Candy Japan Blog

I have a subscription club which sends random Japanese sweets twice a month (http://www.candyjapan.com). This means I get to select what is sent to everyone. I cannot just totally go with my own personal taste, as people expect variation instead of getting my own personal favorite shipment after shipment.

I want to subscribe to one of those as soon as I have disposable income - http://skoshbox.com/ / http://www.candyjapan.com/ (sends you a box of japanese candy each month!)

https://tomotcha.com/ — a Japanese tea subscription service. Although we had to suspend our activities for the better part of 2022, we've been able to resume in January 2023. Logistic is brutal in what is starting to look like a post globalization world: shipping fees are through the roof, delays are long, regulation (especially in the EU) is ever more stringent. COVID-19 pretty much killed bemmu's Candy Japan (https://www.candyjapan.com), and EU regulation just killed Candysan (https://candysan.com): they threw in the towel one week ago. And yet we keep going... gross margin is around $800~$1000 per month.

> almost no [one] wants to spend money [to] ship a single box of candy from Japan They have hundreds of subscribers, and had many more in the past. https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/2017-year-in-review Apparently there is competition in the space. https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/nobodys-going-to-steal-yo…

I love the artwork behind the article: https://www.candyjapan.com/static/credit-card-fraud_s.png

There's a number of sites that actually do as you describe, except it’s for Japanese candy, not ramen. An example: https://www.candyjapan.com

This was actually a pretty good read on dealing with card fraud, though most of it will be familiar to anyone dealing with e-commerce. I hadn't considered that charities would be a target for card testers, but it makes sense. For related reading, there's the blog post of when Candy Japan was targeted by card testing fraudsters: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-i-got-credit-card-fra…

I think that a lof of people fell in love after this made front-page : https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/algorithmic-fitting-of-ja…

Shame less plug: Dear tea lovers on HN, I am from Nepal - home to some of the best organic tea [1] grown in the foothills of Himalayas. I have been thinking about starting Candy Japan [2] like subscription service but for Nepali tea. Would you be interested? Please e-mail me if you would like to help me start this. [email protected] [1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/from-assam-to-oolong-north-ame… [2] http://www.candyjapan.com/candy-japan-crosses-10000-mrr

Totally agreed. This is neat, but I can't see myself signing up for it. Inspired by Candy Japan (http://www.candyjapan.com/) I was researching how to do a "Lego of the month club"; a service that would send you a grab-bag of Lego each month, for whatever purpose you wanted. Different price tiers for different part counts, etc. Unfortunately, I could never figure out a good way to do it other than just buying a bunch of sets and randomly picking from it to make bags for people.

Exactly. Two examples for inspiration: Manpacks and Candy Japan (the owner is on HN). There is also a startup based out of Mountain View that delivers new games and puzzles for kids every month, but I cannot remember the name of it. http://www.manpacks.com/ http://www.candyjapan.com/

My only complaint is the "dark pattern" of not listing prices. There are prominent calls-to-action to enter your email address and sign up. I don't want to enter my email address unless I want to sign up, which is dependent on the price. "[email protected]" now has an email from Candy Japan, and I obviously can't click on the verification link there. After some digging, I found https://www.candyjapan.com/gift, which lists prices: 24 shipments! ($348.00, sent over one year) Dozen shipments ($174.00, sent over six months) Eight shipments ($116.00, sent over four months) Four shipments ($58.00, sent over two months) Two shipments ($29.00, sent over one month) Doing the math, it's $14.50 per box. Even though many levels are listed, there is no quantity discount, which is not obvious - I'm not good at multiplying 29 or 14.5 by powers of 2 in my head. If it was $20 or $30/month, that would be a little different. Some more digging with a disposable email finally brought me to https://www.candyjapan.com/subscribe, which shows that it's still $29/month whether gifting or subscribing. Furthermore, anyone can go to that page and see the price. No, the tiny "subscribe" link on the main page under the comic does not link there - it's an anchor to the email entry point. Perhaps A/B testing says differently, but I would like the business a lot more if there was a big label, above the fold, on the main page, that said "$14.50 per box" or "$29 per month".

Awesome! You're obviously not struggling, but before long it might be worth reworking the site's aesthetic and branding? I honestly don't know at all how much it matters, but I'm gonna throw out some unsolicited design critique in case it's helpful. - Tragically, King did sink their teeth into the word "candy", so using it in a candy-color outlined gradient logotype strongly evokes mobile games. May not matter, but it sends a mixed message. - Only use the good photography. If you're shooting in a studio now, you can cycle out all the iPhone shots, which are contributing to a kind of "man-of-the-people candy blog" vibe, versus a "place that will send me awesome candy" vibe. Images like this: http://www.japanstyle.info/wordpress/wp-content/images//20110908_ame01… make me curious and hungry, images like this: http://www.candyjapan.com/static/japanese-candy.jpg remind me of being told to check Halloween candy for razors. - Lead with the photography. Right now, if I don't already have an idea of what "japanese candy" is, I'm not excited. It's cliche, but even just changing the title text to lightly shadowed white and sticking full-width high quality candy photos behind it in a carousel would be way more engaging. - Consider folding the "Are you still active?" section into the title pitch. If this is a concern people have, you don't want them to have to scroll through the rest of the page to resolve it. Could be worth testing something like "Order now to be included in the…

This is one of the greatest motivations for young and budding entrepreneurs. Even more so than aspiring speeches or conference talks. I'd like to thank everyone that posted links and revealed your numbers. People usually don't do that because it invites competition but it's amazing to see how nice and inviting the HN community is. I'm also AMAZED at the familiar faces. I've seen and bought a lot of code from some of you guys without realizing many of you visit HN. Here's my crap: http://dayonepp.com - Maybe $100/month (down season) then I think $500/month (up season) NOT passive. Lots of work. I handle fulfillment. http://affordabl.es - $0, just launched http://residentevilradio.com - $0, (ran Amazon affiliate links) http://timeforzen.com - $0, needs redesign, will monetize later this year. BTW, where's http://CandyJapan.com guy? Last I heard he told us his project was successful at around $3,500/month in revenue.

A week ago I just so happened to look up some of your older blog posts and Candy Japan articles that you had written, it was an enjoyable reread! For anyone else, here are some links: https://www.candyjapan.com/life-in-japan https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes

The problems with aggregated payments go far beyond just ensuring someone can pay hosting and card processing fees. Who will take chargeback risk? Handle KYC for payouts (especially since many garage bands won’t have business entities)? Handle fraud at scale, including fraud rings using your service to validate stolen credit cards? https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit-with-cred… is an old (2015) but still relevant illustration of this. Centralizing payments requires human monitoring and capital cushions. With services like Stripe this can be cheaper, but still requires nontrivial resources.

Income has fallen below costs. Costs: $40k equivalent [1] Income: $37k equivalent [2] Combine that with an expectation for women to stop working once they marry and surprise, people rationally find that it doesn’t make sense. [1] https://www.candyjapan.com/life-in-japan/what-it-costs-to-live-in-japa… [2] https://kimi.wiki/work/income

Candyjapan has a good write up on mitigating this https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-i-got-credit-card-fra…

Should we take advertising for granted? A few years ago Hacker News had this article which says 2x happier customers means 2x less money on marketing. https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/twice-as-happy-half-the-p…

It's exactly the same today. Here is a blog post from Candy Japan from 2 days ago, about experimenting with youtube giveaways: http://www.candyjapan.com/youtube-marketing-horror-story 0 sales.

He has some interesting advice if you ever decide to use a similar approach: > To get someone to agree to an unboxing, the most important thing turned out to be not asking for their shipping address up front. Instead first explain the service briefly, then ask if they are interested to do receive a sample for a video. If they say yes, only then ask for the shipping address. Asking for the address in the initial mail seemed to be off-putting and resulted in less people agreeing. Even more details https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/ab-testing-contacting-you…

Not sure that's totally accurate, here is a counterpoint article I read on here recently. https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-i-got-credit-card-fra…

He provides a business overview: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/2017-year-in-review .

It happens. Candy Japan gets a bit of discussion here on HN, and has a few posts about credit card fraud on the blog (eg https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-i-got-credit-card-fra… The basic premise is that credit card fraudsters use small online transactions to check if a card is valid before they use it for the big high value stuff, and the cost of those transactions to a small business can make it expensive to run. That said, if you're just enabling features on a site the actual cost to you is effectively zero, so maybe it's not something to worry about.

Format 3. "Problem I had while running my business, and my solution." Engineering blog posts are very popular on HN or /r/programming. Marketing, growth or product development might do better shared on Twitter or LinkedIn. People read it because the solution is interesting to them, but get exposed to your business as a consequence. CandyJapan's posts on dealing with credit card fraud were how I found out about their service, for instance: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-i-got-credit-card-fra…

Remember reading here about how candy japan being hit by something similar. [0] [0]: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit-with-cred… / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237697

Are you planning to do fraud monitoring? Your service can easily be used to verify stolen credit card details. Related: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit-with-cred…

Candyjapan is definitely a business supported by a lot of custom code. Read this: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/how-many-lines-of-code-is…

I wouldn't say Candy Japan involves little/no coding. Their blog details a lot of the cool behind-the-scenes stuff and code is a frequent topic. https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes

There was a blogpost [1] a while back from a guy who runs a candy subscription business. He goes into some approaches and issues with this and also mentions a python package called pyShipping [2] which has an existing implementation using some heuristics to speed up the calculations. 1. https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/algorithmic-fitting-of-ja… 2. https://github.com/hudora/pyShipping/blob/master/pyshipping/binpack_si…