My background so far
- Straight out of university, studied in the Philippines → studied in Australia → came home because of COVID → taught myself web → joined Toppan as a part-time writer *1 → started the Webflow blog → left Toppan → went freelance as a nomad with Webflow → traveled all of Japan → traveled Asia → living in Thailand
That is my background so far. I am writing this in my new house in Thailand. I have used Webflow for about three years, and by now there is almost nothing about it I do not understand. Once in a while someone asks me about a Webflow bug, and that is about the only kind of question I cannot solve.
*1: now Toppan Editorial Communications (shortened to Toppan below)
Why I chose Webflow
The reasons I chose Webflow come down to three:“code export,” “the funding news,” “the level of competition”.
Code export
Webflow has excellent code export: one click and the site you built comes out. And it hands you the HTML, CSS and JavaScript together in a zip. That alone is appealing enough, but back then I saw it asa hedge against risk.
If Webflow ever went under, if Webflow ever became unusable, the website would have to be moved to another tool. In that situation, being able to export all the code at once was very attractive. For someone about to commit to Webflow, it was one big piece of reassurance.
The funding news
I was actually torn between three options: “Wix,” “bubble” and “Webflow.” Then I happened to see a piece of news. Webflow, it turned out, had raised a large round of funding. Honestly, at the time I did not grasp how big a deal that was. But it made me realize all over again how much attention no-code was getting. The size of the round also showed how serious the company was.
The worry of “will it go under some day?” went away, at least for a while, with that news.
The level of competition
With nothing to my name, I would lose for certain if I competed with anyone. So the only road left was one nobody had walked yet.
When I first touched Webflow there were no Japanese articles about it, so research in English was mandatory. But that situation suited me. It meant two birds with one stone: studying English and studying web at the same time. I had just come back from studying abroad, so none of it felt hard — I was simply enjoying the study.
When competition is low, it is easy to rank in SEO too. In keyword-strategy terms, these were low-volume keywords nobody was bothering with. That is where I started writing. (And at first I was blindly translating the official Webflow site, nothing more.)
Those are my reasons for choosing Webflow. There were others, of course — the quality of the design, how easy it is to customize — but those came after the fact.Committing to this probably will not cost me. Maybe even I can compete here.That is what let me move forward
[Past] I really was a nobody.
Whether or not there is any demand for it, I am going to tell you about my life.
In my university days I really was a nobody. I had plenty of friends back home, but at university I made none in particular; I worked endless shifts at an izakaya and did nothing but drink. I had barely studied since junior high. And yet, for some reason, I was confident back then: “I can live a life more special than anyone else. I am somebody.”
And yet I failed my entrance exams and finished bottom of the class. No girlfriend to speak of, no hobby I loved enough to brag about. At my part-time job I was cheeky enough to “only work properly under the manager I liked.” I think I was genuinelya little brat.
Even that brat had a goal of sorts:to go abroad. It was not that I wanted to do such-and-such overseas; it was vaguer than that, more like “I want to see with my own eyes whether abroad really exists.” But I had barely studied, so I figured I needed English, and I settled on the Philippines, which was popular at the time as a cheap place to study. The cost was about one million yen.
My parents wanted me to take a job, so I decided to run the whole plan in secret. I saved a million yen, applied to a school overseas, booked the flight, got the visa. Behind all that, though, I job-hunted seriously too, because I did not want anyone saying I had “run away from job hunting.” In the end I told my parents holding a job offer in one hand and the brochure for the school abroad in the other. All I remember now is that they were furious, and I think I moved out soon after.
Having left home, I arrived overseas for the first time. My reaction was “so you really can go anywhere if you just get on a plane.” (laughs) The abroad I had wanted to reach for so long was only three or four hours away, which is astonishing. Telling the whole Philippines story here would turn into a short novel, so instead let me share one mindset I picked up overseas — the one that leads to Webflow.
What changed my thinking: “be number one wherever you are”
There was an employee at the company overseas — something like a deputy to the president — who was especially good to me. That person told me over and over: “wherever you are, whatever you are doing, be number one at something.” It is ordinary advice, really. Maybe not even deep. But at the time I had never once moved with number one as my aim.
There was a slightly detached version of me that said things like “the moment you compare yourself to others you are finished,” “earn efficiently at your part-time job,” “easy work with high pay is the best!” So I had never aimed for number one. A senior I was close to overseas also told me to “always aim for first place.” Honestly, I still did not really understand it at that point.
While I was living like that overseas, COVID arrived. People around me lost their work and went home one after another. The company I worked for saw its work collapse as well, and nobody could tell what would happen next. My friends there all got the call letting them go, and I assumed mine was coming. What came instead was a call saying “please come in as usual.”
I went in wondering whether I was there to do the final cleaning, and found twice the usual amount of work waiting. On the staff board, only my photo was left. Everyone else, I was told, had either gone home to their own country or been let go. Why I was the only one kept on, honestly, I do not know. Was I the most diligent? I really do not know. I was just working, normally.
Right — at that point I was not working with any awareness at all. Even so, I felt as though I alone had been favored and kept on. (Anyone who has done a working holiday may relate: being allowed to work long hours at a well-paid job is a happy thing. More work meant more money, which made me very happy.)
Having tasted, by accident and in a simulated way, the treatment that goes to number one, I felt it in my body: “so this is how good it feels.” I was working exactly as I always had, yet I was thanked more, valued more, and given more freedom. That was the moment the worth of being number one really sank in.
After that the president told me, “go home whenever you like; until then I will keep giving you work,” and let me work right up to the day before I flew back. Under lockdown there was genuinely nothing to do, so I am full of gratitude.
Back in Japan, a part-time job at Starbucks — and another “failure”
Back in Japan I took a part-time job at Starbucks, because I meant to go abroad again straight away. The life overseas I had finally grasped collapsed within a year because of COVID; nothing had changed, and I had achieved nothing. That man turned 24. There was a lot of impatience, a lot of anxiety.
Starbucks ran mostly on students, and I joined that as a part-timer. Carrying that anxiety and impatience, I drifted the whole time. On top of that, having people younger than me as seniors was new to me and I could not handle it well. Being number one was out of the question — honestly, I was not thinking about the company or the people I worked with at all.
Naturally the work was hard to do, I was hard to value, and uncomfortable hours kept piling up. Then one day I suddenly remembered that company overseas and the words “be number one.” That is where my change of mindset begins.
Things go well at Toppan
After a great deal of agonizing, I decided to become a designer. Then, without looking closely at anything, I searched for “designer” and applied to every job that came up. The company that replied was Toppan. Honestly, when the call came saying “this is Toppan!”, I thought, “what? did I apply to a company that big?” I realized later that the Toppan I joined was the affiliate written in katakana. No wonder I had not noticed.
At Toppan, at any rate, I decided to use what I had learned overseas and at Starbucks to become the most useful person there. That was because I hadlearned from experiencethat it matters if I want to work in a way that feels good. Be a good junior to your seniors, be a good presence for the company. I simply aimed for number one.
As a result I was seen as “someone with drive,” and the work started to flow. After that it was just a matter of trying hard and doing the job as usual. That alone earned me a far better evaluation than my peers, and I was soon put in charge of managing ten new hires.
While I was being valued at the company like that, I was invited into a side business: launching a website production business on the no-code tool “Wix.” In the end I was never assigned to it. Someone with more initiative than me apparently started building a site the moment they heard about Wix and submitted a finished one right away. I lost outright. I remember how badly it stung. I had let slip a chance I had almost grasped. As it turned out, though, I am now glad I lost.
Arriving at Webflow
After the Wix episode I started researching no-code. At Toppan I had already learned how much concept and persona matter, so I could easily imagine why they would narrow the business down to Wix. What I needed was a tool with low competition, a stable track record, and a real reason to be chosen deliberately — in other words, a no-code tool with a different concept from Wix. Wix wins on being simple and cheap. Its downside is that you cannot be particular about design.
Webflow and bubble, I felt, went the other way. This overlaps with what I wrote earlier, but this is the point where I saw the funding news. And that is what settled my commitment to Webflow.
At first I simply turned what I had studied into articles. SEO and design could be learned later. With that in mind I just learned Webflow and wrote up whatever questions came up along the way.
Page views grew and questions started arriving. While I was answering them, one of the people asking commissioned a site from me. That is where the Webflow business started. After that I built our own site properly and tried all sorts of things, A/B testing the design and so on. Incidentally, our site back then used a free Webflow template that I had modified — the most popular free template at the time. The reason was so that visitors would think, “if they can use a template this well, let us ask this person.” (* The site you are looking at now was rebuilt from zero with AI.)
[Future] Where I am headed from here.
When I wrote this piece, Webharu was not yet a company, and incorporating was the goal — and that goal came true in June 2026. As Webharu Inc., we accelerate again from here.
If you commission me, I will be genuinely happy. I am confident I can become the most useful person you have.
That is why I recently switched to a style of hearing what the site needs and quoting by time. Writing a time estimate makes the scope of work clear, and it has made things much easier for me too. Even when someone says “make it cheaper!”, all I have to do is remove scope, so I no longer have to wear myself down to cut the price.
I have decided that I will absolutely become the most useful person you have, so get in touch whenever something is troubling you. Building websites, Webflow, SEO, marketing — I offer everything I have kept learning over these past few years.Contact →
[Wrap-up] To you, worrying that you have nothing
If anyone has read this far, you will have seen just how incapable a person I was. But through lived experience I learned two things: “how much it matters to aim for number one” and “how good it feels to be a useful piece on the board.” If I had no willingness to throw myself at things, if I could not let go of looking cool and of pointless pride, I would still be a nobody. Without all the embarrassment, the failures, being ordered around by people younger than me, being labeled useless, I would still be carrying somewhere inside me the “cool version of me that a child draws.”
Now, though, my mind has changed: “the one who keeps trying even when it looks uncool, the one who claws their way back up even when it looks uncool” is the cooler one. I did not get that from some familiar story I was told; I understood it from experience. This change of mind does not come without action. Books, videos, seminars — stories heard from other people do not change your life. Reading this piece will not change your life either. What changes it is the moment you stop thinking for a while and take on something reckless. If you fail, you can go back. Back where? Take on something reckless again and find it. Then simply decide, on your own, that it is the place you return to. That is what I do.
Writing this, it occurred to me: if there is a good person among the people I work with, I can just decide on my own that they are my comrade. I will do that.
That was my story. A small brag: the other day I traveled to India withManabu’scommunity. Just over a year after going freelance, I was lucky enough to travel with superhuman people like Manabu and Oguro, two of Japan’s best-known independent creators. It was ten days with only five of us, so in my head they are already friends. If I think of someone as a friend, they are a friend (laughs). If you join Manabu’s community, say hello. Let us travel somewhere and become friends.
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I share the Webflow techniques and small tricks I have actually used and found handy while running a business as a Webflow specialist. I also write about nomad life, business plans, and my own experience and process. (The newsletter is written in Japanese.)
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