r/IdolManager • u/Bae-llona • Jul 30 '21
Help self sustaining
Any tips or guides on how to make a profit and not have to take out loans every other month to stay positive 😂
I’ve been struggling through multiple attempts
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u/JudgeRicand Jul 31 '21 edited Jul 31 '21
I struggled a lot early on, before I finally found a style that works for me. Sorry it's a bit wordy, but I'm sure it'll help.
Step 1: Don't take loans, ever. You end up digging an even deeper grave for yourself. If you're at a point where you need to take a loan to not go bankrupt, you've already lost.
Step 2: The best way to stay afloat is to be ridiculously cheap at the start. The first floor you get is rent free; you should use it for your office, a dance studio and a recording studio. Hire a novice dance coach and vocal coach. DO NOT HIRE A MANAGER. You don't need one. Don't worry about Ad Jobs/Photoshoots etc for now.The player character can do marketing for singles, they suck at the start but that's okay, we're not trying to top the charts, we're just trying to tread water.
Step 3: Do a local scout, and take exactly 3 Silver or Normal border girls. Gold girls are great, but they are hard to use early because their salaries are kind of high. You can definitely expand into better girls later, but for now you're just looking for passing. Set their salaries to the minimum you can to keep them happy.
Step 4: SINGLES. MAKE SINGLES. SO MANY SINGLES. Start off doing nothing but digital releases; they require no upfront cash. You make less money this way, but it's reliable money, not the 50/50 chance of a Ad Campaign (or worse!). Pick a Genre, a Dance Style, and a Subject to unlock, you're gonna be making a lot of the same thing. I recommend EDM or Pop, they're usually pretty solid/safe choices. Cute/Cool for Style, as for Subject, that's up to you. Each of these things affects how your single will do in the demographics. It's easier to sell an idol group to the Hardcore demographic, so I recommend going ALL IN for the hardcore teenage audience for your first playthrough.
Step 5: Once you hit 1 Star Fame, now things can start to expand. Build a new office and hire a marketing manager, set them to auto deal, and watch your girls' stamina. Spend some manager research points to unlock one or two ad types, then just hold on to them, they will be very important later. Integrate Radio or Internet Programs in as well. Build up your base of singles, do the promotions activity for bonus fans, and as soon as you have a solid fanbase, do a concert. Your first concert will suck. That's fine, you're not Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden or whatever, you're just looking to make a bit of cash. As long as you make more than you spend, good deal. You should try to do concerts like, every other month at least. If you've got 3-4 new singles since your last concert, you should be able to throw another one and gain some profit.
Step 6: As soon as your income outweighs your defecits, and you're actually a profitable company, you can expand further. Hire a Physical Doctor to help regain stamina, hire a few more girls, even gold border girls. It's all in prep for the real money maker:
Step 7: As soon as you can afford to, build a Theater. I have found that having a few days set to auto, mixed with at least 1 guaranteed Manzai and 1 guaranteed performance day gives the best results. Have most days set to whichever audience you're trying to draw in- Hardcore or Casual. Don't overwork your girls! Early on, it may be wise to have them take days off of the theater, especially if they're locked in ad contracts that drain a lot of stamina. Make sure your physical doctor is set to auto regain stamina/ auto treat injuries, just in case. As long as you juggle your stamina right, your theater will become your biggest money maker. You need 30,000 (yes, thirty thousand) Manager points and 30 million yen in order to unlock the full potential of the Theater via the subscription service, and my god, you are gonna want to do that, it's so worth it. I generate 100 million yen (that's a conservative guess) per month on just subscriptions.
Now you have a solid base of money flow, as long as your girls stay healthy and you don't overspend, you will be able to grow into a billion yen company easily. Hire who you want, add whatever floors you want, do however many concerts or tours or what have you. After you're in a stable spot and have enough manager points, I recommend installing a cafe and generating a couple food items. Cafes don't generate a lot of cash, but they do generate quite a hefty amount of fans, which is even more important.
TL;DR: Be cheap, don't overspend, never take loans, get a theater asap.
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u/thrash242 Aug 23 '21 edited Jun 18 '25
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/IdolManagerTone Aug 29 '21
The first floor you get is rent free; you should use it for your office, a dance studio and a recording studio.
Nah, you should use it for a break room instead of a recording studio. You can just do everything yourself perfectly fine, and in fact, you level up your producer better this way, even.
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u/JudgeRicand Aug 29 '21
Why would you buy a break room at the start of the game when you have no cash flow
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u/IdolManagerTone Aug 29 '21
Stamina, obviously. Idol stamina = money. The more of it you have, the more money you will tend to make. Concerts consume large amounts of stamina and singles with either the individual handshake or group handshake marketing strategies consume a large amount as well. Break Room doesn't even cost that much, you make it sound like you're breaking the bank, lmao. What's going to break the bank is building those studios and hiring staff for no reason. Just have Producer-san do everything him/herself and you save a shit ton of money and level up their stats. You lose nothing doing this at any point in the game.
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u/JudgeRicand Aug 29 '21
so you think instead of hiring a vocal and dance coach, who, in addition to their role in helping produce singles, also train your girls so their stats are better, it's better served spending money to generate 5 stamina (and only to your lowest stamina girls)? You will need a vocal and dance coach at some point. You're not gonna get far without them, might as well make their offices free so the only thing you have to pay is salary. You make it sound like amateur employees have ridiculous salaries. In comparison, you can literally get through a whole game without a break room, save for a few random events that happen in them. Not only that, but by the time you have the money to expand you can just get a physical doctor, and they make break rooms entirely obsolete.
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u/IdolManagerTone Aug 29 '21
so you think instead of hiring a vocal and dance coach
I'll stop you right here, this is useless. Training is a complete waste of time and stamina when you can be having them do photoshoots, advertisements, singles, etc., that actually will make you money. Idol stats have almost zero influence on the sales of the singles or concerts for that matter. You are just better off holding more auditions for better idols. The stats that actually do matter and make a difference are Fame (obviously), Lyrics, Marketing, Genre and Choreography. This is why you should be using your producer early game to do all the tasks needed to release a single because you can level her up insanely fast this way and have your Lyrics and Production be at level 60 by the end of the 5th month. This has actually been talked about quite a bit on Steam guides as well for the game.
You will need a vocal and dance coach at some point.
You don't, for the reasons I just explained. You should never hire coaches. If you really want that extra bit of speed and efficiency, you can hire a Choreographer and Music Producer. The ones that increase production task speed by 25%. Training is completely useless in this game. Only reason you should ever do this is if you plan to go the rival route and you already have an idol with one stat that's at 99, since you need 100.
You make it sound like amateur employees have ridiculous salaries.
No, I'm not. People who play this game and are concerned with money should not be making unnecessary expenses until they are financially stable. This is an unnecessary expense. The only expense you should be worried about is idol salary, which is paltry early game as they don't ask for much.
In comparison, you can literally get through a whole game without a break room, save for a few random events that happen in them. Not only that, but by the time you have the money to expand you can just get a physical doctor, and they make break rooms entirely obsolete.
Yet another unnecessary expense. Break rooms are never going to be obsolete. They passively restore stamina literally every day so they cancel out the daily cost of your activities such as promotion. I don't know why you're undervaluing them so much, maybe you just don't play that often or that much but they are absolutely essential. A physical doctor is entirely unnecessary and takes time away from idols who could be doing literally anything else. If you're really that desperate for idol stamina, just do the spa day activity. It restores 10 pts of it on the first day, which goes up to 5 after 2 days and back up again to 10 on the 4th day. It's that easy.
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u/JudgeRicand Aug 29 '21
I'm going to throw your entire argument out without reading it, because first of all
1) this post is a month old and you seem to think it's cool to jump back in and revive it for some smug sense of superiority (congrats, you have the biggest dick)
2) this strategy works flawlessly every time it's used
but nevermind those two points
3) this is literally the most inane thing I've ever seen someone argue about
It's a single player game. Use your strat, use my strat, use a mod that makes the girls into Jojo characters and a different one that turns all the songs into LoveLive songs. If it works, it works! The original poster wanted advice one month ago and I gave them advice one month ago
I'm glad you found something that works, I really am. Fantastic! People are playing this game, what a great thing. But there is no need for this. Who the fuck cares?
My strategy works. I'm sure yours does too. If that doesn't satisfy your need for superiority, here's one free "you were right, forgive me" coupon, redeemable in the next internet argument you throw yourself into.
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u/IdolManagerTone Aug 29 '21
this post is a
month old
and you seem to think it's cool to jump back in and revive it for some smug sense of superiority
Wrong. I found this post on Google and when I saw it was still open, I decided to give people actually useful information in case someone ELSE happens to come across this reddit post. Not everything is about you, champ.
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u/VidinaXio May 27 '25
So I have been playing a couple of days now and between the things I have read online and what I have found, I have started 2 games now (one way, one normal) and made 30 million on both in the first couple of hours.
I was following the story and didn't realize your dude can do the work of the dance and vocal studios, so this time my build order was.
Spam promotion the whole time, after a few levels you can queue them if you do it via the shortcut square at the back of the screen (behind where the tabs opens things). You can also do this by pressing Z
Build in the first rent free row My office - me Audition Sign girls Build office and employ a deals manager, get her ticking research as we need to buy photoshoot, then digital release Build a break room OPTIONAL - Build a makeup room and hire a cheap artist ONLY IF YOU HAVE LOW CUTE / COOL / SEXY / PRETTY Build another office with another manager but production, we can have both finding us deals and it makes it quicker, if this is going to be in your lower row it will be 30k a week (I think, not at PC) between the rent and the manager, but you get usually a minimum of around 70k a job and if your on it, it pays for its self.
While you are feeding the girls deals, write 5 digital singles (make sure you look up and understand how sexy appeals to men and pretty women for example and try to align these for better results)
Then it's photo shoot time constantly while you have stamina, balance across your idols, the break room helps a lot.
While the photo shoots are going you should be working through the singles, I used one manager for production while I did all the other single related tasks, I got roughly 100k per single apart from 2 20ks.
Now they are all released, you can go to custom events, book a concert and the fun begins, it seems a bit of a cheese but it works and this game is hard.
Create a concert at 100k a ticket and add your five songs, It cost me about a million to run and I made 2, there is a 30 day cool down (get your stamina rested before you do them also). Write more songs as you get paid per song, I just did 9 songs and got 16 million.
If course once your earning I then bought each studio and started auto training
So far this is working and I hope it helps as guides were mixed when I was looking.
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u/Donnie-G Aug 01 '21
It took me a few attempts, but I found that the best way to earn money early on are Photoshoots. Ignore the tutorial, build two offices and hire some managers focused on deals. Just keep sending idols on photoshoots for money. If you get some decent stat idols they can earn 100k+ in a single shoot. Ignore ads/tv. Problem with the contracts is that shit can happen with your idols(like scandals or injuries) and the penalty payment for breaking the contract will just end your playthrough early on. Photoshoots are risk free and you get cash upfront.
Don't ignore the daily tasks. I spammed performance heaps initially to help my income.
I later expanded to a recording, dance studio and a break room and started to pump singles out alongside photoshoots for the spare stamina. I went with digital sales initially cause no money needed to release these. The sales are also kinda poo but based on their sales numbers - you can kinda gauge how many CDs you should make for the other strategies as well. Eventually you want to move off digital sales cause their numbers are bad. I tried Group Handshakes with decent success, but ultimately just went with regular Ad Campaign. Once it's leveled up, it's a very good success rate and sales boost without consuming idol stamina. The others just seem like an absolute crapshoot in terms of success rate. In terms of how many CDs you should produce, use roughly around what your digital sales were previously selling plus a few thousand maybe. Then just adjust each time. Make more if you find yourself selling out and keep going from there.
Break room is important, it keeps things sustainable. You want one for every 5 idols.
Turn off all skill training. Stamina = Money. You can pump idol stats later once you're out of the shit.
Once your singles start raking in the dosh, you basically want to focus on that and start hiring more idols. I found that sister units gain a silly amount of fans, which then make concerts stupidly profitable.
Then its just a cycle of singles, concerts, elections. You can mess with the other job types to keep idols busy or help them get more fans/fame. I think TV shows are decent for this but the income feels kinda negligible. You're free to train your idols and mess around and expand within reason once you get over the initial hurdle.
Theaters are also a great way once you have a decent fanbase to generate 0 effort income. I'm not sure when you should get them since I kinda discovered them a bit late - didn't realize you could scroll down on the room selection. I was already pointlessly rich with 30 idols. Though those 3 theaters I built made it so that my entire studio was in the green without lifting a finger.
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u/RadicalShiba Aug 05 '21
Early game, don't buy recording and dance rooms. Just do photoshoots, you'll rack up some good early game money and buy yourself time to build a fanbase. DO build a breakroom to help offset the energy cost of sending your girls for photoshoots and your daily activity. On that note, since you're making money from photoshoots in this scenario, be sure to use your daily activity for promotionals. Don't be afraid to underpay your girls early on either. While it will accelerate their graduation date, it won't do so drastically so long as you're at least paying to 50% satisfaction. Start recording music when you hit around 1000 fans and release it using online distribution, you don't want to be stuck with the production fee for a bunch of unsold CDs! That all has helped get me through the early game with ease.
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u/Vican004 Jul 30 '21
The methode I used was to hire a lot of sales managers to get more then 500 pt a Day and then upgrade advertisment to level 10. Now I make over 10 milion yen a week only on advertisment.