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A fresh start where even the option of outsourcing didn’t exist.
I started my mobile massage business in Higashi-Mikuni, Osaka. The system began to function, and I could see figures like ¥2 million in monthly sales, but a persistent sense of “frustration” always lingered in my mind.
This was the lack of control over the “lifeblood” of customer acquisition: “websites” and “advertising.”
I didn’t have the abundant budget of my previous job, nor a team waiting for instructions. How to protect and increase the limited funds I had? On this point, the option to “leave web production to professionals” simply did not exist from the start.
“I’ll do it myself. I have no choice but to.”
That was my “absolute rule” for my solitary new beginning. How to achieve the “fruit” of “orders” in the shortest possible time while minimizing costs. As a tool for this, I self-taught WordPress and got my hands on “Elementor,” a no-code tool that had only recently emerged.
I had not an iota of room to pursue aesthetic beauty. Would the fingers of the customer on the other side of the screen, who “wants to book a massage right now,” press the “reserve” button without hesitation, without even a moment’s pause? Focusing all my nerves on this single point, I began days of building landing pages (LPs) all night long.
Shaving off one yen, winning one customer. The “battleground” called Google Ads.
Just creating a website is like setting up a shop in the middle of a desert. The only, and strongest, weapon to draw people there was “Google Ads.”
Here too, I couldn’t afford to scatter ad spend like large corporations with deep pockets. “How to achieve one conversion at a low cost per acquisition (CPA)?” This was my daily mission, a battle for survival.
Every day, I was glued to the management screen, engrossed in adjusting keyword bids down to the yen and making minute adjustments to the LPs in response. In the competitive market of Osaka, where would a less capitalized me find an opening to win?
I couldn’t afford to waste shots on big keywords like “Osaka massage.” I searched for words that more specific and desperate people might search for—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 cost were poured into improving the accuracy of “web production” and “ad operations.” This was the lifeblood of this business.
The lifeblood of startup: the struggle to keep the gears of new customer acquisition turning.
In the mobile massage business, another lifeblood was “securing therapists.”
Even if I could attract customers, the business wouldn’t stand without staff to dispatch. Conversely, even if I had staff, if there was no work, trust would crumble in an instant, and people would leave. The challenge was to keep both “new customer acquisition” and “therapist recruitment” turning simultaneously with high precision, without a shred of error, using the mechanism of the web.
Once these gears meshed, regular customers would gradually start to appear, and direct phone bookings would increase. However, the “zero to one” phase leading up to that was truly a struggle in the mud.
The wording of the ads I placed, the design of the banners I made late at night—these returned to me the next morning as the cruel “results” through the ringing of the office phone.
“With the headline I changed yesterday, the acquisition cost dropped by 200 yen. With this, I can fight today too.”
Only the accumulation of these small victories supported my lonely self. To “self-propel” isn’t just about being able to use technology. It’s about directly touching the fundamental pain points of the business and wresting solutions with your own hands. It was sheer tenacity.
It is precisely because of these “struggles measured in yen, measured in characters” at that time that I can now direct the immense power of AI towards the “shortest distance to business” without hesitation.