Show IH: 70-year-old indie hacker from Japan, just shipped my first product (and second, in Japanese)

Hi Indie Hackers,

I'm smile3, 70 years old. I run a small company in Japan called SMILE70 LLC.
Yesterday I shipped my first two products on Gumroad — within 48 hours of each other.

Background

I'm building toward "Yumoa Village" — a network of 47 retirement communities across Japan over the next 10 years. To fund it, I run 4 AI businesses solo:

1. AI Secretary (B2B for SMBs)
2. Video Automation Studio (full-auto YouTube pipeline)
3. IoT Property Monitor (vacant-house security)
4. Education Store (this — selling what I learn)

All of these are powered by Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI agent).

What I shipped

Product 1: "Claude Code for Total Beginners — From a 70-Year-Old Solopreneur" ($29)

• 130+ pages, 13 illustrations, scripts, templates, bonus skills
• 5-layer copy protection (zero-width Unicode watermarks)
• Beginner-friendly, every term explained, every command copy-paste

Product 2: Same, in Japanese ($29) — for Japanese expats and language learners

Why I made it

For 6 months I've watched young people install Claude Code, get overwhelmed, and quit.
Most "Claude Code beginner guides" are too technical, too fast, written in monospace fonts.

I wrote one for me — for the 70-year-old me who used to be intimidated by git push.
And I gave it the pace I'd want.

Numbers

• Total time to write: ~3 weeks of "calm mornings"
• Time from first draft to published Gumroad: 48 hours
• Cost: $0 (Gumroad takes 10% on sale)
• Target: $1k/month MRR by August 2026

What I learned

1. The "70-year-old who runs AI businesses" angle resonates. People remember it.
2. Bilingual product pages get more traffic (English on top, Japanese below — Gumroad's vector search picks up both).
3. Don't underestimate copy protection — even just stating "this is a licensed copy" deters re-uploads.
4. Existing audience matters. I had ~200 followers on note (Japanese platform) before launch. Day-1 sales came from them.

Open Source

I'm also sharing some of the tools I built (Pillow image generation, hybrid AI+text diagrams, font size checkers) on GitHub:
https://github.com/kaihatu-taro/claude-skill-shop-public

Links

• English: https://arigato70.gumroad.com/l/claude-code-beginners
• Japanese: https://arigato70.gumroad.com/l/claude-code-superbeginner-jp
• X (Twitter): @smile70_X

Happy to answer questions about being a 70-year-old indie hacker, or anything Claude Code related.

Thanks for reading,