Notes from the founder
Occasional notes from the KAZENA team — Taro and the people building alongside him — about Indonesia, the Philippines, and running a small business here.
- LatestVideo (Motion)October 26, 2026
Cropping a landscape video to portrait usually cuts the words
We built all 11 samples in landscape and assumed we could crop them for a phone's portrait screen. We could not. This is about the cuts we found when we rebuilt a separate portrait composition for every one of them, and the fix that taught me a few pixels of margin is not a margin.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 23, 2026
Cash went up but the month was in the red — why that happens
A month can be in the black while the wallet gets lighter, and cash can go up in a month that was in the red. Neither is an arithmetic mistake. I write down the 3 things that pull profit and cash apart — selling on credit, lump-sum payments and stock — and the month I misread in my own company.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 21, 2026
Forty real photographs, and a darkness chosen one by one
Our sample films were drawn entirely in code. They looked tidy, but the coffee did not look like coffee. Here is what we decided when we put 40 real photographs into 7 of the 11 films: which photographs not to use, how dark to make them so the text stays readable, and how we checked.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 18, 2026
Was last month profitable? Find out with 1 subtraction a month
Your body remembers whether a month was busy, but whether it earned anything is a different question. I write down how to check the black or the red once a month without using accounting words, and the mistake I made in treating a month of higher sales as a good month.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 17, 2026
Breaking "it looks cheap" into items we could actually fix
I looked at the car in one of our sample films and thought it looked cheap, without knowing what to fix. Breaking the impression into items turned it from taste into a list of absences — here are the 5 we found, and why the car later came off the page.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 15, 2026
Keep the shop's money somewhere other than your own wallet
When your own money and the shop's money sit in the same place, you lose the ability to tell whether the business is earning anything. I write down how to separate them, how to record what you paid out of your own pocket, and the mistake I left too long myself.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 14, 2026
We invented nine brands that do not exist, and let the industry decide what comes first
Nine of our 11 sample films are fictional brands we built ourselves, from the name to the logo. Here is why we did not use real companies, and how the thing a film has to show first changes with the industry.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 13, 2026
When money moves, write one line the same day
For anyone who has never kept books, here is the one thing I would start with. Not a complete record, but a single line on the day the money moved. I explain why it has to be the same day, and what I got wrong myself.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 12, 2026
Every sample is 15 seconds because only about 10 of them are content
We fixed all 11 sample films at 15 seconds. Subtract what the open and the close need and about 10 seconds are left for content, and what fits there is 1 action or 1 promise. Here is that arithmetic, and what we have not measured yet.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 9, 2026
We do not hold a single one of our sample films as a video file
The KAZENA Motion page we put up on 8 October carries 11 sample films of 15 seconds each, and 10 of them are not video files at all: they are written as HTML, CSS and JavaScript and drawn inside the visitor's browser. Here is why we chose that, and what we gave up instead.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 6, 2026
We stored 'no expiry' and 'never checked' in the same blank field
On 1 October I counted the values we store in order to connect to outside services. There were 11, and for 8 of them we could not say when they were made, because we had been keeping 'no expiry set' and 'expiry never checked' in the same blank field.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post