Shingo Irie's Other Exit: "CLOUD PAPER" — an Invoicing SaaS Sold via M&A Just 2 Months After Handing Over MENTA
Two months after transferring MENTA to Lancers, Shingo Irie also sold his cloud quotation and invoicing service "CLOUD PAPER" via M&A in December 2020 (price undisclosed). A rare Japanese record of a single indie developer executing two exits in the same year.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
Where This Case Fits
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Service | CLOUD PAPER (cloud-based quotation and invoice creation) |
| Sale date | December 2020 (2 months after the MENTA share transfer) |
| Sale price | Undisclosed |
| Developer | Shingo Irie (one of 30 indie products he built in total) |
CLOUD PAPER is a quotation/invoicing SaaS that Irie originally built for his own billing work during his freelance years. It was the “quietly reliable product” in his portfolio, operated since before MENTA became his 30th product and first big hit.
Our Editorial Take
Even the non-flagship products in a portfolio have exits. In the shadow of the star product MENTA, a practical SaaS like CLOUD PAPER still found a buyer. Even without flashy growth, the never-disappearing demand of invoicing work plus an existing user base gets valued as a business asset. You could call it the small domestic version of DashThis’s “unglamorous workflow automation sold for over ¥1 billion”.
Two exits in one year show that “exit experience” also compounds. M&A negotiation, handover, and legal work become a repeatable skill once you’ve been through them. In an indie developer’s career, the first small sale carries meaning far beyond its price.
Portfolio Management for Someone Who Built 30 Products
Irie has built 30 products in total and openly says 29 of them didn’t take off. Within that portfolio, CLOUD PAPER was a middle-tier product — “not a jackpot, but serving real demand and running steadily.” He built it during his freelance years for his own billing work — that is, it was born from a problem of his own that demonstrably existed — and that origin is what gave it the churn-resistant practicality it had.
In portfolio-style indie development, products naturally sort into three layers: “flagship,” “steady earners,” and “experiments/failures.” What matters is that each layer has its own kind of exit. Flagships get share transfers (MENTA → Lancers), steady earners get business transfers (CLOUD PAPER), experiments get shut down. Refusing to sort every product into a binary of “success/failure” by a single standard is part of why he could keep building for 30 products.
Exit Experience Compounds on the Second Deal
The CLOUD PAPER sale closed just two months after the MENTA transfer (October 2020). That speed was no accident. The first deal taught him — hands-on — market pricing, the key points of contracts, the logistics of handover, and how to work with specialists; the second deal was simply a re-run.
To an indie developer, an M&A looks like a once-in-a-lifetime event, but in reality it is a repeatable skill set of negotiation, legal work, and handover, and once you’ve done it, the psychological and practical costs drop by an order of magnitude. Even if the first sale is small, it should be valued with this experience included — CLOUD PAPER’s “small, undisclosed sale” reads as a textbook example.
Related Reading
Sources
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