¥10 Million in Cumulative Sales Over 4 Years on Coconala: A Video Creator's Pricing Strategy That Started With a ¥780 First Order

The Published Numbers

Item	Figure
Cumulative sales	Over ¥10 million (April 2025) → about ¥12 million (November 2025)
Period	About 4 years (started March 2021)
First order	3 weeks after starting, ¥780 take-home (narration read)
First large project	About 1 year in: ¥89,774 (roughly ¥70,000 take-home)
Platform fees	About ¥3 million cumulative (roughly 22%)
Taxes paid	About ¥2.82 million cumulative

The Business and Its Turning Point

Matsuume Take started on Coconala with narration reads, and the first 5 months after launch (April–September 2021) were almost dead silent. Things took off once he specialized in video production during year one, and from then on he grew by a policy of “raise prices rather than chase volume.” As a 4-year firsthand record of an individual skills marketplace, the disclosure is valuable for showing the “take-home reality” — fees and taxes included.

What You Can Learn From This

Growth on a skills marketplace accelerates in the later stages through the “compounding of track record.” The progression from a ¥780 first order to a ¥70,000 project a year later reflects a structure where you only surface in high-price search results after reviews and completed work accumulate. Just like the “build the shelf” strategy of Kindle publishing, the silent first six months are a feature, not a bug — they should never be grounds for quitting.

Read the 22% fees (¥3 million cumulative) as “outsourced customer acquisition.” ¥3 million over 4 years is heavy, but it should be weighed against the sales cost of independently winning ¥10 million worth of video production clients. This is a rare dataset where the cost and benefit of platform dependence are visible in actual figures.

The “Price Staircase” Revealed by 4 Years of Progression

First order at ¥780 → a ¥70,000 project about a year later → then on to high-priced video production. You cannot skip steps on this staircase. Coconala’s search results are heavily sorted by track record and reviews, so a high-priced listing with zero history gets found by no one. Conversely, if you keep prices low after your track record has built up, your time melts away handling volume. Regularly reassess and raise “the highest price my current track record can win orders at” — this is a record of doing exactly that, with discipline, for 4 years.

The decision to specialize also mattered. He went from listings that lined up everything he “could do” — narration, video editing, and so on — to a single focus on video production. A jack-of-all-trades listing gets buried in every category in search, while specialization pushes up your rank within a category. If the case that made ¥740,000 in 30 days through niching down is the short-term burst version, this is the long-term compounding version of the same principle.

The “Take-Home Reality,” Fees and Taxes Included

Within the ¥10 million in cumulative sales, he discloses roughly ¥3 million in fees (about 22%) and roughly ¥2.82 million in taxes. In other words, take-home over 4 years was in the ¥4 million range — about ¥90,000 per month in side-income terms. Whether you read that number as “not much of a dream” or as “an asset built purely on video skills while holding a day job” determines how you should engage with skills marketplaces. Rather than judging by revenue headlines alone, evaluate a business by the take-home left after fees, taxes, and time costs — a habit worth bringing into the evaluation of any side business.