Warary!: A Comedy Live Show Search Service Built Solo for 2.5 Years, Then Sold to a Company

Where This Case Fits

Most sales of indie web services end with both the price and the process undisclosed. Among them, “Warary!” is a rare case that can be verified from both sides of the transaction: the seller articulated his pricing rule of thumb and his sell-or-continue criteria in a note article, while the acquiring company publicly stated its acquisition rationale in a press release. The sale price itself is unknown, but the structure of “why this service found a buyer” can be reconstructed fairly accurately from public information alone.

The Business

“Warary!” is a web service that lets users search comedy live show listings across dates and performer names. Developer Kashii built it alone and ran it solo for about two and a half years. Its users were mainly comedy fans attending live shows in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and the official Twitter account grew to about 5,400 followers. At the time of the acquisition, playground’s press release described it as listing more than roughly 25,000 live shows per year and as “Japan’s No. 1 comedy live show search media.”

Comedy live show listings are scattered across agencies and venues, and fans had no place to search across them. It is a niche service that targeted exactly that “clear inconvenience felt by a specific community.”

The starting point also deserves attention. Kashii was working at a systems integrator and learning programming with the goal of moving into the web industry; starting from “zero skills, zero knowledge, zero connections,” he built Warary! in about 100 days (per his separate note article). His very first indie project went all the way to a transfer to a company.

Timeline

How the Sale Happened

The buyer was playground Inc., a comprehensive entertainment-tech company behind the electronic ticketing service “MOALA Ticket” (backed by investors including Keisuke Honda’s KSK Angel Fund). The company had a track record of supporting the digitalization of comedy live shows for Yoshimoto Kogyo and Asai Kikaku, and the stated acquisition rationale was to combine Warary!‘s media reach with its own industry expertise and technology to help revive a comedy industry battered by the pandemic. On Kashii’s side, he had hoped from the beginning that the service could one day be run stably as a company, so the transfer aligned both parties’ goals. The sale price and monthly profit are undisclosed. However, he shares the following rule of thumb for pricing indie web service sales in general.

The going rate for selling a web service is “monthly profit x 24 months.” On top of that comes “goodwill” that scales with the synergy the buyer sees.

At that multiple, a service making ¥100,000 a month in profit would fetch around ¥2.4 million plus alpha. In Japan’s website-flipping market there are real examples closing at monthly profit x 20 months, so “20 to 24 months of monthly profit” is a range that recurs in small-scale business sales.

In Warary!‘s case, the “plus goodwill” is precisely the synergy described above. For a buyer with a ticketing business, a media property where comedy fans come to look up 25,000 live shows a year connects directly to its own operations. This pairing concretely demonstrates that goodwill is not an abstraction — it is a function of the distance to the buyer’s existing business.

The Sell-or-Continue Criteria

The decision framework Kashii lays out in his note is unusual among sale case studies in that it also covers “the conditions for not selling.”

If you keep going:

• Keep costs down and minimize losses (indie projects have small fixed costs, so simply holding on is not that hard)
• Choose a field you are passionate about (you cannot sustain a service once your enthusiasm runs out)

If you sell:

• You gain cash and the credibility of “a successful exit”
• On the other hand, you can no longer watch the service grow up close, and you give up future income (passive income). There is also the possibility that the brand you raised disappears and ends up as just another piece of the buyer’s codebase
• Think hard in advance about whether you will regret it — “I shouldn’t have sold…”

The note’s title asks “Easy money?”, but his own answer is “Easy money! …it’s not that simple.” At the same time he writes that indie development “has dreams in it,” and advises junior engineers to design their portfolio projects not as “build it and be done” but with the question “what if I kept running this as a service?” His self-assessment matches our own reading. Someone who publishes a pricing rule while keeping the actual price hidden is not writing to market the sale as a success story.

Our Take

What gets priced is not revenue but the “touchpoint with a community.” Warary! does not appear to have been strongly monetized, but it held a touchpoint with a highly engaged audience: metropolitan-area comedy fans. For the acquiring company, the purchase is justified by comparison with the cost (ad spend and time) of building that touchpoint from scratch. Even if the absolute user count is small, the harder it is to reach those users by other means, the higher the value. Folded into a single line, what playground bought was not a search feature but seats that ad spend cannot fill.

“Monthly profit x 24 months + goodwill” works as a starting point for negotiation. Because the goodwill portion varies greatly with the buyer’s synergy, talking to multiple candidate buyers is itself price discovery. A sale negotiated with only one company tends to get its goodwill assessed at zero.

The existence of an exit changes the expected value of indie development. Even if you cannot recoup through operating profit, a service with two to three years of operating history can find a buyer. Once you adopt the premise that “a small hit can be sold” rather than “worthless unless it takes off,” the strategy of taking many shots becomes more rational.

What Cannot Be Verified, and What Came After

Because the sale price is undisclosed, we cannot verify whether the return matched the roughly 100 days of development plus 2.5 years of operation invested. As for how the downsides he listed (not being able to watch it grow, the brand possibly disappearing) actually played out, the original article carries an addendum dated August 2, 2024, touching on what became of the service four years after the transfer (details are in the paid portion). Including the fate of a service that passed from an individual to a company, the fact that the gains and losses of a transfer can only be judged over a span of years is itself another lesson of this case.

Conditions for Reproducing This, and Its Limits

What is reproducible is the problem framing. The structure of “information scattered across agencies and venues with no cross-search” exists in many domains beyond comedy (small theaters, doujin events, local sports, and so on), and this very case proves that a search service can be built with the skills of someone 100 days into learning to code. That the buyer was an operating company in the same industry is also telling: the fastest route to a buyer for niche media is to look among B2B companies in the same sector.

There are two limits. With the price undisclosed, the economic reproducibility cannot be measured. The other limit is the thinness of the buyer pool: an overly narrow niche has few candidate buyers, and whether a company “driving that industry’s digital transformation” happens to exist, as it did for Warary!, retains an element of luck. If you are building with a sale in mind from the start, you need to confirm first that plausible buyers actually exist.

Related Cases

• Zenn, transferred to Classmethod 4.5 months after launch — the same “undisclosed price, indie transfer,” but driven by growing too fast
• A telecom affiliate site sold on Rakko M&A for ¥950,000 in 21 days — a measured data point for “monthly profit x 20 months”
• Tiny Projects, which sold a service built in three weeks for $10,500 — the overseas version of a small “build to sell” exit