Shichinatsu: A Salaried Designer's BOOTH Asset Shop Sells ¥1.08M in Six Months — Every Monthly Figure From ¥100K to ¥250K, Disclosed

Side-hustle income reports tend to tell you only about a single moment, “I hit ¥X this month.” This case lines up six months of monthly figures. Shichinatsu, a salaried designer, sells designer-oriented assets such as Photoshop layer styles through the BOOTH shop “Sansho Shichinatsu,” and published the sales record on note. The total from July through December 2025: ¥1,083,410. What gives this record its value is that you can see the month-to-month bumps.

What’s being sold are tools that a designer sells to other designers. Layer styles for text decoration, assets that shave time off production work, skills used in the day job, packaged directly into products. This is the secondary-use-of-skills model of side business: not selling time the way freelance contracting does, not chasing ad revenue through content, but turning “the by-products of making my own work more efficient” into merchandise. Among side-business archetypes, it sits in the lowest-cost-of-goods category.

The numbers, month by month

What sits between ¥100K a month and ¥250K a month

From ¥102,000 in July to ¥249,000 in October, sales grew 2.4x in three months. What the operator’s own logs reveal about that growth is nothing flashy. Add more products, analyze what sells from the data, deepen the winning product lines, the repetition of basic merchandising moves.

Digital asset sales carry no inventory and no unit cost, but revenue per item is small. The variables that move sales come down to “number of products × exposure per product × unit price,” and Shichinatsu’s three months read as the result of working the product count and the precision of the lineup. The dips, September and December both fell from the prior month, make the record more instructive, not less: digital merchandising doesn’t climb in a straight line, it shifts levels in steps. Individual months rise and fall with the hit rate of new releases, while the floor of the whole shelf ratchets up one notch at a time. The stabilization in the ¥240K range from October onward happens because once a lineup reaches a certain density, the shop as a whole becomes the named destination for “assets of this kind.” That is the transition from selling on individual hits to selling on the credibility of the shelf.

This structure maps directly onto the early stage of the Ikameshi case, which sold VRChat 3D assets on the same BOOTH and reached ¥10M in annual revenue. Same platform, same grammar of growth; what differs is market size and years of accumulation. Shichinatsu’s six months can be read as a live measurement of what “year one” of that model looks like.

The choice of BOOTH as the platform is also explained by its fit with side-business constraints. The platform handles payments, delivery, and a degree of traffic, so the operator’s job narrows to “making things” and “tending the shelf.” The time a self-hosted EC site would demand (payment integration, customer acquisition, maintenance) is time a person with a day job cannot produce. For a side-business operator, the platform fee is a rational price for outsourcing all of that.

Publishing the record creates the next sale

Shichinatsu runs an ongoing operations log on note, starting with “Until I passed ¥100K in sales on BOOTH,” and the six-month disclosure is part of that series. A separate analysis of best-sellers is also published. This output works in two directions at once. Facing outward, most readers are themselves designers or aspiring digital sellers, potential customers and peers, so the record doubles as credibility and as a funnel into the shop. Facing inward, the act of writing down the numbers monthly becomes a management habit: a fixed point from which to review the lineup and the moves. The sales disclosure is less a service to readers than the operator’s own instrument of analysis.

What ¥1.08M in six months means in practice

¥1.08M in six months annualizes to a ¥2.16M pace. For a salaried employee’s side business in Japan, that is squarely in the territory where a final tax return becomes mandatory and where resident tax and, depending on scale and structure, business registration and blue-return filing come into consideration. Over these six months, the business crossed cleanly from the “pocket money” phase of a few tens of thousands of yen a month into the phase of keeping books as a business. The revenue report can also be read as a record of a phase transition in tax and administration.

Staying a company employee, by design

The other point this case raises is the decision not to go full-time. ¥1.08M over six months, a monthly average of ¥180K, is not enough to bet a livelihood on, and more than enough as a side income. It is precisely because salaried income sits underneath that the bumps in sales (September and December fell from the prior month) can be treated as the results of experiments.

Stock-model sales of digital assets decouple labor hours from revenue. Assets sell while you sleep, and in months with no new releases the back catalog still earns. That property pairs well with holding a day job, fluctuations in the hours you can invest don’t feed directly into revenue, so during busy seasons at work the asset base keeps turning. As secondary use of skills, this sits alongside the model of selling paid articles on note, though assets have a longer shelf life than articles and lower unit prices.

Risks and limits

The risks are concentrated. The most immediate is platform dependence: if BOOTH’s fees, terms, or search behavior change, the premises underneath the revenue change with them. Having customer touchpoints outside the shop (note readers, SNS followers) is one of the few hedges against that dependence. One layer down, Photoshop assets ride on Adobe’s ecosystem. If the mainstream of design tooling shifts (toward Figma or AI tools), the market shrinks wholesale. And the pressure of generative AI becoming a substitute for design assets themselves is especially near in this field. The ¥1.08M six-month figure is a measurement taken just before these tectonic shifts.

Note also that the monthly disclosure covers the second half of 2025. The time and effort of the launch period before that, getting to ¥100K in sales, is not visible in these numbers.

Conditions for reproduction, and limits

What would survive a change of platform or product category: converting day-job skills into “tools for peers in the same trade” is the shortest path to a product, requiring no market research. Growth in digital merchandising is the repetition of adding products and analyzing best-sellers, and keeping a monthly record is itself one of the moves. The not-going-full-time design, too, is the best possible match for the volatility of stock-model merchandising.

The limit: in a market where “designers sell to designers,” day-job competence translates directly into product strength, enter without the skills behind you and the shelf will not grow. For the revenue distribution of solo and side businesses, see the monthly revenue distribution of solo and side operators. For the full list of solo and side-business cases, see here.