After quitting four side hustles, a company employee topped ¥400,000/month selling articles on note within five months

Side-hustle success stories usually tell you about the one thing that worked. What makes this case useful as a reference is that the same person has disclosed the numbers for all four side businesses he quit before it worked. A company employee who posts on note under the name “Majima@Exit Strategy from a Depleted Life” has shared how, after taking medical leave for depression and changing jobs, he tried four side hustles, walked away from all of them, and eventually landed on selling articles on note. He reports reaching over ¥400,000/month five months after starting.

Four abandoned attempts, and the one that stuck

Lining up the numbers he has disclosed makes it easy to see what was different.

It’s tempting to write off all four abandoned attempts as “put in the time, got nothing back,” but the failures weren’t all the same kind. Resale brought in ¥30,000 in sales against ¥8,000 in profit, a gross margin of only about 27%, while still carrying the upfront burden of inventory. Crowdsourcing was pure labor at ¥500/hour that never compounded into anything. The blog and YouTube could in principle become assets, but at 100 PV after six months and 20 subscribers after three months, he ran out of stamina to keep up alongside his day job before either reached a level where it would pay.

The turning point: “¥500 on day three”

The moment the trajectory changed can be pinpointed exactly. It was the third day after his first note post, when he made his first sale of ¥500.

As a dollar figure, it’s negligible. But set against the previous six months of pouring two hours a day into a blog for zero revenue, the meaning shifts. The blog delivered “¥0 in six months”, note delivered “¥500 in three days.” That gap reflects not how much he wrote but how differently the two mechanisms convert writing into money.

For a blog to generate revenue, it has to get indexed by search engines, rank highly, get the reader to click through to an external product page, and get that reader to actually buy — several other parties’ decisions sit in between. Selling articles on note, by contrast, means the writer sets the price and the reader buys on the spot. No intermediary steps in at all. Even though “writing text” is the same activity in both cases, the distance to revenue is completely different.

The reasons he himself gives for choosing note all trace back to this shorter distance: zero startup cost (you can begin with just an email address), no need to show your face or use your real name, everything completable from a phone, the immediacy of possibly earning money the day you publish, and articles that remain as an asset. The first three are about the cost of entry. The last two are about how fast you recoup and how durable it is.

Breaking down why it grew

Looking only at “¥400,000/month after five months” makes it sound unrepeatable, but another number he’s disclosed explains the mechanism: an article he wrote five months ago is still generating ¥20,000–30,000 a month today.

Extrapolating from that, the ¥400,000/month is likely not a single hit but the sum of accumulated past articles. If one article continuously generates ¥20,000–30,000/month, having a dozen-plus articles at that level would add up to the ¥400,000 range. The underlying game is less “land one big hit” than “stock up multiple articles at a decent level.”

Seen that way, all four abandonment decisions make sense. Resale resets to zero every time inventory sells out. Crowdsourcing resets to zero every time a piece is delivered. Neither compounds into a stock. YouTube and blogging can become a stock, but the lead time to monetization is too long, someone with a day job runs out of discretionary time before getting there. Only note satisfied both “it compounds into a stock” and “the first payback is fast.” What determines whether a side hustle survives isn’t willpower. It’s this combination of two conditions.

There’s also a time-axis advantage to selling articles on note: you don’t have to wait for a search engine’s verdict. With a blog, after you publish an article there’s a wait of months before it gets indexed and its ranking stabilizes. During that wait, the writer has no way to tell whether the article is even good enough to sell. On note, feedback comes back the moment you publish, so the results from article one can inform the design of article two. The fact that ¥500 landed on day three matters less as a revenue figure than as evidence that “feedback came back in three days.” Raise the rate at which you learn, and you reach a different endpoint in the same amount of time.

Noting the limits of these numbers

Everything covered here is self-disclosed by the individual. Nothing in the freely readable portion, like a screenshot of a dashboard, substantiates the ¥400,000/month figure. Core details like the number of articles it took to get there, the price per article, and how he built a readership are all placed in the paid portion of the same article, so none of it can be externally verified.

There are structural limits too. Selling articles on note (especially in the “how to earn money on the side” genre, which reads a lot like an info-product category) draws buyers who mostly share the same struggle. His own track record of having failed at four side hustles functions as persuasive material in this particular niche. The flip side is: once you’ve fully mined the story of your own failure, what do you sell next? There’s also heavy dependence on a single platform. If note changes its terms, fees, or recommendation algorithm, the revenue from his accumulated back catalog of articles is affected all at once.

What can and can’t be copied

What can be copied is the decision-making criteria. When choosing a side hustle, evaluate it on two axes: does it compound into a stock, and how long until the first payback? Measured against this, there’s little reason to keep grinding at a gig that pays ¥500/hour equivalent or an inventory business with a 27% gross margin. The speed of his decisions to quit, 1 to 6 months each, is also worth a mention as a reference point.

What’s hard to copy is the subject matter. What’s selling in this case is a theme inseparable from his own biography: “how a burned-out employee got out.” The medical leave for depression, the job change, and the sequence of four side-hustle failures are themselves the raw material of the content. Writing the same steps without the lived experience that backs up your authority to speak on it won’t sell at the same price. Also, the speed of hitting ¥400,000/month in five months depends on his exposure within note and his activity on X (formerly Twitter). Because the free portion doesn’t reveal the details of his customer acquisition, it’s impossible to judge how far that speed generalizes.

What can be said with confidence is that what this person gained over five months wasn’t so much the ¥400,000/month figure itself as “a set of criteria for what to quit.” Far from wasted effort, the four abandonments were measurements that led to choosing the fifth.

Related reading

• 24 Kindle books — another case of an individual stacking content into a stock
• Hitode’s blog — a contrasting approach that compounded over the long term through search traffic