Necessity is the mother of invention: A fight to the death with "DIY" and "Google Ads"

A fresh start where the option of outsourcing didn’t even exist.
I started a mobile massage business in Higashi-Mikuni, Osaka. The system began to work, and sales of 2 million yen per month became visible, but there was always an unshakeable “frustration” in my heart.
That was the lack of control over the “website” and “advertising,” the lifelines of customer acquisition.
I didn’t have the ample budget of my previous job, nor a team waiting for instructions. How to protect and increase the limited funds I had. In this regard, the option of “leaving web production to professionals” simply did not exist from the start.
“I’ll do it myself. I have no choice but to do it.”
That was the “absolute rule” of my solitary fresh start. How to achieve the “fruit” of “orders” in the shortest possible time while minimizing costs to the extreme. As a tool for that, I self-taught WordPress and took up the no-code tool “Elementor,” which had only just emerged into the world at the time.
I didn’t have an ounce of leeway to pursue aesthetic beauty. Would the fingers of the customer on the other side of the screen, who “wants to call for a massage immediately,” press the “book” button without hesitation, without even a moment’s pause? Focusing all my nerves on that one point, I began days of assembling landing pages (LPs) throughout the night.
Shaving off one yen, gaining one customer. The “battlefield” called Google Ads.
Just building a website is like setting up a shop in the middle of a desert. The only and most powerful weapon to draw people there was “Google Ads.”
Here too, I couldn’t afford to scatter advertising costs like large corporations with capital. “How to achieve one conversion at a low customer acquisition cost (CPA).” This was my daily mission and a life-or-death contest.
Every day, I was glued to the management screen, engrossed in adjusting keyword bids by the yen and making micro-adjustments to the LPs that responded to them. In the market of Osaka, where competitors are dense, where is the niche I, with less capital, can win?
I couldn’t afford to waste shots on big keywords like “Osaka Massage.” I searched for words that people with more specific, urgent concerns would search for—for example, words closer to the customers’ earnest voices, such as “late-night mobile massage Higashi-Mikuni” or “lower back pain limit massage,” and frequently rewrote the LPs to respond to them.
During this startup phase, all my energy and costs were poured into improving the accuracy of “web production” and “advertising operations.” This was the lifeline of this business.
The Lifeline of Startup: The struggle to keep the gears of new customer acquisition turning.
In the mobile massage business, another lifeline was “securing therapists.”
Even if I could attract customers, the business wouldn’t work without staff to dispatch. Conversely, even if I had staff, if there was no work, trust would collapse in an instant, and people would leave. The challenge was to keep both “new customer acquisition” and “therapist recruitment” running simultaneously and with high precision, without a hair’s breadth of error, using the mechanism of the web.
Once these gears meshed, regular customers would gradually begin to appear, and direct phone bookings would increase. However, the “from zero to one” phase leading up to that was a struggle in the mud.
The wording of the ads I placed, the design of the banners I created late into the night. These came back to me the next morning as the cruel “results” delivered directly by the ringing of the office phone.
“With the headline I changed yesterday, the acquisition cost dropped by 200 yen. Now I can fight today.”
Only the accumulation of these small victories supported my lonely back. “Self-propelling” is not just about being able to use technology. It’s about directly touching the fundamental pain of the business and wresting the solution with your own hands. It was the very obsession of that.
It is precisely because of the “struggle of one yen at a time, one character at a time” during that time that I can now direct the immense power of AI towards the “shortest distance for business” without hesitation.

Next Episode Preview: Chapter 8 “The Temptation and Shadow of Diversification: The Pressure of ‘Operations’ Hidden Behind Success.”
As the business stabilized and I sought the next step, I pivoted towards diversification. However, a cold reality of a completely different kind from the “startup” awaited me.