Transcript
Speaker: Hello all. As a heads up, this is a longer podcast than normal. Joey and I discuss a ton of topics ranging from espresso machines, Japan's recent elections, Trump tariffs, to brainstorming about our future trip of doing the Kuma no Kodo trail.
Speaker: In the later half, we discuss some of the new features we're launching on Akiamart. So feel free to look at the show notes, pick a topic you want to listen to. And again, thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed the podcast.
Speaker: Welcome back to the Buying a House in Japan podcast. My name is Take. Today, joined by my co-host, Joey. How are you doing? Pretty good. Number one Akia podcast in the world.
Speaker: We are back. We are so back, baby. We... Realize we have ah had a lot of new listeners. So just a quick re-intro. Again, my name's Take. This is Joey. We are college friends who studied abroad in Japan.
Speaker: we went our separate ways, had adventures in tech, and we decided to buy an Akiya in Japan. And now we got six. um We got six Akiyas in Japan. We started a website, akiyamart.com.
Speaker: Go check it out. um You can browse bunch of different listings, properties available in Japan right now. And we can also help you purchase. Yep. We've helped about close to hundred people purchase at this point, all over Japan, any price anywhere, all in English. I think we can now confidently say we can get people across the finish line.
Speaker: We learn so much every month. I feel like I just recently learned a lot more about what a judicial Scrivener does. We got a podcast about that as well. Check it out. But yeah, learning more and more ah about the real estate world as the months go by. Okay, Joey, today's topics, we're going to do a little bit of a, I think a fun podcast.
Speaker: As we are closing in on episode 100, we're actually at episode 91, Joey. Okay, 100 coming up soon. Before the summer's over, we're going to hit 100.
Speaker: Before the summer's over, we will hit 100. But yeah, I think something you said before this podcast, in order to keep this sustainable, we have to keep it fun. And how originally were thinking about doing like a stuffy, hey, here's some new feature podcast, but We're going a free ball it a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll talk about some new features as the as they come up in conversation. All right, Joey, what's been happening? How are you? Where in the world are you? I'm back in Nova Scotia.
Speaker: So I was in California for a long time, about a month, and now I'm back in Nova Scotia. I just had a cousin's wedding in Toronto. That was great. Got to see a lot of family back in Nova Scotia now though, and back on the, back on the Akiyamark grind. So new stuff I'm working on. One, I'm just released some email updates so that now people will get a update when their annual subscription is about get ridden. Everyone forgets about annual subscriptions and people, know, we'd always get people writing to us like, Hey, can you, can I get a refund? Sorry, forgot about it. So now you're going to email seven days before it's set renew.
Speaker: That's new today. Man, you've been going on a tear, Joey. I think since you came to my parents' place in Saratoga and like just dialed in, I think most people who are listeners are probably using our website. You can tell it's been a lot of changes.
Speaker: Yeah. And more coming to, you know what it is? It's the sauna and the espresso machine combination. Update on the espresso machine. I don't think we've given the fans the update. While I was gone in Japan, I sent Joey all these extra parts. How have we upgraded espresso machine?
Speaker: the guy So Take bought himself a Gaja Classica. It's actually the Gaja Classica Evo. i don't know what the difference between the regular and the Evo is, but anyways, it's the Evo version. And like, Sue, I don't know, my brother has one. And i remember him telling me about all the mods you can do. Kind of reminds me of like when I was watching, doing a bunch of repairs on my 4Runner before a few years ago. And seems like everyone's always talking about the Miata. So I created it. to the the Miata of the espresso world. It's affordable and like highly moddable, but also like people love it.
Speaker: That's the gaja. The mods we did, Well, yeah, first was the pressure valve. So espresso, I believe if you go to like fancy restaurant on a commercial scale, I think it's supposed to be about nine bars.
Speaker: What people will actually do for home espresso machines is they'll crank that up to around 12 bars um because it depends on the beans. And so these espresso manufacturers are expecting homeowners not to have the freshest high quality beans ah to given that situation, they crank up the pressure. So you still get that kind of creamy.
Speaker: espresso foam, even with lower quality beans. But if you're the type of person that's buying good quality beans, you're to want to bring that pressure gauge down. I don't really know why it's just what the people do on a commercial scale. So talking about the new spring for that.
Speaker: Yeah. Hell yeah. Thanks for installing that. Have you no actually, there's one more mod I sent over, right? The PID controller or whatever it's called. I don't know why they call PID controller, but I think it's a temperature control. Oh, I do think that just base, I have a Breville here at home. And I do think that the temperature is a little bit all over the place versus you using the gadget classica Evo um at your parents' place with the PID controller. It did seem like the temperature is more consistent.
Speaker: I don't know why. i guess that's what this mod is supposed to do. Regulate the temperature. You can set the temperature. You can do crazy stuff like pre-infusion. So you bloom your coffee for a little bit first and then you pour the shot that anyways, a bunch of crazy stuff you can do. I didn't get that crazy with it. I just use the You can set the temperature to a specific temperature to make sure you always hit that. I think it's the same thing that with when they make a home model, they do a bunch of, it's like a little too smart for its own good. And they're doing a bunch of changes in the background for people that are buying low quality beans and don't really know what they're doing. But if you know what you're doing, you want these mods to give you more control.
Speaker: Okay. So two mods onto the Gaja Classic. We tinkered around, i think when we we first got it, Eric was visiting us and we pulled him off like a terrible shot. How much better have the shots got in Jerry? I'll follow up with my thoughts too.
Speaker: Yeah, pretty good. um I thought the shots were pretty good in the end. Honestly, I got to say though, i think the Breville that I've got, I like the shots better from the Breville that I have here in Nova Scotia than the guys. I don't know. Maybe it's the beans. I'm not sure.
Speaker: Yeah. um I tested it out. i think I think the magic numbers is you take, let's say roughly 18 grams of beans and the output should be 36 grams and espresso should be made over 24 to 27 seconds.
Speaker: Hit all those check boxes, Joey. The beans are tasting good. hang shit Thanks for the espresso. For anyone out there, you're totally welcome. For anyone out there listening, I feel like getting in a spread, if you just want to wake up in the morning and have coffee, like an espresso machine is not the way to go. It's really like a hobby. Like imagine waking up in the morning and like you mess up the first shot and then you mess up the second shot and like, you're like, okay, third time's gotta be the charm. And like you mess up the third shot and it's like, you, those are going to be the pitfalls you'll face owning an espresso machine. But if you just want coffee in the morning, I think there's better ways.
Speaker: It really is a hobby. I'd argue the opposite, bro. we have it like Once you have it dialed in, though, the coffee quality you get every morning is going to be consistently higher. I think it's close to coffee shop level if you have the good beans and you have the setup. so I like that you know quality, but again, I probably drink a lot lot less coffee.
Speaker: I drink coffee 11 a.m., 12 p.m. or little bit later in the day. hugh Huberman style. So, well, relevant to Japan and coffee... We are be very close to selling the Nagasaki home, a little bit messed up with the documents.
Speaker: We will make tiny bit of profit. We did not sell this house for profit. In fact, if we factor in our time and energy and probably a bunch of other stuff we forgot to calculate, but we break even.
Speaker: But given that on no in our bank it account, we'll make a little bit of profit. We should buy ah Gaja Classica and mod it and put it at one of our houses in Japan.
Speaker: Hell yeah. Such a good idea. And on on the Nagasaki thing, before we move on, it's just I would say we learned a shit ton though. I think, again, we didn't try to price this as high as we can. We're almost done across the sales process, selling it to a really nice family. We want to just make sure we get them onboarded before we maybe bring them on or talk about it.
Speaker: I think we learned so much and we are making... I guess the one thing we don't know is taxes, like capital gains taxes in Japan. We're break even exactly as you said, but either way, let's buy an espresso machine in Tokyo.
Speaker: So yeah, for first espresso machine, I think we should have it at TBC. I think that's where the kitchen is nice enough there. Let's do it. I say we do it. But on the tax thing, I could be wrong, but I believe since we are a corporation, corporations don't pay capital gains tax. They just pay corporate tax. So that's what i probably around very similar to maybe what it is in the U S 21%. So we'll see how it goes.
Speaker: i think so. I'm not a hundred percent sure. Espresso machine, we're going for it. Long tangent on this i'm beginning to start the pod here, but I think it's worth it. We are going to just, let's just get it. Treat yourself.
Speaker: Yeah, do we get a sauna and an espresso? I don't think we're going to have enough for a sauna. We will not have enough for a sauna. didn't wi Yeah, we're we're backed up. with Yeah, we owe a few people some money too. um sattoan it We should do a, I don't know where we left off. give Give the update, yeah.
Speaker: So last, I think we talked about Sato-san. I think we talked about the letter that he left. Just in case I didn't mention it, let me just remind everybody, Sato-san, we bought our first house in Beppu, October, 2023. We interviewed two contractors. We went with Sato-san over a different company because Sato-san was down for the custom things that we're building in the Beppu house, like our horikotatsu, the sunken table, three meter long sunken table, and our concrete shower anyways long story short we went with this guy sato-san single man carpenter and was a wild ride ups highs and lows he got a lot of work done but petered out near the end but throughout that process he disappeared with that you know literally mia no way to reach him several times always came back with a crazier and crazier story once he impaled metal through his femur supposedly supposedly yeah allegedly
Speaker: Once he was arrested and in jail. And I think that maybe the jail happened twice and shut down his bank. Anyways, there's something with his ex-wife was in there. Lot of drama. The dude is the dude's life is just riddled with drama.
Speaker: Anyways, last we left off, we had not spoken to Sato-san for maybe about six months and the guy just disappeared, right? and Me who is helping us in our friend, who's helping us in Beppu has his contact information online. and has been trying to contact him. Yeah, radio silence, no response.
Speaker: He left us a letter. So he came back to the house, unlocked the door with the key that he still has, and left us a handwritten letter inside the house. Please, Joey and Take, send cash.
Speaker: Just to me. yeah Please, Joey-san, send me cash to this address. Don't say there's cash in the envelope. Don't tell anyone you're sending. Like that little bit of craziness there. And that was two or three months ago, maybe maybe two months ago.
Speaker: And we asked Fumi to, we still owe Sato-san about $9,000, everybody just over $9,000, just 10, 10 still owe And,
Speaker: and We, there was stuff that he didn't do and we're like, do, and we had to get a different contractor in there. We're like, do we knock off that money? I think it's just gonna be cleaner. Just pay him what we agreed to pay him, even though maybe there's a way we could argue and pay him less. I just don't think that's worth it. Um, so we are trying to get him this money over $9,000, but I don't know if it's like legal to send cash in the mail and to so many ways that could go wrong. He could say, oh, I never got them. Like just too many different ways that could go. Yeah. And also.
Speaker: we're going to pay him from our business and I don't want to take out cash from the business account. And maybe there's bookkeeping and accounting issues there. So we're trying to pay him with bank transfer. And he keeps saying, but no, they're going to, the cops are going to confiscate the money or someone's going to confiscate the money. yeah Stalemate we're in right now.
Speaker: Dude, we just want to pay this guy. We have the money. So we're this is an ongoing venture. And thank you to Fumi, who's being the face and talking to Sato. But just know, yeah, if you deal with Japanese contractors, sometimes things can go a little sideways.
Speaker: But we've had a lot of fun with it, I'd say. Yeah. So we're working with Mizota-san now. His actual name, Sato-san is not Sato-san's actual name. Again, maybe. I know his real name, but ah for some reason he goes by an alias.
Speaker: Mizota-san is great, um but also a little bit of a character. Super character. Not in the Sato-san way, just like in his own kind of unique way, like When I met him, he was wearing a Canadian tuxedo, just like all denim, a head to toe. He's got a ponytail, right?
Speaker: Yeah, he was looking fly when I saw him. He had like striped suit, striped black and white suit. And he came by he's just like looking real polished. I'm like, dang, dude, you really you're really going for it. so This is a general contractor, like wearing a three, showing up to the site with the three pieces. He's been excellent thus far. But yeah, we should record a video with him mom next time we're in Beppu.
Speaker: Yeah, he was asking about that. He has his own YouTube channel and he was excited that we have a YouTube channel and was hoping for some cross collaboration there. yeah Anyways, that's the Sato-san story. we last Last thing is Fumi sent Sato-san another email or like, hey, we got to pay you for bank account. Just give us the details and they can pay you.
Speaker: Yep. right, Joe, what's been happening in the Acquia world? I think we haven't done a kind of Dear Diary series for only two or three weeks, but it seems like things are changing. Things are moving. seems like all these Trump tariff stuff, Sanseito. What's top of mind for you right now?
Speaker: Yeah, we'll see how it goes. Again, I'm not an expert on Japanese politics, but it has been hot in the news recently, and I've seen a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. So the Sanseito and I think one more kind of further right party, one unexpected amount of seats. Like I think they control 22 seats out of...
Speaker: I don't know how many, 150, 160 in something called the upper house in Japan. I think Japan has two different houses for their ah politically elected representatives. And the upper house is the lesser powerful house.
Speaker: But the the takeaway here is that the LDP, The Lib Dem Party, which has governed Japan for since the 1950s, they've always been in power except for a very brief time, I think right after the 2008 financial crisis.
Speaker: They are a minority party. not I don't think for the first time, but they're going to have to form some sort of coalition. And I think that might cause complications for the real estate market potentially. I think a lot of the fringer parties don't want foreigners purchasing property. And again, I think a lot of this ah resentment is directed towards rich Chinese nationals buying ah condos and towers and much the same that people have those same grievances in Canada. People are blaming Chinese nationals for buying up real estate and driving up the home prices.
Speaker: But the I think the... that's only took It's interesting that this took over the national kind of debate when this problem is so localized to Tokyo. The prices are not going up anywhere else in Japan. You did a good you could ah did a good job summarizing. You're pretty right up on Japanese politics and a government structure, Joey.
Speaker: So I think like Ishiba, the current prime minister, I think he may resign. So he lost. They want him to resign, right? Yeah. So I think he called a snap election. i think he's only been around for about a year. And when he first came on, he called a snap election and his party, the Lib Dems lost a bunch of seats.
Speaker: And then this is the second election where he's caused big losses for his party. So I think he's on his way out. um Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't know. I don't really have a opinion there. I don't, again, not really an expert, but could with the Trump tariffs coming in and the rice imports and truck imports and i think things are brewing, I think, in the Japanese economy. I don't know which way it's going to fall out, to be honest.
Speaker: I heard the Nikkei just like hit an old all time high yesterday. I think the rice thing is like, ah there's a lot of, there's, I saw on Twitter or X, there's a like a lot of back and forth that that was like not represented correctly or something like that. I mean, they,
Speaker: Oh, I don't know about that, but i you know, the price of like doubled or whatever in Japan recently and Japanese government was, you they were hoarding rice, they destroying rice. They were basically manipulating the market, the rice market for decades now.
Speaker: And I think it's been pretty stable, but they've reached a breaking point. I think after a few bad harvests in a row, the farmers were really angry at that. And now there's not enough rice and the prices shot up. Maybe it's good in the short term to actually, I'm, I feel like I,
Speaker: From an economic standpoint, I like free trade. I definitely lean towards that. So I do think opening up Japan's economy to more agricultural products out from outside Japan is good. Take a look at how expensive fruit is in Japan. It's top quality. You you know, it's very hard to find fruit of that quality in other countries, but you pay for it.
Speaker: It would be nice to have the ability to buy a cheaper watermelon from the Philippines instead of paying 8,000 yen for a tiny watermelon. There's so much pride in Japanese rice farming though, where if they start exporting or importing from the U S it's going to be like, what the hell, this is not up to Japanese Komei quality. had a good point about car imports. So one of the things that Trump ah got through with his deal was chip Japan's gonna, I don't know what it was, maybe reduce tariffs on American imported vehicles or something like that. But I was, companies aren't going to buy American trucks. One, probably a lot of pride in their homegrown industries, Toyota, Honda, et cetera.
Speaker: But also like you need different tools. Like literally that's one of the problems when you work on cars is are your tools metric or, uh, Imperial, you need a whole second set of tools to work on American cars. I'm like, okay, that's another huge um factor here, but but you had a really good point about Tesla's.
Speaker: They're coming for sure. I've yeah seen them more in in Tokyo for sure. I think people will buy Tesla's I agree. I haven't seen a Cybertruck yet in Tokyo. I'm sure they're like, people are frothing to get them there.
Speaker: Toyota blew it with, a and not that they resisted the switch to electric, they actively opposed it. I think they there's a lot of Toyota nasty nastiness in terms of the switch to electrification.
Speaker: Okay, question for you. Can a Cybertruck even fit on the roads to get to any of our houses? Could a Cybertruck get to our vet boop spot? No. Definitely not. those are So yeah, I saw them for the first time in person when I was in California. They're really big. It's a big truck. It's like an F250, I feel like, at that size. It's a flashy car. Actually, yeah. It definitely, I don't think it can even work. can't even fit in parking spots in Japan.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. You're only doing, you're not going into small houses, small alleyways. Yeah. Don't buy the Cybertruck if you're buying a cheap Akia because likely that Akia will have a small road.
Speaker: Definitely. all right, Joey, I think the question listeners are thinking like, how is this affecting the Akia market? You feel like it's heating up, slowing down? What are we seeing with our customers and stuff like that?
Speaker: I think that there could be restrictions coming. I'm not going to say it is coming. I just think that the debate is around this, but I think there could be restrictions to foreigners purchasing property in Japan, but I think likely it'll start slowly in the sense that there was talk before about just recording the nationality of people purchasing property in Japan. So at the moment, it's that's not even recorded, apparently, although it does seem like we have to provide passports and a bunch of affidavits and stuff like that when you do purchase property in Japan, but apparently officially,
Speaker: They're not recording it. And so I think that'll happen first. I think they'll try to figure out, all right, which nationalities are buying property in Japan. So I think that'll probably be a first step and maybe, hopefully, maybe this is just a coping mechanism, but hopefully if the real problem is around people buying luxury condos and driving up home prices in Japan, hopefully restrictions are around expensive properties and not on the Akiya market.
Speaker: I saw something on LinkedIn that like, I think there's no resales allowed in Chiyota in five years or something like that. So I do expect maybe some of yeah those rules coming through for hyper affected areas.
Speaker: That sounds sensible to me as well. Yeah, but I agree with you. Like i I think being, having our Japanese corporation and going through the motions with everything, like it's going to take so long for them to really put something dramatically impactful, I think to foreign buyers and specifically looking at Akiya's.
Speaker: i I think it's something to be aware of and maybe pay attention to Japanese news as stuff happens. But I don't think it's a concern yet. It's, yeah, I'm not too concerned for the next maybe, say, two or three years.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree with you. I would keep proceeding as is. The the actual Akiya true problem is such a deep one that and there's no way, I think, for Japan's domestic population to fill and deal with these abandoned homes, to be honest.
Speaker: I know we got a lot of haters, a lot being like, you guys are bringing foreigners in, but I think we're bringing the right, but we're bringing really cool people in and really nice people. um I would, it would be a shame for them to really actually do restrict that because the there's just so many abandoned homes in the countryside, Japan.
Speaker: Here's my take on that. Like I, I, again, I see the Akiya mondai, the Akiya problem. Like I don't see that. Akia is the problem. They're a symptom of the problem. They're symptom of the aging demographic and for sluggish economic growth. Like what if the Japanese government just bulldozed all the Akia? Like, is that a solution to the Akia problem? Is that a, yeah.
Speaker: Does that solve it? Yeah. That's just going to bring, that's going to cost a lot of money. There's so many Akias. But like, yeah it's a solution that doesn't involve higher immigration.
Speaker: True. Just like creating... less population density in some of these areas. That also just increases problems too, right? I see what you're saying though. It's it's an interesting play, but It's also like a little bit multainai. Dang, this is such a good house. And you guys are definitely multainai.
Speaker: But I'm just like, Japan is resistant to foreigners. I feel like they always have been, likely always will be. There will be some resistance there. And I'm just thinking like, all right, given that if you're policymaker in Japan, are you trying to think, how do we solve this without increasing immigration? Because it's politically difficult to do. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know. We're we're like, good news on our end. We've finally switched our representative director. We are now more in control of our Japanese... company we're starting to get um access to more accounts it took a long time but but the more the deeper we get into the japanese business and i guess systems the more we're like there's so much friction man yeah we tried to do so big shout out to ryan who has joined our japanese company and that's a lot of things are moving smoother now that we have a japanese national should talk is a japanese national
Speaker: Um, but now that we have two Japanese nationals on board with our company, things have been going ah much smoother and we tried to do a wise transfer this morning from our Japanese bank account out into the world. Every time we've used wise so far, it's been from our American company. So this was a first for us because our, our SMBC bank has been so janky and it it it wasn't as smooth. And in fact, we didn't get it done.
Speaker: And it's really interesting how it works. I think it comes down to the integration with the banking system. If anyone's ever used Plaid or those other things to connect your bank account to some third party application, that seems to not exist in Japan. And how we have to do it is we actually have to go, if we want to make a transfer with Wise, we have to go into SMBC bank account and send the money to Wise's bank account with make sure you fill in all these details correctly kind of thing.
Speaker: And then you go back to Wise and you say, hey, i made my transfer kind of thing and We didn't get that far, so don't know what happens from there. There's no integrations with Japanese banks. So there's like this manual step you need to do where you manually send money to WISE.
Speaker: I feel like this happened quite quick in the US. oh like All a sudden, Plaid's like really good. there's We expect integrations with stuff. that we've almost taken that for I feel like i've taken that for granted that like every for the good, but a better, or for the worse, everything's connected on all my accounts. I feel like this wasn't around like 2020.
Speaker: I do agree it's new. It's new. All right, Joey, I guess what are our future plans? like I think we've been talking, um you might be going in September, i might be going in October.
Speaker: Any goals or plans for our fall trip? Yeah, I think one thing we've been trying to do with it, maybe maybe we got, excuse me. A lot of our trips have been rush and productive. I think for, oh yeah, super productive. But I think like the Yaku, so ah the, one of the last trips we did to Japan, we went Yakushima in February, a little bit of profit taking. It felt like in terms of vacation days, and that was a lot of fun. And so I think we're starting to think, all right, we need to bake in to our work trips to Japan, a little bit of fun.
Speaker: And also the other thing we've been thinking about is a little bit of active lifestyle, whether that's like walking the Kuma no Kodo trail, which is something we've been talking about or ah surfing while we're down there. i think we're trying to figure that out for our fall trip, baking a little bit of like profit vacation days and also hopefully keep them, keep those days active.
Speaker: Trade in the wealth for the health, baby. I think we've talked about this a couple of times. Like we've been like 24-7 on Akiya Mart, I'd say for, I don't know, a couple months at a time. And yeah, when we go on these trips, it's just like back-to-back meetings that it doesn't... I feel like I get sick personally.
Speaker: I'm sick right now a little bit like after after these sprints because we go hard and it's worth it in retrospect, but we got to build in some healthy activities because I just... I personally just eat too much shit, I think, when I'm in Japan.
Speaker: For which are you leaning towards more? Spending some time surfing or hiking trail? So yeah, we've been talking about surfing, but surfing just takes some time to get set up.
Speaker: So I think we what we discussed was getting this to be like our prep for the next trips. Yeah, so I think this time we bring the wetsuits. I'll bring over two boards. you can If you can pick me up at the airport, maybe with the van, we can leave the boards in Tama and leave our wetsuits. So like,
Speaker: At least we're set up yeah with all the equipment. I think that's half the battle. yeah then um I've been looking at Kumano Kodo. Kumano Kodo is a trail down... Where is it?
Speaker: It's a pretty long trail. I had never heard about these until that Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Craig Maude, I think. yeah Yeah, it's good one. Yeah, good one. People check it out. But anyways, he talks about his journey walking these... i think they're ancient pilgrimages and...
Speaker: or one's an ancient pilgrimage and one is just like the old road walking trail between i think Kyoto and Edo Tokyo back in the the back when it was still Edo and so there's these people will walk them still from Tokyo to Kyoto or vice versa and then there's I think the Kumano Kodo is like Mie prefecture Wakayama, that kind of area. Wakayama, kind of, yeah. In between, Manada, Mie kind of thing, but on on that peninsula.
Speaker: um Dude, I just realized something. Remember when we went down and in Shikoku and we met Maego Mika for the first time? We did a podcast with her way back.
Speaker: And we saw that dude wearing the yeah straw hat walking. He was a cat. And we stopped for him and he was like, i don't know, I thought I had a rude attitude. I don't need to. I'm just walking guys kind of thing. we're like you're in the middle of nowhere, bro. He must've been doing one of these trails. Absolutely. he was like wearing the straw hat and I was just like, right, let's give this guy a ride. But yeah, he was like, oh so he was doing that trail.
Speaker: I think there's a Shikoku walk too. Actually, we talked about our last pod or one of our recent pods and someone had mentioned there's yeah a Shikoku loop. I think that's where the Benz is. Oh, yeah. theyre in a Somewhere in the north of Ehime, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. So I think this trip, let's do Kumano Kodo. I saw there was a couple, and Brett, my old roommate, did this a while ago, so I can ask him. We can do like a guided tour, which I'm i'm out on.
Speaker: We could do a self-guided tour where they will book stuff for you, or we can just do it ourself, either three. I think we can easily do it ourself. Honestly, it just requires... Mariko-san.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe we have someone help us plan it a little bit. But yeah, I think we can do it three to five days. if anybody So Mariko-san, for everybody out there, like a VA. She does more work than for us than VA a stuff, but I think we found her through LinkedIn.
Speaker: If anybody is I see people popping up on LinkedIn from time to time, usually Japanese women offering ah virtual assistant services. And we have asked Mariko-san a few times to book stuff like restaurant reservations, so personal stuff outside of the business, restaurant reservations, hotel, when Taki's parents went to go stay there. And she's done a phenomenal job. And so just an interesting idea. If anybody else wanted to try finding a virtual assistant through LinkedIn and having them help you book maybe ah japan vacation that's an interesting thing i've never thought of before but it seems to be working really well with mariko-san yeah yeah she booked a haircut for my mom when i needed a couple small things that i just like i don't want to make this phone call and mess it up and so yeah she's been super helpful but joy getting back to it yes let's do the kumano code this fall what do you think october
Speaker: Let's do it. do you and So that's why I brought Mariko. Do we want her to book the hotels for us? I'm sure we actually have a listener. So if you're a listener, you've made it this far. You've hiked the Kumano Kodo. Again, it's probably like it looks like it's yeah around Mie Wakayama Prefecture. close ah ah we'd We'd go to Osaka probably first.
Speaker: um But yeah, if a listener has done this before, has any recommendations, let us know. Me and Joey are pretty easy here. Joey, what's cool is we don't have to carry pack. So we could have a porter service, which pretty dope. but I don't want to carry a pack. Let's do the porter service. True easy mode here. Okay.
Speaker: I say we go no phone during this walk. Okay. Craig. craig So exactly what Craig Ma does in this podcast. show with tim ferriss Yeah. Perfect. Yep. No phone. Okay. Okay.
Speaker: We should do like a party or something at the end of it or something. Just invite any listeners. Kumano Kodo completion party. so of the park Kumano Kodo park. So get boards over, get wetsuits over. Kumano Kodo. That's the active lifestyle plan.
Speaker: Yep, yep. And in addition, we are hopefully going to be finishing up our Otaru project. So we'll make a trip up to Hokkaido. We'll get the espresso machine and Tama. lot of things already.
Speaker: Actually, is where did you buy the gadget? That was Amazon, right? Amazon. Yeah, we could get the Amazon hookup, right, in Japan. ah Yeah, let's just see if the Amazon.co.jp has it. I'm looking it up right now.
Speaker: If not, we do. Okay. So it it does exist on amazon.co.jp, but we made a friend for listeners. We made a friend on she a few friends on the American bases in Japan.
Speaker: And they've told me that they get American amazon.com deliveries to the American base in Japan. So that's another little tidbit. If you know of anybody on these bases in Japan and you're good friends with them, you may, you know, and you bought a house in Japan, that is a potential path to get amazon.com deliveries because amazon.co.jp doesn't have the same stuff like amazon.ca here in Canada doesn't have the same stuff as the Amazon store.
Speaker: All right, let let's get this let's get this espresso machine. F it, even though we have not. We should wait until we actually close. We should be closing on the Nagasaki property in couple days. Yeah, let's wait until we close. Okay. All right, Joey, let's get to some business part of the podcast. You ready? they got the Evo. They have the gadget classic Evo, the exact same one you got. Okay. All right. All right. all right. What's the business?
Speaker: Okay, let me go back to the... All right, transition time, Joey. We are launching a new subscription finally. I know we've talked about it probably for the past year or so, but it's it is officially rolling out August 1st.
Speaker: What can we expect on Akiyamart with this new subscription? All right. My favorite subscription. new feature, there's like a bunch of new features. That's, I dunno, 10, 10 new features, let's say.
Speaker: And, we've been given out a lot of these for free to the current existing pro, I guess not for free, but for existing pro AKM are pro subscribers. We've been giving them out for free for now.
Speaker: One as a thank you for being early users and supporting us when we were getting this business started, but also to test out bugs. So some users have written to me and told me about, Hey, this isn't working. That's not working. So very much appreciate that to everybody that wrote out to me as I was launching these new features. um Thank you very much helping get ready for launch day. I'm just the one developer solo developer here. So it really does help when people report bugs.
Speaker: My favorite ah new feature coming out, I would say, is... i like the alerts, actually. New property alerts. So I have a bunch of... You can basically save a search now on the map, given your filters that you've set up.
Speaker: And you'll get an email every time a new property ah comes on that matches that search. search The code that runs that powers the alerts right now runs twice a day. So the two opportunities to get new listings delivered to your inbox every day.
Speaker: For all y'all who are using Zillow, we know this is a Zillow feature that we've been trying. It's been hot, hotly requested. But again, Joey is literally the single man army here. um But yeah, Joey, great work on the alerts. I think they're going to be super helpful for those hyperactive or specifically like very niche area searchers and in in particular.
Speaker: Not quite instant like Zillow, but twice a day. Hopefully that's close enough for now. I literally have an only alert, like right in front of this one surf break in Kyushu, called Igauda at the very tip in Miyazaki. And it's, I got alert, Joey, as soon as something comes up.
Speaker: Nice. I think I've got an alert there too. Um, yeah, I've got several alerts all over. Uh, the map actually, I personally enjoy the emails. I know some people might maybe just consider it spam or you don't, you don't want that. You can always unsubscribe but um from these alerts too. It's not a set in stone thing. I personally like just, don't ah just switch the alert. yeah I think you can set ah your settings to whether you want the alert, what, you know, when the property arrives, or you can just turn it off if you just want to save that search, but not get the emails.
Speaker: My favorite feature that we are launching is our historical sales data or like when was the last listing delisted? I think this just brings Japanese real estate to a different level now.
Speaker: I think as a consumer or user, you don't usually get access to this previously like delisted data. Again, I would take that with an asterisk because we don't know exactly how much of the property sold for.
Speaker: But this is so helpful. As you look at properties in the neighborhood, you can start looking actively at comps. So I guess this is like the previously sold function on that Zillow would have. But this was a but a big mission.
Speaker: Joe, you've been collecting this data for a while. Yeah, and bear with me, everybody. Loading the previously sold is a little slow. I just haven't had time to really figure out exactly why. It's not terribly slow, but just know there's a little bit lag there It takes some time to load the previously sold.
Speaker: Please just bear with me for the time being. I will get around to investigating that soon. but I'm excited about this data, man. I don't know if people and know we've talked about this a couple of times, but I think this very clean data that we can build some more products and insight tools from that and don't think anyone else has access to.
Speaker: I know we really have no way of figuring this out, but if you had to guess when we say previously sold, as talking, I mentioned small asterisks there, we don't know. district or Big asterisks. We don't know if the property was actually sold. All we know is that the listing was removed from the Japanese websites.
Speaker: And we don't know the price that it sold for if it did sell. But that being said, Taki, what do you ex how many properties do you think are, let's say D listed removed from the Japanese websites that aren't actually a sale?
Speaker: Like 10%, 5%. ten percent five percent It's. Most of them are probably sales, right? Yeah, I would say maybe 10%. but like in whats it If someone's going to sell a property, we would make them delist it. um maybe it's like we've seen I don't think there's a hesitancy about delisting if it's been up for a long time.
Speaker: um I'd say 10%, but again, if if someone has a more informed opinion, we'd definitely like to hear it. Cool. Yeah, that's definitely a cool feature. One more that I think is really exciting that kind of came last minute. Our friend, edie gusan Eric, he's starting a new business, Japan Unlocked coming soon. He's going to be helping with utilities and purchasing cars and registering cars and stuff in your name.
Speaker: That's coming soon. He's getting his business set up, but our friend and he's helping us out. on the sales side of things, Eric said, Hey, it would be great if we had satellite view on the map. And actually I use this all the time.
Speaker: I really looking at them. I'm always looking at like properties close to water, whether it's rivers or beach towns, that kind of stuff. And it's really nice to see the water on the map in the actual color that water is and the green stuff. So I actually use the satellite view way more than I ever expected. And that isn't something that we planned. Eric just said it one day.
Speaker: and it was actually easy but to throw on. um that's one That's a feature I like a lot too. Okay, next up, I think this is probably the biggest by most people's view is our airb airbnb eligibilityity yeah Airbnb eligibility insights tool, where we've talked again about it a lot, but taking government data and interpreting, this has been a behemoth project for Joey, Keita, and Miku, who has been helping us look through almost every city in Japan.
Speaker: This one also huge asterisk. This is very hard to interpret per city in Japan. So these are our best guesses based off government data, what we've read on how to interpret those minpaku or short term rental laws. So you'll see Airbnb eligibility. um But Joey, I know you got some thoughts here.
Speaker: I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that this data is 85% accurate just based on, so I, so far this map was based on my ability to read Japanese legal doc. You know, this is the housing and building act or whatever these things are called, all these different ordinances, yeah obviously with the help of chat GBT, but it wasn't like I just gave these laws to chat GBT and said, Hey, tell me what to do.
Speaker: I was trying to translate and understand them myself and then turn that into code a little bit, put, um, i don't know what I'm saying. I'm evaluating my own work here and saying 85%, but I do feel that I work quite diligently. So they are not, it's not perfect. These laws are very complicated, way more complicated.
Speaker: Actually, a lot of the complication just comes from the unstructured nature of how everything is put together regarding these laws in Japan. There's no central place you can go and figure out the laws and how it works right now. If you are purchasing a property and are interested in Airbnb-ing it, your real estate agent will literally just call the Hokkenjo or the city hall or whatever to and one by one per property and ask, hey, can this property be Airbnb or not? So there's no like central way to know all across Japan everywhere that you can Airbnb or not. um And so that that's the problem that we tried to find a solution to.
Speaker: here. So very difficult problem, put in solid efforts. And thanks again to yeah, Miku and Keita, who's been helping us out here. ah But I think it's very cool. That being said, that's the huge caveat. That being said, what you get is a very simple map overlay.
Speaker: There's four colors. There's green, which means you can Airbnb or or hotel 365 days of the year. So think in terms of short-term rentals, not Airbnb. So short-term rental, meaning either hotel or Airbnb license green means 365 days of the year. You can run a short-term rental business. So that's the same as you would expect. And if you're trying to Airbnb in America or whatever,
Speaker: The next color is yellow. That means 180 days. And yeah this is the national standard. So this will mean no hotel license available, but, uh, you do, ah you are able to Airbnb short-term rental under the national MIMPACU law with no added restrictions.
Speaker: So yellow and orange, which is the next color down are very similar. Yellow is you can run a short-term rental business, 180 days, no restrictions. Orange is you can run a short-term rental business, 180 But added restrictions.
Speaker: So this is a lot of times you'll hear things like, oh, it's very difficult to Airbnb in Kyoto, or it's very difficult to Airbnb in Chioda ward in Tokyo. Not exactly true. These places, Kyoto and Chioda ward, et cetera, have very large tellable zones in them.
Speaker: So yes, you can buy a property, get a hotel license and run a short-term rental business for 365 days a year. But when people say, oh it's difficult to Airbnb in these areas, they're talking about the added ordinances or restrictions from the local ordinances that are tacked onto to the MIMPAKU or Airbnb law.
Speaker: So that's what orange represents. It represents areas where You are subject to the 180 day national law, but there are local added restrictions, usually restricting things like you can only Airbnb Monday to Friday, no weekends, or you can only Airbnb no March to June. You know, I'm just, I just made those up right there, but added additional restrictions. That's orange.
Speaker: The final one is red, which means banned in these areas. So zero days a year, you cannot run a short-term rental business, neither Airbnb or a hotel. So green is what you want to aim for yellow.
Speaker: It would be the default orange default, but slightly not so great. And then red is just outright. It can't do it. That being said, I know like Anton in Japan runs some fantastic Airbnbs in Tokyo.
Speaker: His are in the orange zones. So definitely doable. Yeah, I think this is, and we're never going to get a one hundred percent tool. We've had a couple of customers ask, is it ready? Is it ready? And I think this is as ready as it's going to be, but we are continually improving it. We do have someone on Keita who's helping us get even more granular, but I think again, take this tool with a grain of salt.
Speaker: It is going to get you, I think 80% of the way there, but As a disclaimer, you 100% need to tell your agent that you're intending to do short-term rental just so that they can verify with a gyosei shoshi or they can call the office before purchasing.
Speaker: Yeah, I would, but exactly. I would use it to help narrow down your search early on, uh, in the sense that let's say you decide that, yes, I want to buy a house in Japan and I want to run an Airbnb.
Speaker: Uh, whether that's under the mean pocket license or the hotel license, I would use this tool to find places in the green zone. That's going to be really solid, uh, narrowing down for your real estate agent. And then you've already ruled out a ton of properties that aren't going to meet that. Even again, 85% correct. So there may be outliers, the false positives and false negatives, but this really, really help the agent you're working with, both of you to speed up the process so instead of wasting time finding properties that you love and then finding out later after the phone call is made to the Hokinjo or city hall that you can't run a short term rental business there.
Speaker: Yep. Okay. Let's move on to the next filter that has been made. I think this one by popular request is ownership rights filter. So we now show if you own the property, is it a leasehold or is it freehold building or property?
Speaker: I think Joey and i were like, do we need to build this filter? Then we started searching for spots ourselves and we'd found like, oh, this spot is dope. And then we go so far like emotionally into being like, okay, how are going to get this? And then we find out it's a leasehold it was like, okay, we should build that.
Speaker: Same thing with it. Like we were just mentioning with the Airbnb or like, you know, you go so far down a path and then find out can't be Airbnb or in this case, you wouldn't own the land. You'd be renting the land from a landlord and paying a fee each month. Yeah.
Speaker: ownership rights, do you own the land? i It's actually interesting. I should look up what percentage our leasehold, um now that we have the data in our data, I actually have not looked this up yet. If I had to guess, I'm going to say 5%.
Speaker: It's pretty low. I think and we've gotten feedback that when you click the sales, or sorry, the ownership rights filter, you you don't you can't really tell a difference. And I think realistically, You should almost always have ownership rights filter checked.
Speaker: Joey, I still think we should put this as freehold filter, but yeah we we can fit we if you're a listener and you have a specific better naming convention for this ownership rights filter, let us know. Yeah, I would say, like you mentioned, I think freehold seems to be a standard industry term, and so we should definitely change it to that. The other idea I had was like b land ownership rights.
Speaker: I think is like pretty that explicit in the words it's using. yep that the Yeah, oh and it's cool. We can tweak that around. But yeah, if any listener has any particular, hey, this it should be this way, let us know.
Speaker: Okay, last big chunk. We have a whole bunch of... disaster risk filters now? and Japan has a lot of natural disasters. Yes. ah We're working on this. So we, the ones we have right now is landslide.
Speaker: This pulls straight from government data. ah You'll see yellow zone and red zone, which seems to be the standard ways these are classified in Japan. Red zone, worse than, more dangerous than yellow zone. ah Check that out. If you're looking for a property, do you want to buy something in landslide zone? Yes or no.
Speaker: Tsunami risk as well. So this is tsunami is estimated flooding depth from a tsunami. And I don't actually know, I should look this up, but I do know based on, so we're adding flood data soon. And there's a few different metrics that the Japan government measures flood by. And one of the ones we realized, ah we realized through talking with a real estate agent,
Speaker: The way that agents will present this when they do the explanation of important matters document, where they talk about all these different hazards in the area of the house, they use a very like maximum, what's the word?
Speaker: Badness scale. So they will look at the one in a thousand year flood. So the government says, okay, what are, what's the estimated flood depth in a once in every 10 year flood? What's the estimated flood depth in a once in every 50 year flood, et cetera. There's lots of different. ways they slice and dice it. And we asked our real estate agents which metric they use when they prevent present this.
Speaker: And it seems, I don't know if it was a legal thing or just industry standard, they use the maximum, which is the one in a thousand year flood. And that's what they will present in the Explanation of Important Matters doc.
Speaker: So if I had to guess, tsunami data is likely the same. It's probably the maximum that you can expect, which makes sense because in some place, some rare places, I can't remember exactly where, but I've played around with the tsunami ah estimated flood depth filter. In some places, it's 50 meters.
Speaker: ah What's that in feet? 150 feet? Oh, yeah. Not good. Not good. Not good. I was talking to one of our agents who who we verified with him on this information. He's just like, yeah, global warming was his immediate response. He's just like, climate's changing, Japan's acknowledging that, which is good. that I think we are taking the most conservative decisions hey, there's a one in a you know one in a thousand year.
Speaker: And once every thousand years, there will be a flood here. With the way things are going, it would not surprise me we see some of these mega floods in our lifetime. That's very true. or Things are changing.
Speaker: 50 meter? Is that right? I can search through the database i actually find it. But yeah, I believe there was 50 meter. and Sorry, maybe it was... so The data is a little bit messy. So sometimes they'll do things like...
Speaker: Instead of a a value, they'll give a range. And I, for the purposes of displaying the overlay on the map, I had to turn that into just a single value instead of a range. So I think some of them came in from the Japanese government. They would say, okay, in this area, 30 to 50 meters.
Speaker: And I can't remember what I did. I either took the average or I just took the maximum and I, so that's where I'm getting the 50 meter from. Okay. With that very last one, the last feature actually layout and room count filter, this is by popular request.
Speaker: it's been a heated discussion with Joey and I on how do we take Japanese Madori like room naming conventions and trend that to Westerners. And there's no perfect solution, but ultimately we decided just keep it simple.
Speaker: ah So typically you'll see on the listings like for LDK, what does that mean, Joey? yeah Did we keep it simple? So we kept it simple and in the way that we're presenting you the information that you would see it on a Japanese website. We didn't try to ch doctor anything or do any cultural conversion ah to a Western audience, which we, that was part of our debate. Do we translate what for LDK means into a two bedroom, two bath ah for the way we think about housing and you know, the Western world.
Speaker: And what we did in the end is we did not do that. So we still present the, it'll look like for LDK, 2DK, et cetera. So what this means it, and just a heads up everybody.
Speaker: Kind of doesn't make any sense. I'm just going to tell you how it works. um But it, there's a little bit of information. you I would say it's like 50% signal, 50% noise here.
Speaker: So there's two parts. There's a number and then there's a series of letters. So for example, four or let's do three LDK, which seems to be the most common one I see in housing. So three LDK three means the number of rooms in the house, not including the kitchen.
Speaker: So. three LDK three rooms plus kitchen is what that means. The LDK part refers to the kitchen.
Speaker: So you, it's this is just how they break it up. It, the L comes from the word living room. The D comes from the word dining room and the K comes from kitchen. And it, this actually refers to the size of the kitchen. Not that you're getting,
Speaker: Not it. It's not that if you see three LDK, you have three rooms and then you have a living room and a dining room and a kitchen. No, it's three rooms plus a kitchen. LDK means a large kitchen.
Speaker: A DK means a medium sized kitchen and a K just means a kitchen. So if you say three LD, three LDK, it's three rooms plus a large kitchen, two DK, two rooms plus a medium sized kitchen and so on.
Speaker: The complication comes from those rooms that are not the kitchen. Are they bedrooms or are they not bedrooms? That is the real complication. And I don't think you can say yes or no to that question.
Speaker: Sometimes they are bedrooms. Sometimes they are not. I think when it comes to condos, They are bedrooms. I think a 95% of the time, if you are looking at condos and you see a two DK, it's going to be two bedrooms and a medium sized kitchen.
Speaker: For example, homes in Japan can sometimes be a little bit funky. And I think that's where sometimes you would like my test for a bedroom is would I put a bed in this room? Like yes or no. So for example, our house in Beppu, the up to the room, we call the upstairs chill room.
Speaker: There's three rooms on the upstairs, but to get to one of the rooms, you have to walk through, to get to actually, there's one room that you have to walk through to get to the two other rooms.
Speaker: So we use those two other rooms as bedrooms. And then the room, the chill room that I'm talking about, kind of like an upstairs living room. But if you put a bed in that room, you'd be walking through somebody's bedroom to get to another bedroom, which like doesn't make sense to us, or i would as wager to say most people. So like that would be considered part of the other rooms, a 3DK, but I would only say it's two bedrooms. So just be aware, the it this is the system they use and it's pervasive. Every Japanese website, listings website, you'll see this Midori, it's called, I guess, layout.
Speaker: The last thing I'll say on that is um if you look at, so I was trying to figure out how other Like English language real estate's websites present this information. And so I was looking at one e-housing. They focus mostly on rental units, I believe, in Tokyo. So a little bit more on that luxury end of things. If you're looking for a luxury condo in Tokyo, maybe check out to rent, maybe check out e-housing.
Speaker: But... What they did is interesting. They literally, because it is mostly condos, I think they get away with it. They literally just say the number part. So in a three LDK, they just say three bedroom, which I believe makes sense for condos. so 95% of the time, I think that's going to be correct. But for houses, doesn't quite make sense.
Speaker: Yep. Well, we've taken a stab at it. It's going to need a little bit more education built around it, I think for sure. And I think I'm still personally, I get it wrong. and When I'm looking at a house, I'm like trying to be like, okay, this is a 5LDK. And you look at the photos like, okay, I'm not sure if it's my error or is the listing error. But um yeah, I think at least we have a searchable filter now ah to try to filter out five room I think it works in this sense.
Speaker: If you want, let's say for here's a ah personal example, like me and Taki, sometimes we're like, Oh, do we sell TBC our house in Thomas city, Western Tokyo and buy maybe a condo downtown ah because we spend so much time downtown Tokyo with the business and meeting people.
Speaker: We would want to buy a condo <unk> a little bit easier since it is a condo, but we want to buy a condo with two bedrooms. So we can use our own filter, the Midori filter, the filter for two plus on the room number of room size and then any size kitchen.
Speaker: And that would at least meet our criteria there of two bedrooms. So two plus rooms plus any size kitchen.
Speaker: Okay. We've learned a lot about Japanese real estate, baby. um But that was our last filter. And we will, Joey, congrats. This has been a ah work in progress for, I think, the past year or something.
Speaker: um But we are launching this new subscription plan. It's going to be called Akiyamart Pro July, or sorry, August 1st. So T minus six days. If you are, I think I'm posting this probably next week, but...
Speaker: Be sure to check it out, subscribe, let us know what else you want us to build. We are have a couple of things up our sleeve. I think we've gotten a lot of requests to build. Like how much is this Akiya going to cost where if I buy it We recognize that ah calculators are necessary. So that that's up on the roadmap.
Speaker: We have a really big redesign coming. A couple of, it's crazy. Like a lot of our friends are, we go our separate ways, and but they're so accomplished. We have some friends that are in the growth product manager and like design space that are helping us redesign our homepage.
Speaker: So that I'm pretty pumped about. Yeah. Last thing on the subscription. So as Taki mentioned, all those features are going under our pro subscription. We are raising the price, but we are introducing a basic option, a more affordable option, which if you just want to browse property, don't care about any of the things we just spoke about all these extra features. You just want to look at listings.
Speaker: We are coming out with, we're calling it Akiyamart Basic, a cheaper subscription tier where you just get un unlimited access to the catalog of listings. And also I believe you get some, you get the property alerts too, which I think is, was my favorite feature.
Speaker: Hell yeah. I'm excited. We've been calling this Subs V3 for the past I don't know, six months that it's ah good for us to finally get it out. If you're a listener, you'll see this on the site. You'll see the email.
Speaker: We're going to probably do a LinkedIn post on it. We should brainstorm on that, Joey. um Yeah. marketing Marketing as a small two-person business has been a big learning experience. Like what channels work for us, what to focus on.
Speaker: Yeah. what do you Any initial thoughts on marketing and as a small business owner, Joey? Yeah. It's been really interesting. I think most of my thoughts are around the tech side of marketing a little bit. It's really interesting writing code for marketing as I was a mostly backend engineer.
Speaker: I did some front end as well, but I mostly focused on backend engineering, uh, and throughout my career and, Doing front-end marketing has had never thought about building websites for robots. So a lot of how you get your website out there into and people seeing it comes down to Google search and other search engine searches, so search engine optimization.
Speaker: And essentially what you do is you build your website so that it is understandable both to human users, which is the normal way we think about websites, but also if a robot, a Google bot, were to look at your website, it can easily...
Speaker: understand what the page is about, find more pages. And then then Google hopefully goes and indexes it. It's a little bit of voodoo. How do you please the Googlebot? There's tons of strategies out there. And now this was all new to me. So it really does feel like you build two websites, one for robots and one for humans.
Speaker: It feels like a game a little bit, right? And it's like, we we try to make something, but it's also like, you gotta, to in order to get distribution of your product and for it to be easily seen, you have to please, please the robots. Yeah. Yeah. ah Very interesting.
Speaker: What, one last sort of thought on subs V3. or launching all these new features since we're talking about it is that as a solo for this is talking to engineers out there, if anybody else is software engineer and thinking about building a business to yourself.
Speaker: One thing that I learned is the complication gets out of hand. Say you're trying to launch like 10 new features, and charge a premium subscription subscription tier for those new features.
Speaker: The complication gets so out of hand if you're trying to do like a big launch day and launch everything at once, which, you know, when I was working for other companies you with 50, 80, 100 different software engineers across the entire organization, they can afford to do that because there's a lot of different people that are there managing all the complexity.
Speaker: But when you're just one person, it doesn't make sense to hold it all back. And so what we chose to do, was, Hey, as a feature was complete, I just launched it out there to everyone that was an existing subscriber and merge that code, deploy it, let it run. People will report bugs. You'll fix stuff as you go.
Speaker: The complexity is just so much easier to maintain in your own head. get it one massive ah PR or having a ton of feature flags everywhere just to launch everything at once. It's not worth it. I think just build and launch as you go. And then at a certain point, if you did want to charge more under a premium tier, then add that tier as the last thing.
Speaker: And users will be happy. They get to test out free stuff. You are happy. You get people reporting bugs before launch day and the complexity just way, way lower. Yeah, I think once we made that decision, it seemed like ah there's like a relief with you. And I saw that we moved, we pushed things quite quickly. and But also that like some of the users... moved fast.
Speaker: Yeah, our users have been giving us some great feedback. Like things are broken, but people are pointing out bugs. So please, if you're listening to this and you're a power user, please keep on doing that. Again, Jerry's changing the site like every day for... I think it's been incredible. We look at our previous how-to video and it's like...
Speaker: It's night and day what the website looked like a year ago versus two. Oh yeah, go check it out. It's in the about if anybody wants to see a blast from the past 2023 Akiyamara. It's under go to about and then watch the Vimeo video.
Speaker: little cringe probably. little cringe, but it's okay. It's cool. Our first podcast was cringe. This podcast is going to be cringe a couple years from now when we listen back. right, Joey, I'm excited. Great job with Subs V3. It's now time to send it out in the world. And again, listeners, if you have any feedback, please let us know. You guys are our biggest supporter. And and thank you for not only using our site, but listening to our podcast.
Speaker: Smash that like button. Yeah.
