue, 2018 will be another down year.

I will start spending more time trying new projects again. Hopefully nothing involving physical products this time!

Thanks for reading, and do subscribe if you'd like to try some candy for yourself. You can use the code HACKERNEWS to get 10% off.

I run Candy Japan, which ships surprise sweets to subscribers. It isn't a store that ships individual orders. Instead you sign up to become a member and pay monthly. You receive surprise boxes until you cancel.

And people do eventually cancel.

What I wanted to know was:

"How many people would need to join each month to sustain 1000 subscribers?"

When I started thinking about all this I was on a beach in rural Japan in a hammock. No computer or even a phone with me.

Simple example

For simplicity suppose 50% of people cancel every month. That means that if I do some clever marketing and manage to get 100 new people to join, then after a month 50 of those would be left. After another month, 25 of those would be left and so on.

Because of this fall-off, even if you run a subscription business forever, you will not have infinite customers. Instead you reach a steady-state number.

42 ?

In a given month, you will have the new members that you managed to bring in through the door that month. But you will also have people remaining from the previous months.

Continuing with the previous example of 100 new members coming in through the door each month and 50% canceling each month, you'll have 100 + 50 + 25 + ... = 200 members each month. Even if you run the business for a million years, you will still only have 200 members.

The two things you can improve are either bringing in more people, or making cancellations less likely.

Stand back, I know Python

I quickly bicycled home to see what the answer would be, accidentally spreading sand from the beach all over the floor rushing to my computer too quickly.

I fired up Python and first checked the previous result.

def subscribers(new_members, retention):
    n, x = new_members, retention

    # n + n * x + n * x^2 + n * x^3 ...
    return sum([n*x**p for p in range(0, 10**5)])

print subscribers(100, 0.5)
# Yay it prints out "200"

Happily it agreed with my "beach guess" that 100 + 50 + 25 … would equal 200.

Playing with different values

Trying out different values, I found that with a monthly cancel rate of 50% you need 500 new members each month to sustain 1000 subscribers.

How the member count improves as cancel rate goes down is surprisingly steep.

If you can get the cancel rate to 25%, with just as many people joining each month, the member count doubles to 2000 subscribers.

Get the cancel rate to 12.5% and now you have 4000 subscribers.

Conclusion

Every time your cancel rate halves, your member count doubles.

What I hope you take away from this, besides beaches being the best thing about living seaside in rural Japan, is this:

Make your customers twice as happy, and you can get away with spending only half as much on marketing.

Subscription plugins

By default Shopify does not support recurring payments, but it can be extended to do that by using apps. In this article my aim is to make your life a bit easier by giving you a quick listing of all the major apps out there, along with their prices.

My motivation for searching for subscription apps is finding the perfect solution for my own business, Candy Japan. I use a homegrown system, because there wasn't really anything good available at the time I started the site. I'm always open to transitioning to a better solution, and want to keep up to date on the solutions available.

The base fee for the the Shopify ecommerce system is $29 / month. On top of this you need to pay credit card fees, which are 2.9% of revenue + $0.30 per sale if you use Shopify's own gateway. Using other gateways comes with extra costs.

ReCharge

There also exists an app called ReCharge, which is designed to be used both as a "subscribe & save" -type feature similar to Amazon or as the engine for subscription boxes. The introduction video on their app page is excellent, I recommend checking it out.

ReCharge is $19.99 / month + 1% per transaction for up to 500 subscribers, with a negotiable discount if you have a larger customer base. The first three months are free.

With ReCharge all recurring subscriptions appear as new orders within Shopify, with special new interfaces for managing them both for you and your customer. You can change the subscriptions and update credit cards etc. through the interface which ReCharge adds to your Shopify. It also sends notification emails (welcome email, charge failed and charge succeeded) to your customers automatically. ReCharge supports monthly and other frequencies.

ReCharge has also recently launched an API.

"With the ReCharge API, you can now solve your complex subscription needs. From tailoring your customer portal to creating custom workflows, you can now build off the ReCharge platform to fully customize your store."

Chargify

One of the recurring payment apps is Chargify. By combining Shopify and Chargify, you have a system suitable for running a subscription box. They charge 1.2% of your revenue, with a minimum charge of $149 / month. There is an advanced plan as well, offering some extra features at a cost of 1.2% of revenue + $299.

Extra discounts apply if you have over $250k / month in sales.

Bold Recurring Orders and Subscriptions

$19.99 / month + 1% of recurring revenue. Free 3-month trial. If your subscription box really takes off, for very high volumes the percentage fee can be reduced. You can find Bold subscriptions in the Shopify app store or on their own homepage.

PayWhirl

Another option for adding a subscription layer to Shopify is PayWhirl. It has three tiers, all with varying fixed and percentage fees.

In addition to these, there is now also a "free" plan which charges no monthly fees, but takes 3% of revenue.

I did the math for you.

If you process less than $4,900 per month, choose the "Free" plan. After that stick with the "Business Pro" plan until your revenue hits $10,000. Beyond that go for the "Business Plus" plan, until at $20,000 finally switch to "business ultimate".

You can find PayWhirl in the Shopify app directory or on PayWhirl’s own site. Besides Shopify, PayWhirl can also be used in other contexts, such as with SquareSpace.

Thanks for reading

Which solution did I pick for my own Japanese candy subscription box Candy Japan? None of the above! I went with a custom solution, because at the time I founded the site none of these existed. If you found this useful and happen to like candy, please do subscribe.

Not making as much progress with your studies as you could be? The issue might be unclear goals.

I studied Japanese full-time at a university in Tokyo for two years, learning around 500 kanji characters during my stay. After my exchange study was over I decided to stay in Japan, and have been here for close to 10 years now.

You might think my kanji ability would have improved a lot during that time, but for the most of my stay I didn't seriously study much. I basically just coasted at the level I had attained before.

Importance of goal-setting

"I have met so many people who have been studying a language for years and never actually made much progress, or are otherwise just about maintaining their plateau of speaking pretty well and never improving."

– Benny Lewis on goal-setting

Why did I stop improving? I was lacking a clear objective to work towards.

Now a bit over a year ago I decided to seriously up my Japanese game, and started to make progress at a good clip ever since. What finally got me going again was setting a clear goal.

If you haven't set a goal yet for your kanji studies, then consider this your wakeup call. If you have already set a goal but feel it might not be as firm as it could be, then consider this an eye-opener.

Setting your study goal

"Without motivation, you die a horrible Japanese learner’s death, usually quite early on (2-3 months in?). There is no continue button or extra lives. You are done."

– Adam Shapiro on Why are you Studying Japanese?

When you study, you want to know where you are heading, so you'll know when you get there. What is your motivation?

Mine is pretty simple.

I'm living in Japan with a toddler. Thinking about his education made me realize that if I just continue to coast along, he will pass me in kanji somewhere in the middle of primary school. That would be kind of embarrassing.

While him passing me is inevitable (and desirable) if we continue to live in Japan, I would feel more comfortable if it happened during his high school years instead.

How many kanji is that?

In Japanese primary school by 6th grade, kids are expected to remember 1006 characters called the "kyoiku kanji" (education kanji) set. Kyoiku kanji covers 94.5% of the characters you encounter in the wild (full kyoiku kanji list here).

Doubling this to "joyo kanji" would get me to 99.7% coverage. Whether I want to continue there or go back to coasting mode after reaching my goal will be a decision for another day.

So I should know the kyoiku kanji set at least. But as anyone who has expended serious effort on the kanji front can tell you, there are vastly different ways to define actually "knowing" a character.

The many ways to "know a kanji"

"I don’t consider a Kanji as being learned until I know the most common words using that Kanji with the correct readings and can write those words randomly months after I initially memorized it. Unfortunately, given that standard, I probably know about 100-200 Kanji but hey, we all need goals, right?"

– Tae Kim on You can’t “learn” Kanji!!

For some people it means that when you see the character, you can recite the rough meaning of it in English.

For some it means knowing the Japanese reading for it. Even that is vague, as there are always multiple ways to read a character, depending on the context. Perhaps you want to aim at knowing all the most common readings. Some might even try to learn the rarer readings.

Do you have to know every single character, or are you allowed to make mistakes?

Should you be able to write the character too? In the correct stroke order? Have you failed if you miss a hook, or pierce a line where it should be contained?

Refining your goal

"90% of learning is simply not forgetting"

– Lloyd Vincent on How I studied kanji

Perhaps you want to get hired by a Japanese company and to that end need to pass a certain JLPT level. In that case your goal is clear.

For the rest of us, we have to make our own goals.

In my case I want to reach at least 6th grade level, so my goal is to get an A in a sixth grade exam. And to make sure it isn't just a lucky fluke, I want to get two As in a row.

I will take writing exams intended for Japanese school kids until I pass each grade level, with grade 6 being the ultimate target. If this sounds like the goal for you as well, you can find the tests here.

Working towards your goal

Doing these tests each week and then memorizing anything I missed also gives me nice mini-goals. Anything I miss I add to the spaced repetition app Nihongo to make sure I will re-study them until they stick.

"Think about it like this: if kanji really DID look like the things that they describe, you'd have to memorize 2,000 complicated drawings that had nothing in common with each other. But with radicals, all you got to do is learn around 200 simple shapes and you can draw and read almost all kanji - which was exactly the intention of kanji's inventors."

– Kanji facts from KanjiDamage.com

I don't just study the character out of context, instead I check example sentences and pay attention to any radicals that I am unfamiliar with.

Clearing your daily flashcards quickly becomes a habit. I share Ben's anchoring techniques of starting the review while eating breakfast and proceeding whenever I have a bit of free time during the day.

Conclusion

I'm currently scoring around 50% on the 6th grade exams, and can only get As on 3rd grade exams. I have a lot of work to reach my goal, but at least I'll know when I get there.

When I do, a small celebration will be in order before deciding where to head next.

That's my goal. What's yours?

My background

I've lived in Japan for 9 years with my Japanese wife and now a 2-year old boy. When I did the JLPT test four years ago, I passed N2.

Besides being obsessed with studying Japanese, I'm a programmer and run the Japanese candy subscription box Candy Japan.

Transparency with profit numbers, subscriber numbers and details on the set-ups of shipments as such is fine, but recently I have decided there is one thing I will no longer share information about: anything zero-sum, which at this point is limited to marketing campaigns.

Why?

Because it can cost a huge chunk of money to experiment with marketing, and the big result you get is information on what works. Sharing this information would be the equivalent of giving that money away, as competitors reading this blog would go out and do the same things. In a zero-sum situation whatever is gained by one party is lost by the others, meaning more people doing the same thing is not helpful to anyone.

It would not only erase any benefit Candy Japan would be getting, but likely no-one could profit any longer. Therefore sharing this information would be pointless.

Some day in the future I will share more details when it no longer matters, except as an interesting past case study, but not at the moment.

How it started

In 2011 I moved to Japan. To pay the rent I decided to find items to sell online. Candy seemed to have a nice balance between being fun to receive and also easy to send. I set it to work like a book club, you become a member and then periodically get new sweets to try.

It grew rapidly to 300 customers after launch, staying at that level until 2013. In 2014 there was massive growth, followed by big issues with credit card fraud in 2015.

2016

We sent literally tons of sweets to people, totaling 15,710 boxes of candy (pictured below to scale). Sales were roughly $15,000 / month.

I let my personal life (getting serious about learning Japanese again and being a dad) take priority. I did spend a ton of time running the service, but did not attempt any radical improvements. Two things did happen though.

Thing number one: USDJPY

I had grown used to the cheap yen and put that towards sending people more stuff in a bigger box. Below you can see the packages in the beginning vs. now.

In 2016 Japanese yen was suddenly becoming very expensive, meaning shipping, sweets and packaging also started to cost a lot more, making profit margins slim. I couldn't cut back on spending since I had already promised this level of service to subscribers.

Although there are now more than twice as many members than in the beginning, financially there is little difference.

Thing number two: Video ad

One thing I did manage to do was produce a video ad. Its intended audience is people in early 20s who are really really into Japan. It seemed important to try, because I can use it as a preroll ad on YouTube, which means a huge potential audience.

The ad took months to get made and cost about $3000. I learned that $100 per second is pretty typical for an animation. On top of getting the video made, I've spent about $2000 on the campaign.

Turns out YouTube ads are really expensive! 1 cent per view is the minimum, which means $10 CPM. There are many purchases resulting from the ad, but just not enough to break even.

Thanks for reading

I remain hopeful that I can get the ad to work next year, as there are some tweaks I can still do to improve on cost per conversion. Yen seems to be getting cheaper again, so hopefully things will turn out OK there as well.

If you'd like to get some candy, you can subscribe to Candy Japan here.

Hey I know, I'm a programmer, I'll just write an algorithm to do it for me. How hard could it be?

Given a list of candy dimensions, test if they'll fit within the 23 x 17 x 4 cm parcel pictured below.

One necessary but not sufficient condition is that the total volume of the candies has to be less than the volume of the parcel.

Another one is that no individual candy can be too big:

Even with both conditions met, the candy still might not fit.

Below you can see an example of this. The green candy would fit in the box, but adding the red candy is impossible, even though each would fit individually and their total volume is less than that of the box.

To find the true solution, we can try putting candies next to each other in various ways to see if any permutations would fit. Different locations and rotations need to be tested.

Rotating the boxes is simple, just find all the ways to permute dimensions.

If you tested different locations millimeter by millimeter in three dimensions, with just three candies you would be looking at roughly 10²⁰ ways to place them. The program would take millions of years to complete.

Reducing permutations

Testing any combination which leaves space between the candies is useless. You can always just move them closer together and still have a valid permutation. In other words, don't test "islands" of candy.

Now you only need to test combinations where the candies are touching, but you can still slide the candies along each other, leaving as many permutations as you want accuracy.

Sliding the smaller one past the edge of the larger one just takes more space. Placing the smaller one between the edges doesn't take more space, but it isn't helping either.

From this it seems enough to only test combinations where two edges align. The parent box stays put while the child box goes through possible positions. The parent has 6 surfaces, each surface with 4 ways to align the unrotated child.

Below you can see the 144 different alignments after child rotation is also taken into account.

This method can be chained to test for arbitrary numbers of candy, although the permutations explode quite rapidly.

6*144^(n-1)*(n-1)! ^?

The 6 in the beginning comes from the 6 ways the first parentless candy can be rotated. Adding another candy means 144 more ways to attach it. (n-1)! because it can be attached to each of the existing candy boxes (first there is 1 way to attach it, then 2 ways, then 3 ways and so on, all multiplied together).

At a million tests per second, 4 boxes would already take over a minute in the worst case, although you can abort as soon as you find a fit. With more boxes it would also be necessary to test for intersections with previously added ones, which would also eliminate many recursions.

Conclusion & improvements

So how hard can it be? NP-hard, it turns out.

It would make sense to try some common arrangements first, and to not venture down recursive branches where the previous box combination is already known not to fit.

I am likely to use an existing solution if I adopt this way to find optimal candy sequences, since at this point my JavaScript code is just too slow. For example the Python package pyShipping comes with an implementation which speeds up these tests by using heuristics.

Still, writing this was a fun learning experience. If you would like me to pack some boxes for you too, you can subscribe to Candy Japan here.

Currently the most popular way to start such a service is Cratejoy (YC S13), a store builder designed for setting up services like these. They conveniently have a marketplace listing all stores, complete with date of creation. I spidered the marketplace into a spreadsheet and plotted out how many stores existed each month.

While a year ago there were about 30 new subscription boxes created on CrateJoy each month, that number has now ballooned to more than 150. That's some wild hockey-stick growth.

I started getting the feeling that every month there are increasingly more and more of these out there. For only Japanese candy, besides our own Candy Japan, I know of at least 25 competing boxes, with seemingly more popping up every month. Looks like there really is a subscription box gold rush going on.

When I started there were no good platforms to start such a service, as "subscription boxes" were not a thing yet. So I had to code everything myself. This post is about how much work that turned out to be.

If you would rather listen to me speak, this is also available as a 14 minute YouTube version. If you'd like to additionally see me uncomfortable on a stage, there is also a video when I gave this as a presentation at a Hacker News meetup.

Stack

Back in 2011 there were no readymade subscription box platforms to use. Even the term "subscription box" wasn't in popular use yet. To write the site I used Python on top of Google App Engine. The site has integrations with PayPal and Recurly (credit card middleware). No other major dependencies, just MixPanel and Google Analytics.

Surface

The landing page has 104 lines of code backing it. How many lines of Python code do you think the entire codebase of Candy Japan has? Write your guess down somewhere so you can see in the end how close you got. Don't include the HTML & CSS templates in your guess, just the Python code.

Besides the landing page, there are other pages which the users can see, such as the FAQ, list of candies that were sent before and the thumbnail generation for them. The images are in the App Engine BlobStore. These add a total of 337 lines of code.

Under the surface

If the landing page and other customer-facing pages are the tip of the iceberg, what lies underneath?

PayPal integration

There is some code to talk to PayPal. When I originally did this integration, the API I could use was one called the PayPal Payments Standard NVP API. The acronym NVP stands for Name-Value Pair, which is a way to transmit responses back from PayPal in a way which is a bit more painful than JSON. This integration added 712 lines of code.

Recurly integration

Recurly is middleware which sits between you and credit card payment gateways. It is designed to be easy to integrate with, so that only ended up adding 222 lines of code.

Gift cards

I thought it would be nice if people could buy each other gift cards. These would be prepaid cards you could buy and send to friends as a special link. The person purchasing the gift would not even need to know the shipping address of the recipient.

This turned out to be dangerous and is currently not enabled. I'll tell you why next. In any case, I already wrote 420 lines of code for it.

Fraud detection

There are bad guys on the internet. Sometimes there are credit card leaks, some retailer gets their database hacked and as a result a bunch of valid numbers are released into the wild. Bad guys will then use the stolen card numbers to place purchases in online stores.

Gift cards are doubly attractive fraud targets, because not only do the criminals get to check if their card numbers work, but also get the card which possibly has some resale value. The fraudster could potentially sell the cards on eBay, leaving me with a chargeback and a sad situation where the eBay customer thought they were buying a legit card.

For the time being gift cards are disabled, but before the year-end holidays I would like to re-enable them, probably with PayPal only, as it is much more fraud-resistant.

To try to tell the bad guys from the good guys, I have 587 lines of fraud detection code.

Shopping cart

After experiencing the problem with fraud, I had to stop using the Recurly shopping cart widget, because it wasn't fraud-resistant enough.

Instead I had to implement my own shopping cart flow to gather all possible signals which could help detect fraud more accurately. This added 510 lines of code.

Shipping

After I get orders, I have to actually ship them too. With only a few subscribers, it would be easy to just deal with them manually. After you have hundreds of subscribers with thousands of past accounts also in your database, you want some kind of system to help you out.

I wrote some code to go through all the accounts and try to figure out who I should actually be sending candy to. This is not always so straightforward, as there are some edge cases too. For instance accounts can be paused, there may be manual adjustments to them. In some cases I might want to send stuff to people even if their payment hasn't gone through yet, if I have good reason to believe that it will come in soon.

When you make a thousand shipping labels a month, you end up spending a lot of money on the physical labels themselves. I wrote some more code to try to make a compact PDF file that can be printed in one go on a smalle number of sticker sheets. Compared to printing one at a time, this is both more economical and faster.

Shipping-related code adds 1165 lines.

Returns

Sometimes the post office returns packages to us. The address may have been wrong, or maybe the customer moved or wasn't home to accept the package.

It's extra work to manually find out which account returned boxes are for, emailing the customer and adjusting their accounts. To cut down on this labor, I print barcodes on the boxes so we can just scan them when they get returned. Now it takes about 10 seconds to process a returned package, compared to 10 - 15 minutes digging through the database and writing emails manually.

This does add 505 lines to the codebase.

Admin tools

There are all kinds of administrative tools as well. While you could look at the database directly, it's much more convenient to have a tool for viewing account information. You also want to be able to search for accounts based on name, address or subscription ID number.

Additionally reports need to be produced, for example for tax reasons. These admin tools add 634 lines of code.

Marketing code

If you put a website online, people will not just magically find you. In the beginning it's a bit easier to get visitors, as you can post a new site to places like Product Hunt. Some bloggers might also cover your site because it's new.

After you've been around longer, your site isn't news anymore and people won't hear about it unless you somehow keep promoting it. This costs money and effort. You end up writing code to try to measure and improve your marketing.

First of all, to know who my target audience is, I added a questionnaire step to the subscription flow.

You also need to know how much you can spend on ads, so you end up calculating things like retention rates. There are some ways to get more of visitors to convert, such as A/B testing and sending reminders to people who abandoned their carts.

Another way to market is to send free sample boxes to bloggers, but adding those orders manually to the database gets tiresome. I get around a dozen such requests each week. To make dealing with those take less time, there is an alternative sign-up flow only for bloggers. For this flow, there is no payment step, but instead I will look at each application and deny or accept it.

All this marketing stuff adds 1219 lines of code.

Transactional emails

When someone joins, you want to send them an automatic welcome email. When a reviewer is accepted, you want to send an email telling them that. Also a reminder so they wouldn't forget to write the review when the box arrives.

I do sometimes just contact people manually for fun, but there are also automatic emails that go out.

These add 253 lines of code.

Total

Total 8341 lines

How did you do? I'll rate your guess as "excellent" if you guessed between 5000 - 15000 lines. "Pretty good" if 3000 - 30000. "Meh" if 1000 - 50000. I'm flattered if you thought I could pull it off with less than 1000 lines. More than 50000? This isn't assembler.

Learnings

I spent a few months actively developing the codebase and about 5 years gradually adding stuff to it.

If you were starting a box now, I would definitely go with a platform such as Subbly or CrateJoy.

It would have made sense to split my site into a CMS (maybe WordPress) and have the subscription part be separate. Everything visible on the site (FAQ, candy images, landing page, blog) could have been managed through the CMS. This would have reduced some code that tries to be a CMS, but does a poor job at it while adding unnecessary complexity.

The app engine NoSQL data store is not good for running reports. You end up writing Python code which would be better expressed in SQL. Otherwise I am happy with choosing App Engine.

I don't know how I could have expected it, but somehow from the start I should have prepared for fraud. You want to at least keep an eye on any suspicious activity and react quickly if you start getting many chargebacks.

Thank you

If you would like me to send you some candy, please do sign up. You can read more of my writings in the Candy Japan blog or on my personal blog. I also wrote a book about starting a subscription box.

Thanks to Artem Olegovich for the illustration.

Vuokra

654 eurolla saimme vuokrattua 70 neliön kämpän. Paikallisesti tällaista asuntoa kutsutaan nimellä "mansion", mutta mistään kartanosta ei ole kyse. Ihan tavallinen kerrostaloasunto. Vaikka löytäisimme paremman paikan, tuskin muuttaisimme, koska Japanissa joutuu maksamaan useamman kuukauden vuokraa vastaavan rahasumman muuttaessa uuteen asuntoon. Kyseisiä rahoja ei myöskään saa takaisin, vaan ne annetaan vuokranantajalle "kiitoksena" tai "avainrahana" siitä, että saat asua siellä.

Suomeen verrattuna yllätti, mitä asuntoon ei kuulu. Huonekaluja en odottanutkaan, mutta jääkaappia ja hellaa kyllä odotin. Ne piti ostaa itse erikseen. Loppuviimeksi asunnon viilennys ei myöskään kesällä riittänyt. Työnteko alkaa jossain määrin kärsiä, kun kotitoimiston lämpötila nousee 35 asteeseen.

Ostin lopulta omalla rahalla ylimääräisen ilmastointilaitteen. Niitä on nyt asunnossamme kolme. Lisäksi talvella ilmastointi ei riitä lämmittämään asuntoa, joten tuli ostettua myös muutama lämmitin, ja vielä lisäksi kuumavesipullo ja lämmittävä sähköpeitto. Japanissa useinkaan ei säädellä koko asunnon lämpötilaa, vaan pyritään viilentämään tai lämmittämään vain se paikka, jossa itse kulloinkin oleskelet.

Kun joskus muutamme täältä pois, joudumme jotenkin hankkiutumaan myös eroon jääkaapista, hellasta ja ilmastointilaitteista. Seuraava asuja joutuu sitten hankkimaan ne kaikki uudestaan.

Netti

Meille tulee valokuitu kotiin. Lisämaksusta siitä saisi nopeammankin, mutta meille riittää perustason 89 Mbps kumpaankin suuntaan. Hinta on 43 euroa kuussa.

Sähkö, kaasu ja vesi

Nämä maksavat yhteensä 190 euroa kuussa. Sähkön osuus on 42%, kaasu 45% ja vesi viimeisenä 13%. Suomessa asuva varmaan ihmettelee, että mitä sillä kaasulla tekee. Hella on kaasuhella ja myös vesi lämmittyy kaasulla.

Terveysvakuutus

Suomessa tämä sisältyy veroihin, mutta Japanissa maksetaan erikseen. Oli aika iso shokki, kun sain tästä ensimmäisen kuukauden laskun: 508 euroa. Sama summa pitää siis maksaa joka ikinen kuukausi. Se lasketaan tulojen perusteella, en tosin ole aivan ymmärtänyt millä kaavalla.

Jos ajattelit mennä Japaniin vain vuodeksi pariksi, niin maksu ei ehkä koske sinua. Itse olen asunut täällä jo niin kauan, että maksan myös verot ja muut tällaiset veroluontoiset maksut Japaniin. Veron maksaminen siirtyi Japaniin asuttuani siellä kolme vuotta (googleta "kolmen vuoden sääntö", jos haluat tietää tästä lisää).

Yksi tapa pienentää tätä maksua olisi kuulua johonkin ammattiliittoon. Itse yritin liittyä JAGDA-taitelijaliittoon, jonka kautta olisi saanut paljon halvemman vakuutuksen. Oman japanilaisen karkkikaupan sivujen web designia ei kuitenkaan katsottu tarpeeksi "taiteeksi", jotta sen perusteella olisi saanut alennetun vakuutuksen. Olen itsekin samaa mieltä, mutta koska kyse on varsin isosta rahasta, ajattelin kuitenkin kokeilla josko maksua saisi tämän kautta alennettua. Opinpa ainakin sen, että jos yli 50% tuloistani tulisi web designista, niin sen perusteella liittoon olisi voinut liittyä.

Vaikka terveysvakuutus on kallis, se kattaa vain 70% lääkärikuluista. Eli joudut kuitenkin maksamaan vielä lisää, jos oikeasti sairastut. Jonkinlainen maksukatto ilmeisesti kuitenkin on, joten ihan jenkkitilanteisiin ei pitäisi joutua. Kustannukset ovat järkevästi hinnoiteltu. Kun kävin vartin vastaanotolla sairaalassa, se maksoi vakuutuksen jälkeen 10 euroa. Hammaslääkärissä käynti oli muistaakseni noin 35 euroa, sisältäen puudutuksen ja ilokaasun.

Yllättävää oli kuitenkin, että hintaan sisältyy ainoastaan metallipaikat. Jos haluaa hampaan värisen paikan, se maksaisi noin 400 euroa lisää.

Ruoka

Vaimo yleensä kokkaa kotona ja aineksiin menee 377 euroa kuussa. Silloin harvoin kun käymme ulkona syömässä, se yleensä maksaa 5 - 15 euroa. Suomeen verrattuna ulkona ruokailu on halvempaa.

Täällä on joka puolella kioskeja, jotka ovat aina 24/7 yötä päivää avoinna. R-kioskia vastaavia, mutta vähän isompia. Niistä tulee usein osteltua kaikenlaista pientä. Pienet ostokset kuitenkin kasautuvat, ja veikkaan tuhlaavani noin 265 euroa joka kuukausi melko turhiin ostoksiin. Eli tyyliin Häagen-Dazs -jäätelöön, Red Bulliin, karkkeihin, erikoisjugurtteihin yms. kivaan.

Kännykkä

Kun ottaa huomioon sekä laitteen että liittymän, meiltä kahdelta kuluu niihin 111 euroa kuussa.

Oma operaattorini on b-mobile, joka maksaa 22 euroa kuussa, mutta siihen ei sisälly puhelinta, joten laskin myös pari kymppiä uuden puhelimen ostamiseen noin joka kolmas vuosi.

Vaimon liittymä on DoCoMo, joka maksaa 71 euroa kuussa. Mielestäni se on liian kallis, mutta siihen sisältyy kyllä puhelin. Ostin juuri häälahjaksi vaimolle puhelimen, ja onnistuin painostamaan hänetkin vaihtamaan b-mobileen, koska se on kuitenkin pidemmän päälle paljon halvempi, vaikka ottaisi puhelimen ostamisenkin huomioon. DoCoMo on kuitenkin aika velmu siinä, että liittymää ei voi sulkea kuin tiettynä aikana kerran kahdessa vuodessa. Joten odottelemme nyt sitä päivää, jolloin liittymän saa sulkea.

Pre-paid SIM-kortteja täältä ei tunnu saavan yhtä helposti. B-mobilen sai ostettua netistä ja SIM-kortti tuli postissa, mutta sitäkin varten piti laittaa heille liitetiedostona kuva skannatusta passista. Joku näytti myös oikeasti tarkistavan passiskannauksen oikeellisuuden, sillä jouduin lähettämään kuvan uudestaan kun ensimmäinen lähettämäni kuva ei ollut tarpeeksi selkeä.

Auto

Jos asuisimme Tokiossa tai muussa suurkaupungissa, niin autoa ei tarvitsisi. Tokushima on kuitenkin niin maaseutua, ettei täällä ilman autoa oikein pärjäisi, varsinkaan nyt vauvan kanssa. Hankimme pikkuauton merkkiä "Suzuki Wagon R" kun muutimme tänne, mutta se alkaa olla nyt loppuun ajettu. Se maksoi ostaessamme 7000 euroa ja saimme siitä 5 vuotta ajoaikaa irti, eli 116 euroa kuussa. Bensaan menee noin 17 euroa kuussa, se on vähän halvempaa kuin Suomessa. Yleensä autolla ei juuri ajeta muualle, kuin vaimon työpaikalle.

Vauva

Lapsen kanssa rahaa menee monenlaiseen ennalta-arvaamattomaan ostokseen. Tuntuu että joka kuukausi on jokin yllättävä asia, joka vauvaan liittyen pitää ostaa. Ensin ostat ehkä autoon turvaistuimen, eivätkä rokotuksetkaan ole ilmaisia. Rahanmeno on hyvin vaihtelevaa, mutta kun ynnäsin viimeiset 10 kuukautta yhteen, niin satunnaisiin vauvamenoihin tuntuu menevän noin 91 euroa kuussa.

Tähän ei kuitenkaan sisälly se suurin meno, eli päivähoito. Kun itse koodailen kotona ja vaimo on töissä, jonkun pitää huolehtia vauvasta. Tätä varten vaimon työpaikalla on kätevästi päivähoito, mutta se maksaa 442 euroa kuussa. Saattaa kuulostaa kalliilta, mutta esimerkiksi Hollannissa vastaava hoito maksaisi noin 1700 euroa kuussa.

Yhteensä

Satunnaiskulut kuten huonekalut, vaatteet, auton korjailu ja muut pienet menot lisäävät vielä loppukustannukseen 221 euroa.

Kun kaiken laskee yhteen, meidän kolmihenkinen perhe käyttää 3035 euroa kuukaudessa. Tähän sisältyy siis vain täällä asuminen. Suomessa vierailu kaksi kertaa vuodessa kesällä ja jouluna tulee sitten erikseen.

Laskiessa oletin, että 1 EUR = 113 JPY

Toivottavasti tästä laskelmasta oli jollekin hyötyä. Jos olet kiinnostunut kokeilemaan japanilaisia karkkeja, käy katsomassa myös karkkikauppani sivu. Sivut ovat nyt vain englanniksi, mutta lähetämme kyllä myös Suomeen.

Jos jaoit tämän artikkelin jonnekin, niin laitan mielelläni sinulle kiitokset tänne loppuun. Laita mailia me@bemmu.com. Kiitoksia saa toki myös enkkuversion jakamisesta.

Candy Japan is a subscription box for Japanese candy. As a business, we cannot just send things to anyone for free. That would lose money and we have to eat, pay rent, host this website etc., so we can't go broke if we want to stay around!

However if you have some good way to promote Candy Japan, we may be able to give you free candy in exchange. For example if you have a YouTube channel, a popular Facebook page or a website related somehow to Japan or candy, then in exchange for promoting Candy Japan we may be able to send you a free box of candy.

How to apply for free candy

To apply, please enter your details here. Be warned however that we do reject most applications, as it's not free for us to send these samples, and we will only send free candy if it seems very likely that the promotional value is higher than the cost of shipping you the box. So for example if you have a YouTube channel with only a few videos with less than a thousand views each, we are very unlikely to send you a free candy box.

If you don't have a way to promote us, please consider just begging someone for money and then just subscribing as usual here :-)

As Halloween nears, searches for how to type the 🍬emoji go through the roof. In the US this would be called "candy emoji", while in the UK it's "lolly emoji".

To include 🍬in your message, either just copy & paste from this article, or follow the more advanced instructions below.

Mac OS X

On a Mac, you can press ⌘ + Control + Space bar to bring up the emoji selector. Bet you didn't know that existed.

From there you can enter "candy" as search to bring it up.

PC

In Windows, look for the touch keyboard icon in the lower right of your screen. Click on that to bring up a keyboard selector and select the emoji mode, scroll until you find 🍬. This works at least in Windows 8 and 10.

Many factors affect the success of stories on Hacker News. The basic formula is based on the number of upvotes, adjusted with a time decay so that popular stories eventually leave the frontpage to make space for new ones. Stories may get penalties based on title or overheated commenting activity. Flagging by users and voting ring detection play a role as well.

Although most posts go nowhere, there is some correllation between posting time and chances of success. Below you can see a chart compiled by Max Woolf showing the chances of a post getting at least 10 upvotes, for each weekday and hour.

I often write stories related to Japan, so I wanted to continue the investigation to see if there might be a country-specific element to the optimal posting time. Peak Hacker News usage times should differ for each country because of time zones. I'll start with UK as an example, you'll see why later on.

Assuming that people in the UK are more likely to upvote posts related to the area, posting when the highest number of people from the UK are looking at the new page seems like the way to go.

The most accurate way to discover peak usage would be to look at IP addresses from Hacker News access logs, then map those to countries. Sadly I don't have access to those logs.

Country-related postings as a proxy

Assuming people are more likely to post local stories, looking at country-related posts should be a pretty good proxy for usage. What I mean is that if there are a lot of posts about "United Kingdom", "Britain", "British", "UK" or "England" in the titles, then maybe it's peak time over there.

Below is a plot of how many stories per hour were posted with those phrases in them. The time zone in this and all other charts is UTC, which in this case conveniently happens to be the UK time zone.

This rather satisfying curve was based on about 6000 story submissions. Posting to Hacker News seems to happen mostly during working hours. You can see people gradually waking up starting from 7am, with peak usage happening at noon. There is a dip at 1pm, maybe for elevenses?

Next comes the big question. Are UK-related stories more likely to succeed during peak hours? "Success" here is defined the same way as Max did with his chart, as a story that has 10+ points. For each hour I checked the percentage of stories that succeeded. You can see them below in red, overlaid on the previous graph so you can see the relation.

While the graph has some strange quirks to it, I would still call it a rather nice fit.

Japan

Since I write many stories about Candy Japan, the big question for me is whether an optimal time exists for making such posts. The answer is... rather unsatisfying. I wanted to show the nicer curves first.

Below you can see the posting activity for anything with "Japan" in the title. Again in UTC time zone.

So far so good. There is a clear peak at 3pm UTC, which in Japan is midnight. The 1581 posts this chart is based on is enough data to make a plot of posting activity, but it turned out not to be enough to make a nice plot of the success ratio. There are only about 15 stories per hour that have at least 10 points, making the chart too noisy to make much sense of:

It could be that the timezone doesn't really matter, because almost no-one living in Japan uses Hacker News and all related stories are actually posted from abroad. Another reason could be that Japan is just so interesting even to people not living there that there isn't much regional effect.

Conclusion

The best time to post about Japan remains a mystery. It's 7am UTC (4pm) if you believe the noisy graph, or 3pm UTC (midnight) if you would rather like to assume that the peak time is also the best time for Japan.

Thanks to Artem Olegovich for the illustration work and to Qaisar Tariq for GQL help.

Let me know in HN comments if you would like me to make a chart for your country.

To be able to write text more efficiently, let's try introducing a new symbol. To keep things simple, I'll just make it a square: 口.

Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce, let's use this symbol to encode an entire word instead. I'll pick the word "mouth".

"口" = "mouth"

Now instead of "mouth-to-mouth resuscitation", you could write "口-to-口 resuscitation". Since it's obvious from the context, we could even shorten that to just "口口 resuscitation" and save even more characters. Compact.

As another example, "I have no mouth and must scream" would become "I have no 口 and must scream".

Conjugating verbs

How can we write for instance "stop mouthing your words and speak up" or "she silently mouthed her answer"?

One option would be to just write "stop 口 your words and speak up" and "She silently 口 her answer", and leave it up to the reader to guess from context how to exactly read it.

To be more clear, we can add the conjugation part after the ideogram. So in the previous cases you would write "stop 口ing your words and speak up" and "She silently 口ed her answer".

Introducing another symbol

Happily just replacing "mouth" with our new symbol is working great so far, only requiring some extra characters after the "mouth" part such as "mouth" + "ed" or "mouth" + "ing". But in some cases it won't be as clean.

Suppose we introduced a symbol for the word "eat", with the past tense "ate". Since both of them are the same concept, it would be ideal to use the same character for both. But if you introduce a symbol that means both "eat" and "ate", how will you know which way to read it when you encounter it?

The answer is to first put the symbol, then also add the last letter at the end to disambiguate it. So if it's "eat", put a "t" after the symbol. In case of "ate", put an "e" after the symbol.

Now what would be a good symbol for "eat"/"ate"? I'll pick 食. When you want to say "eat", you'd write "食t" and for "ate" you'd write "食e".

Plot twist time

Did the character 食 for "eat"/"ate" look sort of familiar to you?

Well okay, I'll come clean. I've actually been secretly teaching Japanese to you. 口 actually really is the Japanese character for "mouth" and 食 really is the symbol for eating.

I wanted to fool you just for a bit, just so you would get some idea of how the Japanese writing system works, so you could appreciate how it works without having to learn a bunch of new grammar, vocabulary and characters.

Thanks for reading

Now you know the basics of how the Japanese writing system works.

I think you deserve a treat now, go to your fridge, put your favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!

Bemmu has been living in Japan for 7 years and studied Japanese as an exchange student for 2 years. He runs the fortnightly subscription service Candy Japan.

Note: there is an updated 2019 version of this article available here.

Rent

For 654 EUR or 732 USD we are able to rent a nice 70 square meter / 750 square feet apartment, or "mansion" as they are called here. A mansion is a place in an apartment complex built from concrete, while an apartment is one built from wood.

I like to browse apartment listings in our area and our place seems to actually be on the larger and newer side. Even if we did find something better, we would be unlikely to move because of the various fees involved, which tend to equal several months worth of rent.

Another surprise for me was all the things that are not included and which you are expected to move out with you when you leave. Furniture I can understand, but you are even expected to bring in and at the end uninstall your own stovetop and fridge.

I discovered that my home office would be a sauna in the summer, so I had to install an extra air conditioning unit. That will also have to be moved if we ever get a new place.

Internet

For 89 Mbps up & down we are spending 43 EUR or 49 USD per month. This is not the fastest option that would be available, but we decided to rather spend less, as this is already unnecessarily fast.

Electricity, gas and water

For these combined the monthly cost is 190 EUR or 213 USD per month. Of these costs electricity is 42%, gas 45% and water comes at 13%.

I hadn't spent any money on gas before moving to Japan. It's used for the stove, but apparently the water heater also uses it.

Health insurance

To me this was the biggest sticker shock, which I didn't mention at all in my old post as I wasn't paying it yet, as I was still tax resident in Finland. Now I'm currently paying 508 EUR or 569 USD for my health insurance here. That's not a typo or a yearly cost, that's what it costs every single month.

I tend to think of it as just another form of tax, as it's based on your income. If you are thinking about moving to Japan, after you become tax resident (coming from Europe that seemed to typically switch after 3 years) this will be an expense you should mentally prepare yourself for.

The only way to reduce this which I could find was to join some kind of health insurance union. I went through the application process to join one for artists and web designers, but could not join as maintaining your own online candy store did not count as being webdesigney enough. My accountant seemed to agree that I should just suck it up and pay the usual national insurance fee.

It covers 70% of medical costs, so even after paying the monthly fee, you still pay at hospitals too. It seems there is some cap on how much you have to pay at maximum if you get hospitalized for a longer time, although I don't quite understand how it works.

The costs seem to be very reasonable though, with a short doctor's visit to refill a prescription usually costing about 10 dollars after insurance. Dentists are also rather cheap, with visits seemingly never costing more than 50 dollars even with anesthesia and laughing gas (which you have to hunt for, most clinics don't offer it). The only surprise was that if you want a tooth-colored filling instead of a metal one, you would have to pay a big premium, around $500.

Food

My wife makes delicious home-cooked meals, for which our costs are 377 EUR or 337 USD per month. We almost never eat out, but when we do a single meal is usually about 7 - 15 USD per person.

Confession: I have the bad habit of buying random snacks from the 24 hour convenience store strategically placed almost right next to our apartment, and run up a monthly bill of about 265 EUR or 297 USD there.

It's very easy to spend $10 a day in convenience stores. When I'm bicycling I'll often stop to buy a drink and a candy bar. In the evening we might want some Häagen-Dazs ice cream. In the morning I might want to start with a Red Bull (which I recognize as my worst spending habit, also unhealthy). At night I'll get peckish and get a yogurt. It adds up easily, from many seemingly small purchases.

Phone

Total monthly cost for our phones is 111 EUR or 124 USD.

I am on b-mobile, which costs 22 EUR or 25 USD, but doesn't include a phone, for which I estimate I'll have to budget an extra 20 bucks each month if I want to buy a new device every 3 years.

Wife's DoCoMo phone subscription is 79 USD or 71 EUR per month. To me that seems insanely high, as I was used to paying around 10 USD back in Finland. It does include the phone though. Looking to switch wife also to b-mobile, but it is only allowed penalty-fee-free during one month every 2 years.

One peculiarity is that you have to show clear proof of identity when getting a SIM card. In Europe I would just get one at the counter of a kiosk or grocery store as casually as buying a pack of gum. Here I had to upload a scan of my passport when ordering one online and even had to re-upload when it wasn't clearly legible from the scan, so apparently they take it seriously and have people actually checking them.

Car

If we lived in Tokyo a car would be unnecessary, but here in Tokushima it is not really optional. We wouldn't be able to go anywhere without a car, especially not now with a baby.

Our Suzuki Wagon R is now nearing the end of its life. We got 5 years out of that car and I recall spending about 7000 EUR or 7800 USD on it, so that's about 116 EUR or 130 USD per month. Now we are looking to buy a new one, which will probably end up costing around 13000 EUR or 14530 USD. For that price you can get a new Mazda Demio. For the total I'll go with the old cost, as we haven't bought anything yet.

For fuel we spend 17 EUR or 19 USD per month. This is for wife's commute and short weekend trips.

Baby

There are all kinds of random things you end up buying when you have a child, with every month tending to have at least one random expensive thing to buy. One month it will might be a car seat, the next a bunch of vaccinations. It's very varied, but average spend has been 91 EUR or 101 USD per month based on the last 10 months.

He just had his first birthday and just started daycare, which will additionally cost 442 EUR or 495 USD per month, so from now on for our son Aito we will likely be spending about 533 EUR or 596 USD per month.

Total

Misc things like furniture, clothing, fixing/inspecting the car etc. random expenses total around 221 EUR or 247 USD per month.

All in all living in Tokushima, Japan for our family costs around 3035 EUR or 3313 USD per month. I am only including essentials of living here. Biggest thing I am leaving out is foreign trips, because they aren't really a part of what "living in Japan" costs. When I wrote this I assumed 1 EUR = 113 JPY, 1 USD = 101 JPY.

I hope this was useful or interesting to you. Please do check out our monthly japanese candy subscription, if that sounds interesting to you.

This was an update written from scratch to a previous blog post, which was generally well received, but did receive some criticism (mostly because I counted our expenses separately, so this time I combined them). Now that we've lived here in Tokushima for over 5 years, I thought it was time to post an update.

Our original box was just a dark colored parcel with no branding on it. I commissioned a new design and assigned customers randomly to either receive the new packaging (group A) or the old one (group B).

Plain unbranded boxes go for just $0.34 a piece, while a box with a full-color illustration printed on the cover costs almost twice as much: $0.67.

This may not seem like such a big difference, but in absolute terms using the new box means around $500 less profit per month or roughly 10% of profit margin.

Result

The test ran for 4 months and 2 weeks. During this time 6458 packages were sent to 1075 distinct customers. Customers who started a subscription and canceled before receiving their first package were excluded from the test. Of the remaining customers 38.93% canceled during the test.

In group A 38.27% or 168 of the 439 customers receiving the new package design canceled during the test.

In group B 39.59% or 175 of the 442 customers receiving the old package design canceled during the test.

This is not a statistically significant difference. In a world where it makes no difference which package is sent, you would get a result as significant as this 80% of the time.

Conclusion: no clear improvement to retention

Will this mean Candy Japan will stop using the new packages?

Not necessarily.

Retention is not the only reason for having a nice package, and possibly not even the most important one. I can immediately think of at least three other effects which could be more important:

• YouTube unboxings may look more appealing and having the brand name on the box may remind viewers of where to go to subscribe.
• Friends who come over to eat the candy with you will be able to see the company name on the box and may not have otherwise known where to go to subscribe.
• When including product pictures on the homepage, a nicer box may persuade more people to sign up.

Sadly the first two effects will only result in direct visits and seem to be impossible to measure. The last reason seems to be measurable, but in practice it would be difficult to take pictures in such a way that the only difference would be the package design.

Thanks to Marek Gibney (creator of www.productchart.com) for calculating the p-value.

You can find the anonymized subscriber data and code for calculating the cancellation percentages here.

You can sign up here if you would like to receive the candy.

Pictures are originals taken by Candy Japan, feel free to use but please link back.

Patisserie Swallowtail in Tokyo, Japan is offering sweets shaped as zoo animals.

The cake shop located in Ikebukuro is offering a whole zoo of nicely designed wildlife sweets to pick from, all the way from tiger and monkey cakes to white chocolate elephants and almond lions, with even an orange and lemon slow loris mousse on offer.

They have even more super cute animals, see them all here.

Via http://patisserie-swallowtail.jp/topics/hands-ikebukuro.php#160325, https://twitter.com/Hands_Ikebukuro/status/726223466265890817

Chocolate company Morinaga opened a temporary pop-up Dars brand store in Omotesando, Tokyo. The store was part of a promotion coinciding with "Dars day" and has already closed, but while it was open they had several special items for sale, the most grandiose of which was this $300 chocolate tiara.

See more pictures of the store at http://ameblo.jp/sweetsmode/entry-11963543916.html.

Types of Dars chocolates available

Besides the basic varities, these varieties also exist or have existed at some point: uji matcha (high-class brand of tea originating from south Kyoto), matcha milk, bitter chocolate, raspberry, affogato, crea hazelnut, queen of nuts, nuts & fruits, salt, white cacao, limited edition gianduja (type of hazelnut chocolate), limited edition cocoa crush, and Hello Kitty Strawberry Milk.

Dars chocolates are specially designed to melt at 22 degrees celsius (71.6 fahrenheit).

There also exists a Dars drink and varieties of Dars ice cream (at least pino x dars and crunchy ice cream). As part of a Dars day promotion, for a time you could purchase a $300 Dars chocolate tiara.

Via http://ameblo.jp/sweetsmode/entry-11963543916.html

Company behind Dars

Dars is a product from the confectionery company Morinaga Seika, founded in 1899 and based in Tokyo. Artist Ayumi Hamasaki and olympic silver medalist figure skater Mao Asada work with Morinaga in their advertisements. Morinaga is the company responsible for introducing Valentine's Day in Japan as the day when women give men chocolate.

History of Dars chocolate

Dars came on sale in Japan in 1993 as a variation of a chocolate called "solid", which was already on sale since 1988. "Solid" had just a solid block of chocolate, but "Solid Dars" broke that up into a dozen pieces. The Japanese word "ダース" (dars) means "dozen". The "DARS" spelling was chosen as a combination of the Spanish word "DAR" (give) and the Latin word "ARS" (art / skill). Even their tagline used to be "there's 12 in the box - therefore dozen". The packaging used the English word DOZEN on the box instead of the current made-up word DARS.

You can see musician Kenji Ozawa even spelling this out in a commercial by counting the Dars box contents piece by piece.

Dars store

There was a Dars brand store in Omotesando Hills. Among other things you could purchase a chocolate tiara there for the low low price of $300. The store may pop up again, as it was a special brand promotion for Dars day 12/12 (December 12th, as "dars" means "12").

Celebrities appearing in Dars commercials

1995 - 1996 Musician Kenji Ozawa

Musician Kenji Ozawa was Morinaga's first celebrity to be used for promoting Dars chocolates. YouTube has several Dars commercials with Kenji Ozawa appearing.

1998 - 1999 Actor and singer Takeshi Kaneshiro

2000 - 2007 Musical duo KinKi Kids

2005 Actress Kumiko Aso

2006 Actress Eri Fukatsu

2007 Singer/actress Ryoko Shinohara

2008 Actors Yusuke Yamamoto and Junji Takada

2008 "Country Musume" member Mai Satoda

2009 Actress/fashion model Asami Usuda

2009 Actor Masaki Okada

2010 - 2012 Actress Aoi Miyazaki (well-known for her role in "Nana")

2013 Actress/model Haru

2014 Model/actress/singer/designer Kiko Mizuhara

Via http://mdpr.jp/gourmet/1577781

This à la mode "pomu pomu pudding" was just announced to go on sale in Japanese Mini Stop convenience stores starting April 26th. Mini Stop is hoping customers celebrating Japanese Children's Day on May 5th or Mother's Day on May 8th will buy it in droves.

Via http://mdpr.jp/gourmet/detail/1579464

Let’s take a look at 8 of the most popular candy-related international subscriptionboxes.

Candy German

Does the term “German candy” ring a bell to anyone? Probably not as much as brand names such as Haribo, Kinder or Ritter Sport do. But all of these now world-famous treats originated from Germany, and that is exactly what the company packs up in their monthly boxes. A bag of the infamous Haribo Gummy Bears, a bar of Ritter Sport chocolate, a Kinder egg, a pack of Leibniz cookies and many more less-known, but not less delicious brands of confections make up the Candy German subscription boxes.

They provide free shipping worldwide and 6 to 8 items in every monthly package. The price for one month worth of treats is €29, which is about $32.43. Candy German webside also proposes 3 and 6 months plans that allow the customers to save up to $3 per box. It might seem pretty pricey compared to other subscription boxes, but the company sticks to the german quality standards- their website states that no package contains less than 1kg of candy.

As for the confections themselves- they are sure to delight you with their exquisite flavours and textures. Worth a try!

Gummi Munchies

Speaking of Gummy Bears. Have you ever walked by one of those stores full of tall jars filled with multicolored gummies and thought “I want them all!”? Well, that’s what Gummi Munchies is here for. For only $21.95 a month, this company provides two pounds (~0.9kg) worth of mixed bulk gummies.

The best part is that you can mix and match your favorite flavors and shapes to create your own, unique mix that fits your tastes. You can choose from sour, fruity or sweet gummies, you can have bears, nature or marine shaped ones, or even a gluten-free alternative for those who keep their figure in check.

Even though the multi-choice option ruins a bit of the surprise factor, who doesn’t love a selection customized to one’s tastes? However, aside from the original bag of Gummi Munchies (the pick-and- mix one), the box also includes a jar of surprise candy and some gummies from a foreign country, to satisfy those who seek mystery and suspense in their subscription boxes.

The Gummi Munchies website is full of discount options and contests – customers can get 25% off the entire order just by following the company’s social media accounts. Now, there’s even a contest for the subscribers, the prize being a free 12-month supply of candy.

KarePax

KarePax is a US based company that combines sweet treats and comic books in a mystery-type subscription box. Their treats come from all over the world- the contents of the previous boxes published on the website include Japanese Pocky and KitKat, candy corn flavored Oreos and chewy chocolate bars from the US.

Each package contains 11 to 13 full-size snacks, a handful of little candies from various countries and 3-4 comic books. For those who aren’t really into comics, KarePax offers the opportunity to get some treats doubled instead of them. On to the prices, a big box of sweets and geeky indie comics will cost you $26, with 3, 6 and 12 months plans available to choose from. However, for overseas shipping you will be charged an additional fee of $10.

OmNomBox

OmNomBox is a subscription box company that includes candy from most Asian countries- China, Korea, Taiwan, and of course, Japan. While there are at least 10 Japanese-only sweets subscription boxes, OmNomBox appeals to its customers by including typical Korean and Taiwanese treats, such as honey flavored apple chips, probiotic strawberry yoghurt gummies and Pejoy biscuits.

Never heard of Pejoy before? Look it up in the information provided, as every box comes with a detailed description of each snack and beverage! For instance, Pejoy is Pocky’s inside out version- a hollow biscuit stick with chocolate cream filling, much like a wafer roll.

Another specific of the OmNomBox is including a drink in each package - usually green tea from China or Taiwan, but various juices and soft drinks such as Ramune soda have also been featured.

To taste the confections of the Far East will cost you $25 a month, plus shipping fees if you live outside the US. The company offers a month-to- month auto-renewing plan, various coupon codes for discounts and opportunities for bloggers to get free boxes for public reviews.

Old British Sweets

For all the Harry Potter fans out there, you might want to take a look at this website.

Old British Sweets will give you the impression that it’s the online version of the Honeydukes sweets shop from the HP saga. With intriguing names such as Gobstoppers, White Mice and Dip Dabs, whimsical-looking pictures and mouthwatering flavors, the Old British Sweets are definitely worth a try. The company supports local candy making craftsmen and states that the best confectioneries are not the ones found among the aisles of a supermarket, but rather the ones crafted by hand.

For only £19.99 (~$31) you can receive 450g of Britain’s finest candy right at your door – that’s right, the shipping worldwide is free of any charge.

Such a festive subscription box is the perfect option for a gift as well. The website has a special option for sending gift packages, which does not automatically renew every month, as a normal subscription does. Old British Sweets is the only company on the subscription service market that provides this kind of traditional and handcrafted candy.

You might want to put one of their boxes on your next Christmas wishlist.

The Sweet Club

The Sweet Club is a customizable monthly box of treats from the UK. Much like the Gummy Munchies, the company allows its customers to choose from a variety of confectioneries to make their own box, suited entirely to their tastes.

For those who are confused by the multitude of items on the “menu”, The Sweet Club offers premade selections as well. A box typically includes 8 kinds of different treats(~100g of each) that you can pick from the website. What can you choose from? Well, pretty much any kind of candy you could think of. Chocolate, gummies, hard and soft candy, liquorice, fudge or lollipops – the menu on the website’s got all of them.

You can even choose specific types from these categories, for example the Chocolate section includes items such as Chocolate Covered Marshmallows, Chocolate Eggs, Chocolate Fudge, etc… Just add some sour jellies to dilute the sweetness and voila! You have a selection ready to be packed and dispatched to your home country. For £9.95  a month or £8.25 a fortnight, plus shipping fees outside the UK, you’ll get more than 800g of candy of your choice straight to yor doorstep.

You can update your selection every month or leave it to the company- they are sure to surprise you with one of the readymade selections!

Treatsie

For those who are less into gummies and jelly beans and love a more gourmet option when it comes to their sweets, Treatsie is the perfect choice. This smaller, but certainly more stylish box is sure to make the difference. What’s inside it is even more appealing – bars of red velvet milk chocolate, peanut butter cups with cinnamon and sea salt, lavender-infused caramel, etc..

Original American chocolate chip cookies have also been included previously. Such an exquisite selection will be shipped to you monthly for only $12, with 3 and 12 months plans also available. The company also provides a gift giving option, which is perfect for anyone with a sweet tooth in your life. Treatsie takes great care of their customer service. In the hot summer months, the boxes are shipped in radiant cool packs, that keeps the chocolate from melting and makes sure that the box reaches its destination in the best condition possible.

Gypsy Trading Company Snacks

The name of this subscription service says it all- their boxes are huge, treasure-chest like packages filled to the brim with fun, kitschy snacks from all over the world. Their treats come from the Far East, Central and South Americas, Europe and more.

Flavors and brands we’ve never seen in other subscription boxes include Indonesian Milkita Lollipops, Mexican Chili Rokas, Bon o Bon chocolates from Argentina, Taro Cream Wafers for Taiwan and many more. Each box contains at least one drink and some savory snacks as well.

The drinks are also very unique- ever tried Inca Kola from Peru or Chinese Apple Jasmine drink?

Gypsy Trading Company gives you the opportunity to taste them all! A small snack treasure chest includes 8-12 treats and a drink, and a big one can hold up to 20 treats and 2 drinks. For $20 a small chest or $29 a big one, you can try the flavors of faraway countries without having to leave your house. Plans for 3 and 6 months are also available both for the big and small boxes of treats, allowing you to save up to $27 on the entire purchase.

Candy Japan

Candy Japan (our site) mails Japanese surprise sweets to subscribers around the world twice a month, with free shipping of mystery boxes no matter which country you are ordering from.

Japan has the most interesting sweets in the world, so if you are looking for an international candy subscription, this would be the one to start with. There are sweets with cute shapes that will make you go aww, bizarre flavors you cannot taste anywhere else, kits where some assembly is required before you get to eat your creation, even candy that make sounds or that you can otherwise play with.

Unlike most subscription boxes, Candy Japan ships smaller boxes, but twice a month so that you will always have the next box to look forward to soon enough and to keep you from eating too much at once!

The reason why the candy subscription services are so popular is obvious - everybody loves a sweet treat. However, everyone’s tastes differ when it comes to candy, and that’s why so many different companies have been appearing all over the internet. Do you love munching on gummies? Or would you rather have a fine selection of chocolates every now and then? Perhaps you want to try flavors from all over the world?

Got hungry after reading this? Don’t worry, there’s a candy subscription box out there which has got you covered.

Not everyone is a big fan of PayPal. Imagined threat or not, it seemed risky to have all subscriptions depending on it. For these reasons I wanted it to be possible to sign up directly with a credit card as well. Just a form on the site where people could enter their payment details.

Back then it was still a fair bit of work to find a suitable credit card processor to accept payments directly on your site (unlike now). I spent a ton of time going through different options, finally finding the magic payment combination that got me the form I wanted.

When I finally got things set up, I was so happy we went to the beach and celebrated it with fireworks. My understanding of how to charge cards at this point was "slap a Recurly widget on your site and call it a day".

Things were good. Until they weren't.

Data breaches affect your store, even if your own database is safe

Credit card numbers leak. The source could be a compromised database, or just an untrustworthy employee skimming cards to supplement their wage at a reputable store. Sometimes millions of card numbers are liberated in a single event.

Because of these leaks, you can go out and buy valid card numbers for about $10 per number, sold in bulk or in smaller packs of confirmed numbers. There are even people who travel the world using flight tickets purchased with stolen cards.

There are plenty of cards already out there.

In June 2015 I started feeling that fallout. I thought we were just having a particularly great month, but it turned out almost all of those new orders were just fraud. It cost thousands of dollars in fees and lost product.

It wasn't a single event either, in fact it is still happening even as I write this. On each fraud attempt I get a notification, and it's blinking often enough that I'm tempted to turn that off. At this point the problem is so bad that when I get a new candy subscriber, it is as likely to be fraud as it is to be a real order.

Trying to fix the issue

My initial reaction was to just turn off credit card orders completely, reverting to PayPal only. After this the amount of new subscribers turned into decline for the first time. Partly because not everyone likes PayPal, but also because I started feeling burned out and spent less time promoting the business.

After recollecting my thoughts, I started reading more about what this fraud is and the motivations of the people behind it. I asked around online and even gave a presentation at a Hacker News meetup to solicit some ideas.

Mostly the suggestions involved either signals for trying to guess which orders might be fraud, or countermeasures to try to make things harder for the fraudsters.

Some examples of signals are checking if many orders originate in a short span of time from the same IP address, whether the IP address country same as the shipping address country, is the email from an anonymous provider such as yopmail and so on.

The problem with signals is that the fraudsters also know about them, and will quickly adapt when they notice you are checking them. It took less than a day for them to start generating new IP addresses for every order once I banned multiple orders in succession from same IP. Same thing when I started requiring a verified email address. They would just generate those on hotmail, outlook or by using throwaway email services.

Countermeasures try to make things harder for the fraudster. The huge issue with these is that you are generally also making things harder for legitimate customers and losing sales as not everyone is willing to jump through fire-lit hoops just to get some candy. This might not seem like a big deal, but it can affect the cost of acquiring customer such that you can no longer afford to promote your site. Some examples are requiring email address verification, connecting with Google+ or Facebook account, SMS / phone verification, captchas and so on.

Key insight #1

Imagine you're in a war. A sniper shot just barely misses you and you take cover. You don't then stand up, spread your arms and shout "I'm still alive!". You want them to think they got you.

On a whim during Christmas holiday in Finland I emailed Derek Sivers to ask how he had solved the problem for his store CD Baby. After flying back to Japan to spend the New Year with my wife's family, I checked my email and was thrilled when I actually got a reply from him!

Characteristically it is also one of the nicest emails I have ever received. It contained a ton of great information, but one insight stood out in particular: don't let the fraudsters know whether their order succeeded.

If you suspect an order is fraud, don't go out and say to the criminal "hey, I declined your super suspicious order!". Instead, play dead. Pretend they got you. Tell them "thank you for your order", behaving exactly the same way as if it really was a successful order.

Now if criminals are using your site to check validity of card numbers... well they can't do that anymore, because it looks like every card they try is valid. If on the other hand they are really trying to get free candy with a stolen card, they'll hopefully be happy after their initial "success" and go away.

Key insight #2

Sadly the Recurly widget wouldn't allow me to play dead so easily, and would rather give fraudsters instant feedback of the success of their charges. I had to do a deeper API integration that took longer than I had hoped for, but I learned another useful thing on the way.

To avoid risking a data breach, you don't ever want to store or even see card numbers hit your server. When you have a payment form that allows typing in a credit card number, you "tokenize" the numbers first. As an example, suppose a customer is typing in the number “1444–4444–4444–4444”. When they hit "submit", you pass the number to a trusted third card number vault, which turns it into a token such as“abcdefGHJIJ1234”.

What's so great about tokens? Tokens are pointers to card numbers not stored on your own server. Whenever you want to charge a card, instead of the number you transmit the token. Unlike card numbers, tokens are only valid for a number of minutes. As they are temporary, they are much less risky to store. If your database got leaked, the attackers would not be able to charge any cards.

Token expiration is a strength, but to me it seemed it could also be a challenge. I wanted to be able to manually confirm any orders before letting them through (to avoid any chargeback fees), but as the tokens are only valid for a number of minutes there wasn't enough time for any manual checking.

Reading up more on the API I learned that while you really do need to use the token within the time limit (20 minutes for Recurly), setting up a charge that happens in the future also counts as "using". Now when a new order comes in, I tell Recurly "charge this token 2 weeks from now". Now I have plenty of time to read the orders before they are actually charged, and this works out just fine since we only ship candy out twice a month in any case.

Conclusion

By not sharing order success with potential fraudsters, using delayed charging of cards and looking at signals for hints on which orders may be fraudulent, I am now at a point where I have been able to re-enable credit cards. Whether this will reduce fraud to a tolerable level or if I will need to go PayPal-only again will remain to be seen.

If you would like me to send you some candy, you can order here. If it's all the same to you, use PayPal so I won't have to manually check your order :-)

In this post I'll do a behind-the-scenes cost breakdown inspired by the CushionApp expense report. As we are dealing with physical items here for Candy Japan it's a bit more complicated.

But I'll start with the software part of it.

Basecamp

I was paying $20/month for the project-management tool Basecamp, until realizing how silly it is to pay for something that was basically just my own personal todo list. I replaced it with a text file, but will likely continue using it if later on I actually have a team to communicate with.

CCC, Dropbox

I stopped living dangerously and started taking proper backups of the site and codebase with Time Machine, Dropbox and additionally Carbon Copy Cloner (~$40 one-time payment). The cool thing about CCC is that it takes backups incrementally, while still allowing you to boot off the external disk. That way you should be up and running quickly if your original drive fails.

CrateJoy, Subbly.co

When I started there were no easy-to-use subscription platforms available. Nowadays there are a few, so to see what they had to offer I signed up and kicked the tires of CrateJoy (YC S13) and Subbly.co for a few months. They are priced based on subscriber numbers. Here's a comparison chart from my book:

I didn't end up switching yet, as it seemed I would end up writing some glue code to keep the current non-Stripe subscriptions going. There would likely be other migrations to do, such as rewriting templates and importing everything over.

Perhaps a bit of sunk cost fallacy and NIH going on as well.

Google App Engine

I'll be the first to admit that learning Python on top of GAE just for Candy Japan would have been total overkill. I just happened to be familiar with the stack from past projects, so it was easy to keep using it.

Here's the 164.17 USD bill for the year:

As you can see it's not even really optimized. A lot of the bandwidth is from accidentally including full images in RSS feed as data URIs, all served each time the RSS feed was refreshed. Oops.

The nice thing about GAE was that I've had basically no downtime and haven't had to configure anything or worry if the site would hold up to slashdotting, as it autoscales.

Irccloud

Perhaps not strictly a Candy Japan cost, but please don't make me go back and redo my chart.

Irccloud lets me hang out on the #startups channel on IRC FreeNode without losing chat history and ask for feedback on these posts.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a tool for composing and sending email newsletters.

They have a free tier and I had planned to stay under it. Then one month I went over the limit and discovered that once you go paid, you can't go back.

The chimp outwitted me.

Zendesk

You can start doing customer support just fine through plain email, but after you get a bit more volume and want to hire someone to help, you need to be able to share the task somehow. Zendesk has the additional benefit that Facebook page messages and tweets can all go to the same place.

Are you watching closely?

All of these costs. I'm going to make them disappear.

Yes, you, Patio11, sitting there in your mansion in Tokyo, reading my blog and at this point thinking how insignificantly low all of these software costs are. All of the above put together is barely visible when you look at the big picture.

Candy Japan total expenses

The chart above includes not only software expenses, but everything else as well. See that little arrow pointing at the red slice in the upper right? That's all of the software costs from above.

Everything else is non-software.

Well, except Recurly, but as payment middleware you might see that more as a transaction fee.

Conclusion

Software and servers are really cheap now. Actually the clip art of that crayon arrow used in the chart cost more than the monthly bill from App Engine.

If you are writing your own SaaS and thinking what to charge, your customers may not be as price sensitive as you might assume.

It doesn't take a very large increase in sales or a big savings in time to justify spending some more.

Thank you for reading

If you would like me to send you some candy, you can subscribe to Candy Japan here.

Japanese candy boxes timeline

Here you can see when each Japanese candy box company launched. In case they are no longer around you can also see when each shut down. Created with Preceden Timeline Maker.

Full list of Japanese candy subscription boxes

24/7 Japanese Candy (first spotted July 2015)

Bokksu  (first spotted February 2017)

Candy Japan (the website you are on, service started 9th of July 2011)

Freedom Japanese Market japanese snack subscription (subscription service spotted August 2014, existed prior to that as an online store and shopping service)

Japan Candy Box (first spotted August 2015)

Japan Centre Snack Box (first spotted April 2016)

Japan Crate (first spotted July 2014)

Japanese Candy Ninja  (first spotted May 2017)

Kizuna Box (first spotted June 2017)

Manga Spice Cafe (first spotted April 2017)

Oyatsubox (first spotted March 2014)

Oyatsu Cha Cha Cha (first spotted October 2015)

Snakku (first spotted October 2014)

Tokyo Treat (launched June 2015)

UmaiBox  (at least since 2015, originally operated from France as nihonbox.fr)

WOWBOX (launched August 2015)

ZenPop Japanese Sweets Pack (launched October 2016)

Status unknown

Japanfunbox (Since November 2015, had delivered over 2,878 boxes according to page as it was in January 2020, but website no longer works, possibly temporarily down?)

Dead

Forget Sushi KyotoBox (since November 2016, around March 2018 stopped subscriptions, but still offers single boxes)

Sushi Candy (first spotted March 2016, somewhere after May 11 2017 stopped subscription and turned into a store)

Sweets of Japan  (since November 2017, but now a wagashi and matcha online store instead of a subscription site)

Taste Japan! (first spotted August 2014, sometime after March 2020 turned into an "under construction" domain parking page)

Popuka - Just Snacks  (first spotted September 2016, last confirmed operating August 2019)

Kuubox (first spotted November 2015, last confirmed to exist August 2018)

Japan Life Box  (since late 2017, seems to have gone on permanent hiatus within 6 months)

Crave Japan  (first spotted November 2018, seems to have closed within months)

Box From Japan (first spotted April 2015, seems to have shut down around April 2019)

http://okashiconnection.com/  (first spotted June 2014, shut down December 2017)

http://skoshbox.com/  (first spotted June 2013, shut down April 25, 2018)

http://www.jlist.com/product/SNACKSUB1  (first spotted March 2015, down at least since February 13th 2017)

http://www.japanesetreats.com/  (first spotted June 2014, down at least since February 1st 2017)

http://oishiibox.com/ (first spotted December 2014, last seen August 2015)

http://www.shikibox.com/ (first spotted November 2014, last seen October 2016)

http://www.omnombox.com/  (first spotted January 2015, seems to have disappeared around December 2015)

http://www.nandemobox.com/  (first spotted November 2014, down at least since February 1st 2017)

http://www.otakyou.com/en/otakyou-box (only seen ever mentioned August 2014)

http://www.desubox.com/  (first spotted April 2015, down at least since February 1st 2017)

https://japanyum.com/  (first spotted July 2015, down at least since February 1st 2017)

http://www.yumecrate.com  (founded by ‎Danny Ta, first spotted July 2016, down at least since February 1st 2017)

https://www.japancandymonthly.com/pages/subscribe-now  AKA http://japancandymonthly.tk/ (founded mid-2016, down at least since June 2018)

http://www.okashda.com (first spotted November 2015, last seen February 2016)

https://dokidokiboxie.com/ (first spotted October 2016, down at least since June 2018)

http://www.tokyosweetbox.com/ (first spotted August 2015, seems to have disappeared after May 2016)

http://marimomarshmallowstore.com/collections/marimo-candy-club (first spotted April 2015, at least since June 2018 they seem to have shut down their subscriptions and become a store only, which later also shut down)

Thanks for reading

Is your box is missing from the list? Drop me a line. Please note this is only for Japanese candy subscriptions — this list does not include stores offering only one-time purchases.

This is a bit of "behind the scenes" post. We've been selling surprise japanese candy subscriptions online for about a year now, all through PayPal up to now. Today, we finally charged our first customer without them. 

There's a lot of PayPal hating out there, but personally I've never had any major issues accepting payments through them. I've been a user for years and accepted thousands of payments. Still, I thought it was a bit risky to solely rely on them and conversions might also be taking a hit every time I throw a user off to PayPal land instead of just asking for their credit card info on my own site, so about half a year into the Candy Japan project I started to look a bit more seriously into it. 

It started when I came across a free ebook (eleaflet?) called "How to be a Credit Card Processing Ninja" (author told me it is no longer updated since FeeFighters got acquired). It explained how the whole system of accepting credit cards roughly works. Gaining a bit of understanding of the process motivated me to push on. Not all of it applied to me, as I wasn't really in the position to start comparing payment gateways against each other, my problem was more about finding one that would even accept me as I'm not based in the US. Before I realized that I did try contacting Braintree and Authorize.net. From Braintree the reply was "We are currently only set up to provide merchant accounts for businesses with a physical U.S. presence" and the same for authorize.net. So how about Stripe?

In 2011, on impulse I signed up for the Startup School event, which is a Y Combinator event consisting of lectures and mingling with other startup founders. I flew over from Japan and watched the presentations in total jetlaggety state (protip: if flying over, give yourself time to rest before the actual event begins). There were YC company office visits available, one of those being Stripe. They're a cool payment processing company backed by Elon Musk among others, who interestingly was one of the founders of PayPal. I got to chat personally with the Stripe guys, but sadly it turned out that they wouldn't be able to help me either, I really need to be in the US to use them.

Well, I wasn't in any particular hurry to get a new payment system up since PayPal was working OK, so several months passed while I just kept my eyes open for any new information. On Hacker News I kept noticing several mentions about services that help you manage automatic billing, such as Recurly and Chargify. One evening I was just randomly browsing the Recurly support site, fully assuming I wouldn't be able to use them. Going through their list of "additional payment gateways", right near the end it mentioned a European payment gateway company I hadn't heard of so far.

Checking up on them I found out they can also help other Europe-based businesses take credit cards. I still wasn't sure if I could be accepted there, so I sent them an email to see if they might really be able to help. I got a response very quickly and just a week later our discussion had proceeded to the point where I had their price list, along with a list of documents I would have to provide to them. In the end being a sole proprietor not all of the items on the list applied to me, but I did end up sending them (in case you are thinking of doing this): an official certification of incorporation, a copy of my passport, a description of the ownership structure (using a form which they provided me), copy of a utility bill to prove my residence, a document where I free-form explained what kind of things I would be charging for and then finally a signed copy of contract to open the account with them.

This might seem like a lot of documentation to provide, but in the end the application process was tolerable and everyone I interacted with at the gateway company responded very fast and helped me through the process, providing me with help on any specifics, making the process smooth. That wasn't the end of it though (about halfway through), so in my next post I plan to share how the process was finalized and all the final steps I had to take before I finally saw my first Recurly transaction come in.

Thanks for reading and do check out Candy Japan if you'd like to see the shiny new credit card sign-up form in action (and some exotic munchies). Here's how we celebrated our first accepted payment.

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