Hitsuji: Quit With No Website, Savings Down to ¥20,000, Then ¥1.7M a Month in Year One

“I did something reckless: I went full-time without even having a website.” That is how the Japanese affiliate marketer Hitsuji describes his first year. When he quit his job in April 2016, he had no revenue. He did not even have a site to run. His SEO knowledge was close to zero. All he had, in his own words, was “a strange, unfounded confidence.”

At the end of that year, in March 2017, his monthly accrued commissions exceeded 1.7 million yen. But the value of this record lies less in the final number than in the rawness of the process. By June, accrued revenue was still zero. His savings went from 700,000 yen to 100,000 yen, and eventually bottomed out at 20,000 yen. Hitsuji published the month-by-month figures and his mental state on his own blog.

The twelve months

Note that these figures are “accrued” (hassei) numbers as shown in ASP dashboards, distinct from “confirmed” commissions that survive approval and actually get paid. Hitsuji himself separates the two in his article. Every figure above is accrued. The distinction has direct consequences for daily life: even with 1 million yen accrued in January, the cash arrives months later after approval and payout. In his record, it is only at the end of the fiscal year that money starts coming in and he can buy a MacBook Pro. The 20,000-yen bottom in savings comes after the accrued numbers had already jumped, few records show the slowness of affiliate cash flow this clearly.

What was built during the five income-less months

The heart of this case is what he did while the zeros continued. From June to August, Hitsuji researched the budget-SIM market (mineo) from scratch, wrote 120 articles, and revised 80 existing ones. He writes that even at 14 hours a day his “concentration did not break,” while also recording that he was “starting to be mentally cornered.” Savings dropping 150,000 yen a month were, quite literally, a countdown clock.

Structurally, this is a race between SEO’s slow ramp and the burn rate of savings. Search traffic lags article publication by months, so a site started in April cannot show results before autumn at the earliest. The 200,000 yen accrued in September reads as the delayed return on the summer’s concentrated output. Conversely, had he been watching only his bank balance without understanding that delay, calling it a “failure” and quitting in August would have been an entirely plausible decision. The 20,000-yen floor is also the outer limit of how long he could postpone that verdict.

The technical learning, notably, continued after revenue arrived. His November-December notes say he was “learning about the effect of backlinks”, meaning he systematized his understanding of SEO’s main variables only after posting 200,000 yen months. Launch on volume first (120 articles), learn the structure (links, ranking dynamics) later, the reverse of the textbook order, but a rational order for a full-timer who needed numbers before the savings ran out.

The other move worth a closer look is October. Right as the mineo site began to work, Hitsuji declared on Twitter “I’m building an affiliate support site!” and built the know-how site “Hitsuji Affiliate” in a month. On top of a working site’s track record, he immediately converted his own method into content. A second asset. That pivot speed is what later led to his position writing for an ASP’s official media (ValueCommerce’s step-up guide). The year-one retrospective itself lives on that support site: publishing the measured record is itself the second business’s product.

What didn’t work, what wore down

This is not a smooth up-and-to-the-right record. Through November and December Hitsuji burned out, writing “for about a month I couldn’t put myself into the work” and “in November I could only manage about 30% capacity.” The 14-16-hour intensity invited a backlash right after results appeared. In February, he records another stall: “once you hit the big milestone of 1 million yen a month, motivation drops a little afterward.” Looking only at the numbers, January’s million looks like the turning point. In his own record, there are two motivational troughs around it.

Structurally, the revenue resting on a single genre, effectively a single program (mineo), was the weak point of the period. A change in program terms or a ranking swing translates directly into total income volatility. And since the figures are accrued, rejection risk never goes away. The 1.7 million yen landing is what the concentrated bet looks like when it does not backfire. This record demands the reading that just as many cases exist where the same concentration swung the other way.

The record of his mental state is treated as data on par with revenue: anxiety (June), grind (summer), recovery (September), peak (October), burnout (November), recovery (December), achievement (January), stall (February). Both troughs of the year came immediately after the numbers improved. A launch model built on long hours has to schedule the recoil into the plan.

What transfers, and what doesn’t

Three things generalize. First, SEO-driven affiliate work has a months-long lag between input and results, and the design of living costs to survive that gap shapes outcomes as much as skill does. Second, the volume of work during the income-less period (here, 120 articles written and 80 revised) sets the angle of the later ramp. Third, the moment a working track record exists, the method itself can be converted into a second asset.

The limits are just as clear. This record belongs to the 2016-2017 search environment, inseparable from an era when individual sites could still compete on brand-adjacent keywords like budget SIMs. And the preconditions (700,000 yen in savings, single, 14-hour days) are extreme as living conditions. This is not a bet to recommend. As the author himself calls it “reckless,” this is a case that survived into the record because it worked.

For comparison, see Hitode’s long-run blog records from another full-time blogger, Tsuzuki’s blog case of a gradual transition from side work, and the “Blog no Kamisama” record of taking 6 years and 2 months to reach 50,000 yen a month. Within the same affiliate business, the size of the bet and the time horizon can differ this much.