Columns
Individual cases only show so much. Aggregating the cases published here reveals the shape of the market: what exits actually sell for, how far one person can get, and where AI businesses stand right now.
Every figure is either an aggregate of our sourced case archive or a clearly cited public source. Nothing here is advice.
5 Owned-Media Success Stories: a ¥1M/mo Blog, a $900K Newsletter, a $5.8M Exit and the 3 Models Behind Them
Five cases from our archive where a self-owned media property is the core customer engine, all with published figures: a side blog at ¥1M a month, a newsletter grossing $900K a year on 75,000 readers, a SaaS built on 10 landing pages, a course with a 300K-strong list, and a comparison site sold for $5.8M. They share one label and run three different businesses.
Anatomy of 11 Closures — Platforms and "Profitable but Unsustainable" Kill More Small Businesses Than Running Out of Money
Of our published cases, 11 carry status: closed. Classify the causes of death and the running-out-of-money type is a minority: three closures trace to platforms and terms-of-service, and three businesses were folded while profitable or even high-earning. Operating spans run from 4 months to 10 years. The scarcity of failure cases is itself survivorship bias, and that is part of the analysis.
How True Is "My Only Employees Are AI"? 26 Solo-and-Side AI Businesses, Median ¥1.5M/Month
We fact-checked the "one-person company staffed by AI" narrative against our archive. Across 26 solo or side-project AI businesses, the 20 with disclosed revenue have a median of ¥1.5M a month — higher than the all-solo median (~¥900K), but the same order of magnitude. What AI replaces is development and support; distribution and judgment remain human work.
Median Monthly Revenue: ¥250K in Japan, ¥4.5M Overseas — Where Does the 18x Gap Come From?
Splitting our 346 published cases into 135 Japanese and 211 overseas, the median monthly revenue of operating businesses is ¥250K vs ¥4.5M — 18x — and median sale prices are ¥2M vs ¥130M, 65x apart. But reading this as a gap in ability is premature: the two distributions are missing different halves.
Median Monthly Revenue by Acquisition Channel — Word of Mouth ¥7.5M, Social ¥2.25M, Marketplaces ¥260K
We aggregated the 235 published cases that disclose monthly revenue by their main acquisition channels. The highest median belongs to word of mouth and referrals at ¥7.5M; the lowest is marketplace-driven at ¥260K — a roughly 29x spread. But this is not a ranking of channels: it should be read as the business model choosing the channel, not the other way round.
menu Shuts Down Sept 30: Not One Number in the Announcement, and a Market That Peaked in 2023
On August 19, 2026, KDDI announced that the food delivery service menu will close on September 30 and that menu Inc. will be dissolved and liquidated. We read the structure — buy the company outright on August 31, then wind it down — alongside a market that peaked in 2023 and the widening losses of the operators who survived.
How Many Months of Revenue Does a Business Sell For? Across 20 Disclosed Deals the Median Is 25 Months — and Japan and Overseas Differ 4x
Across the 20 published deals that disclose both sale price and monthly revenue, we computed "how many months of revenue the sale was worth." The median is about 25 months; Japan's median is 7.8 months against 29.3 overseas. What moves the multiple is not the border but the repeatability of the revenue.
Our Own Record #5 | To 11K Monthly Users — the Winning Line Was the "Top 6%": the Summer We Turned Analytics into Topic-Selection Rules
A follow-up on the content site from Our Own Record #4. Active users in the last 30 days: 11,136 (vs 1,971 the 30 days before); search clicks went from 122 to 1,432 over 28 days. In July we found that the top 8 articles — 6% of the total — carried 63% of traffic, froze that analysis into seven topic-selection rules, and here review the measured result.
Where Businesses Get Sold — A Breakdown of Exit Routes Across 168 Listed Cases
Tallying the deal routes of 167 listed exits: over 60% were direct deals with no broker. Platform deals: Batonz 27, TRANBI 9, Rakko M&A 8. Buyers and pricing differ by route.
Our Own Record #1 | We Started Four Businesses and Three of Them Broke — Why This Site Is Publishing Its Own Numbers
A series in which a site that has only ever covered other people's numbers publishes its own. Between 2024 and 2026 we started four businesses; three stopped. We line up commit counts, active days and the dates things died, and record what differed — in four parts.
Our Own Record #2 | The Two-Person SaaS Broke on the Cap Table — Even Though the Funding and the Fireside Talks Were Going Fine
A B2B SaaS started with a friend from our graduate intake. VC and angel money came in, a talk with a Big-4 firm and a partnership with a major company were set. What broke was the equity split: the fundraising-driven need to concentrate shares in the CEO, against an equal workload, accumulated into a sense of unfairness.
Our Own Record #3 | 277 Commits and 17 Languages, and It Still Stopped — How Two Apps Went Quiet
The stoppage record of two mobile apps started in the same month. One was polished for 51 days — 277 commits, 17 languages; the other was fully rewritten and shipped within 17 days. Neither ever included a step to check demand, and both stopped when the commits stopped coming.
Our Own Record #4 | 9,103 Monthly Users in 3 Months — the Real Numbers of a Content Site with 226 Articles
Real numbers from a content site started May 15, 2026. We published 226 articles; active users in the last 30 days were 9,103 (vs 1,457 the 30 days before). Between the week we shipped the most articles and the week traffic took off, there was a lag of about six weeks.
Is the AI Business Boom Over? The Current State in 2026, Seen Through Published Cases
Across AI-based business cases, the winning pattern is replacing expensive human services, not AI itself. Just as many cases fizzled after an initial boom or shut down.
A median map across 12 business types: how far apart are monthly revenues?
Median monthly revenue varies over 50x by business type — SaaS at about ¥9 million vs. YouTube at ¥170,000 — but the gap isn't about which field "pays."
How Far Can One Person Go — The Monthly Revenue Distribution of 121 Solo and Side-Business Cases, and the Truth Behind the Ceiling
121 solo/side-business cases with disclosed revenue: median ~¥900,000/mo, max ~¥175M. The gap was labor decoupling, not hours worked.
What's a "normal" exit price? The distribution behind 168 published sale cases
Of 168 published exit cases, 37 disclosed a specific price. The median was ¥30 million, from ¥3 million at the bottom quartile to over ¥600 million at the top.