Hana: ¥7.5M in year three, saved by ¥200K a month

In 2025, her third year freelancing, Hana billed ¥7.5 million. Expenses came to about ¥700,000, and the average month landed near ¥600,000. Her first year of self-employed income was ¥2 million with a low month of almost nothing, so three years took her to 3.75 times that. At this point “she picked up more clients” would explain everything. Her own retrospective rejects that explanation outright. In year three she did almost no business development and took only the work existing clients brought her. She also quit the teaching job she had described a year earlier as “one of my steady sources of revenue.” Revenue still moved from ¥6 million to ¥7.5 million.

Three years, side by side

The ¥3 million headline for year one includes ¥1 million of salary from the months she was still employed. She earned ¥2 million on her own account, and she notes that she “did no active selling and honestly did not work that much.” Year one was planned around a long trip and self-directed projects.

The expense line that reveals the size of the stock business

Year three expenses came to about ¥700,000, broken out like this.

Software and connectivity ran about ¥150,000 (Adobe CC ¥43,000, Morisawa ¥64,240, Microsoft Office ¥19,170, server fees ¥13,200, accounting software ¥13,046). A computer cost about ¥200,000 after her machine started failing, replaced with a Mac mini and a monitor while she kept the old keyboard and mouse. Fees came to about ¥250,000. Sole proprietor enterprise tax took about ¥100,000.

That ¥250,000 fee line lets a reader estimate something the post never states. She writes that the platform selling her stock products takes “around 10%.” The line reads “fees and the like,” so not all of it is sales commission, but the order of magnitude only works if sales through that platform reached the low millions of yen. It fits the stated split of 40% from stock and similar sources, or ¥3 million. She had set a target of ¥3 million in stock income for the year and says she fell “just a little short,” so the actual figure sits slightly under that.

Dozens of applications, not one recurring contract

The miss deserves attention before the growth does. In year two she tried to widen her client base through business matching services: Wantedly, YOU TRUST, Workship, Conema. She spoke with dozens of companies. Work materialized with, in her words, “fewer than a handful,” and most of that ended after one or two one-off jobs. The monthly recurring contracts she wanted never happened.

She blames her own rates. “I think what sank it was setting my rates and hourly price quite high. I am the kind of lazy person who would rather not work than work cheap.” The figures are there too. Her usual one-off jobs work out to about ¥6,000 an hour. For an hourly contract she wanted ¥3,000 to ¥4,000, and an agent told her that rate was very hard to clear for a graphic designer.

Our reading parts company with hers here. Across three years of numbers, that failure did not cost her revenue. Taking one-off jobs from existing clients at an effective ¥6,000 an hour and pushing the spare time into templates is what produced ¥7.5 million. This next part is speculation, but filling those hours with recurring work at ¥3,000 to ¥4,000 would have lowered her annual revenue per hour worked. The contracts she could not win were the cheaper place to lend her time.

The steady income was never the teaching job

Of the teaching work she started in year two, she wrote at the time: “commissioned work comes in waves, so this became one of my steady sources of revenue.” It was roughly one day a week, teaching Illustrator and Photoshop at a design school. She quit partway through year three. The reasons were the low hourly rate and the stress of fielding questions on her days off. “The hours where my mind never rested kept increasing.”

What replaced it as the floor was template sales. In year three there was a month when client revenue came to zero. Projects were moving, but nothing became an invoice that month. The household still avoided a deficit, she writes, because roughly ¥200,000 a month of stock income was arriving. The income stream she had labeled “steady” and the income stream that actually held the floor swapped places within a year.

Why templates worked better is spelled out across her own posts. The products are data, so there is no inventory. There is no deadline, so she can “chip away at it whenever time opens up.” And once a product is listed, it “turns into revenue with almost no effort.” In this business the troughs in client work are the production time for inventory. Busy months leave no room to build, and busy months do not need the help. One mechanism that converts troughs into inventory is enough to lift the floor of the monthly chart. What was a single ¥100,000 December in year one became a standing ¥200,000 a month by year three.

The range of “selling your own product”

Lining up the Japanese stock-sales cases by size shows where she sits. The six months of Notion template side work totaled ¥100,765, about ¥8,820 a month. The BOOTH asset sales by a designer with a day job reached ¥1.08 million in six months, about ¥195,360 a month. Hana’s stock income sits at essentially the same ¥200,000, with the difference being that hers fills the troughs of a commissioned practice.

Thickening the client side alone is another route. The designer who specialized in the beauty sector on Coconala went from ¥3,000 to ¥20,000 per job and reached ¥1 million a month. Hana went the other way, holding her commissioned rates high without raising volume and placing the increment on the product side. Both run solo.

What is not disclosed

The number of template products, the price of each, and the name of the sales platform are all absent. So is the per-project rate for client work and the actual hours she puts in (the record consists of “I honestly do not work that much, ha”). The ¥700,000 covers business expenses, so income tax, residence tax and national health insurance are not in it. Take-home drops further from there.

The ceiling reflects a decision as well. She is a tax-exempt filer and writes, “once revenue passes ¥10 million there is a consumption tax obligation,” declining to grow through subcontractors. The ¥7.5 million is a chosen level rather than a peak.

Where this transfers

• Converting troughs into production time works only when the commissioned side is one-off work from existing clients and deadlines stay movable from your end.
• Stock income functions as a household floor only while monthly fixed costs sit below it. Here that meant ¥200,000 against the cost of living alone.
• Holding high rates holds only while existing clients keep asking for you by name. Through new channels, dozens of conversations produced fewer than a handful of jobs.

The limits belong in their own paragraph. All three years are self-reported on her own note account, with no third-party verification. Year one’s client work came through “the company I used to work at, the company where a senior colleague’s family member works, and the new employer of someone who had already left that company,” which is a network built before she went independent. She writes that “print work is visibly going to shrink from here,” so the commissioned base sits on ground she expects to erode. Building the stock side is partly a hedge against that shrinkage rather than a free choice.

Related reading

• Six months of Notion template side work, ¥100,765
• Shichinatsu, ¥1.08M in six months of BOOTH asset sales while employed
• Six months of zero inquiries on Coconala, then ¥1M a month after raising prices