I did a coffee kiosk once. It went well, but required a large amount of energy and focus.
We did a little twist on the business model. Starbucks sells nice places to sit down. We sold drugs. The model, from logo design to promotions, was designed to create a habit loop where people would get their morning coffee from us.
It was so profitable that I seriously considered making it my full time career, expanding cafes all over the country. The only thing that changed my mind was 1) the startup boom 2) dealing with minimum wage workers is extremely depressing. The tech industry has its abundance, whereas with food and drinks, it was clear that income was limited and had to be managed carefully.
Did you consider paying more than minimum wage? I wonder if a higher wage would enable you to expand your talent pool to folks who would enjoy slinging coffee a couple days a week on the side to improve their situation while actually finding it fulfilling work. The math does seem fixed, there is only so much time in the day and the inputs have fixed costs, but if you can get it all well tuned to the point where effort and time in is worth it then it can just run for a long time until some change in conditions makes you walk away instead of tweaking again. It always seems to me like spending more for a better product should be the first tweak attempted rather than the race to the bottom so many places undertake.
Our value proposition was that we just provide tasty enough caffeine. It's a psychological boost - first thing on a tough day, end of a tough day, before a class on linear algebra.
We weren't competing with other cafes. We were competing with cigarettes. We aimed to be daily, unlike Starbucks.
Our key metric was quantity:
1. The more purchases they make, the more the lock themselves into the habit loop.
2. More quantity means we could negotiate cheaper prices for beans, cups, marketing, etc.
3. The main factor for quality was bean freshness. If a bag is opened for more than an hour, it rapidly loses 70% of its flavor. The faster we go through a 1kg bag of beans, the higher the quality of the next cup.
4. By selling 100-200 cups a day, our baristas skill up far better than those selling 30 cups a day.
Unfortunately, this process requires little skill other than the team being charismatic and pulling in more loyal customers. The race to the bottom is part of the business model. With food & beverage, you start at 20% profit margin and save money by controlling the supply chain (roasting, etc).
The system let us create a better product than the competition, but we couldn't really charge more because the target market just didn't have the money.
I'd love to read more about how you positioned your brand, especially on the design decisions that you made to entice customers come more regularly and how you manage to sell more cups than your competitors.
Habit loop: cue, routine, reward. This is how all habits form, whether it's shampooing hair or gambling/gaming addiction. Once a habit sets in, people can only control the routine, not the cue and reward.
Starbucks is an entirely different thing. As mentioned in other comments, ours was closer to cigarettes in market size and problem solved.
Reward: Caffeine
Reward: Coffee flavor
The caffeine acts as the bubbles in your toothpaste, it's there to remind you of the loop without being too strong.
Cue: Entering work/class, before 9 AM. Promoted with steep 'discounts' during this period - it was already profitable and looked cheap anchored against overpriced coffees like Starbucks.
Cue: Seeing logo on cup. The coffee was all in paper cups, not sitting down. It saved a little money on rental area and training. But the main reason is that people would walk away with the cups and throw it in a trash. They'd bring it up to their offices and their friends could see it. Students would take it to other buildings. We didn't have to put up any banners - the cups were the banner. The logo was bright yellow and black, designed to be highly visible.
Cue: Stressful periods - after classes, before exams, at the end of the day.
Marketing? It was quite straightforward for us. If saw someone walking by, we'd ask them to try. Especially if they were staring at the menu.
Those who were hesitant, we'd offer a 100% refund if they didn't like it. Nobody ever requested a refund.
First day, we sold 100 cups. After that, many were repeat customers. A lot of people are afraid to approach strangers. But if you do it playfully and without any pressure, they never get angry.
Yes but seeing the numbers I think this person could have paid workers more and still make a profit. I don't know if it's greed or robot like optimization
Well, look at it this way, by increasing salaries 20%, we'd double losses on a pessimistic estimate, and make no profit on a realistic estimate. Of course everyone starts a business being optimistic; businesses are gambles after all. But nobody wants to lose money.
It's more fear than greed. As an employee, you're always working hard trying to not drown. As a business owner, that feeling is multiplied. You don't just have to feed your kids, you have to feed your employees' kids. You can lose $500/month as an employee or $2000/month as a business owner.
But even if the pay was doubled, it would still barely be a "living wage". There's an argument that traditional businesses drive down prices and drive wages up, which is true, but it's still pretty bad.
I'd rather focus on startups, which creates few jobs, and destroys other jobs, but there's plenty of incentive to pay people well, and their salary scales well with the company's success.
Note that I mean profitable comparing to a developing country tech job, not to Silicon Valley standards. Also most of the profit is if you scale it to multiple spots.
One cup made about $3* unit profit. We sold 75-300 cups a day. $5k to $20k of profit a month to start with, 5 days a week. Rent is about $1k. So let's say $4k-$19k, with it more likely being around $6k/month.
Peak hours were 6-7 AM, 12 noon, 7 PM and it takes an hour to open and close. We can't miss any of these periods, and often have lines too long to manage. But that's a 14 hour shift or two 7-8 hour shifts.
To sell 100-200 cups, the minimum team size is two, because people get sick, go to the bathroom, pick up kids, etc.
If someone wants to do an 8 hour shift, that boils down to an average value of $1500/month. If they can do 14 hour shifts, we could pay them $3000 instead, but we lose some benefits of redundancy. I'd be paying 2x for a 1.8x gain or so.
Scaling the company means more quantity. If I had 5 kiosks, I could negotiate 10% better prices and push the 20% margin to 30%. My $3 profit margin becomes $4.50. I can give raises, but not double salary.
Let's say salary and rent totals $5000/month. At 1 kiosk, we'd take home about $1000 on an average month, lose $1000 on a bad month, take $10000 on a good month. If I paid them 20% more, that makes it $-2k/$0/$9k. There's a huge incentive to pay as little as possible.
If we expand to 5 coffee spots, it becomes more like $1.5k/$4k/$9k per kiosk because of economy of scale. Multiplied it would be $4.5k per month pessimistically, $20k realistically, $45k per month optimistically. Scale to 20 or 200 spots, and it does become hugely profitable.
In the tech world, if you pay 2x, you'll often bag a 3x programmer. Quality scales very well with salary. The output also scales.
With coffee, not so much - we sold great coffee at low wages, the kind that people come in skeptical and end up buying two cups a day, or take a bus from the other faculties just to buy. If we improved quality by a lot more, I doubt they would buy three cups a day instead.
* not actual dollar value, just normalized for simplicity
I'd be happy to share. But your email address doesn't seem to be in profile. If my responses in the other comments haven't answered your questions, feel free to email me.
Freshly brewed coffee is exactly one of the many, many things you can buy at Japanese convenience stores, which are franchises open 24/7, at walking distance from any inhabited neighborhood.
Also comparable to Italian coffee shops or "bars" (different meaning from standard English usage) which are also found at walking distance from any inhabited neighborhood. But not open 24/7, because of cultural and regulatory differences.
I woodwork at a local makershop, I started out making random things for my home and when I no longer had ideas for other stuff I wanted I’d make things and give them away for free to friends.
Eventually other people wanted to know if I can make them custom pieces so I began doing it for money, mostly to cover cost of materials and a bit of time for labor.
Not making big money from it but it’s fulfilling work and good to know I could still have a place in a world with no technology. Surprisingly, woodworking shares some things in common with building software.
I've been enjoying some minor woodworking as a purely hobby. I agree, it's great fun, and I think there is some common idea along with building software.
Wondering what you've found to be a reasonable amount of income vs work for sale? I'm not really interested in making money, but covering costs and feeling satisfaction would be good.
I give a fixed cost so materials cost x 2 is usually a good starting point for a minimum price, then add on if you think it's going to be very labor intensive.
The thing I love about woodworking (I’m not the op) is the upfront planning and design process, the immaculate attention to detail (an 1/8” off is often a big deal), and then the satisfaction at the end of being able to physically hold the finished product.
For commonality with software, personally, I like to do a fair bit of up-front design work before building something. Not days worth for most stuff, but hours worth. Scribble ideas, riff on them, iterate to a design I like before building it. And then during the build process, you’ll probably discover something you missed in the design process and have to improvise a bit; software is generally more forgiving in this regard, but it’s the same shape of process.
I find that when I’ve been doing more hands on stuff (small woodworking, welding, car repair, bigger construction), I get better at doing the software design stuff. My brain gets better at thinking through the consequences of design decisions and picking out small details that can have significant implications.
Aside from the things mentioned: Like software, wood is something that is around us everyday, but very few people really stop to think about how it's assembled. Wood and technology are things we can never seem to escape in human civilization.
People see computers like a black box that does magical stuff, in the same way they will look at a curved wooden chair and simply sit in it, without thinking how it got to be in that shape and how the carpenter knew it would be a safe design for holding a person's weight. People also don't think much about the types of woods used and their special properties, similar to how people don't think much about technology stacks and why certain applications work better than others.
In wood working it's also common to make other tools and jigs out of wood for you to use, to make other kinds of cuts easier. This is the same as writing smaller programs that do one task to help accomplish other tasks. A woodworker may use a series of tools and jigs to produce some end result the same way a programmer may pipe different programs together to make some end result. Each tool is a lot like a discrete program with input parameters that applies some effect to a piece of wood, and their combination allows for the production of a multitude of wood works.
Also, when you get good enough at building furniture, you will begin to wonder why people would pay so much money for something you could easily build yourself, similar to how people wonder why pay for Dropbox when you could just mount an FTP server on a filesystem and use some version control. $400 for a coffee table is ridiculous, I could build the same thing for maybe $100 in wood, and probably better, because I can be sure it wasn't mass assembled by a crackhead following basic instructions in a sweatshop.
One big commonality I found is that a woodworking joint (dovetail, mortice & tenon, etc) is equivalent to a software design pattern. There are very well-established procedures for common problems.
I've been wanting to get into this for awhile, but find myself procrastinating mostly out of uncertainty and fear of failure; but somewhat out of just having no idea where I should start, what tools I need to start, and what is achievable for a beginner.
To get a solid feeling of satisfaction from that project, I’d recommend a picture frame that doesn’t require mitres in the corners. Getting the length and angle exactly right is pretty frustrating for a beginner.
I started by watching Youtube videos. My first project was a modern bench built out of 2x4s, I picked a project that didn't require too many tools or advanced cuts of wood, and could be put together with wood glue. I also learned how to sand and finish wood to a professional finish. I then built this same bench again but better, learning from mistakes I had made. Then I went on to learn how other tools worked like jointers, planers, routers, bandsaws and learned about joinery. I then kept doing more advanced projects and seeking out more exotic woods to work with, such as walnut.
There's not much failure in woodworking as a hobby, if what you build isn't great just toss it out and try again. It doesn't matter much if you're just building cheap pinewood prototypes. Perhaps the only failure would be like losing a finger on a table saw or ruining very expensive wood.
I assume you've gone through this journey all at the makershop? How did you find it? I'd really like to find a place where I can say "I have no idea what I'm doing but I want to learn".
I've been doing audio mastering as a creative hobby for about 5 years but I've never done anything professionally. I was literally just contacted early this morning (EST) regarding an opportunity to do some work professionally for an indie record label so I am going to see where that goes. There is a "Full-Time Effort" clause in my employment contract that might require me to get permission from my company to do it, but I'm hoping it won't be an issue either way.
I'm an avid saxophone player and am taking evening classes in theory, so I made this to solve a problem that I myself had. Nothing else like it on the market!
Every part of this notebook is automatically generated with a bunch of python scripts: the cover design, the interior, the line placement, the margins. The program basically spits out a PDF which I can then send to print shops (which is the hardest part of the whole thing!)
The product is good, people like it, and the hardest part for me right now is sales - trying to get stores to carry it, or get traffic to the site to drive sales! If you know anyone who might be interested...
edit: Okay I've opportunistically created a coupon code THANKSHN for 10% off.
1. Email 50 print shops from searching google about the project and specifications
2. Wait for 5 of them to respond to you
3. Work with them on the specifications and obtain physical proofs
4. Choose 1 which prints the books with an acceptable quality-to-price ratio
Oh, sure. I mean, the first reason is because I am a backend engineer and all I know is python! The second reason is that it made it easy for me to iterate - you have no idea how painstakingly I adjusted the line thickensss, spacing, margins, etc. So being able to just update a little config file was super useful. And, finally, for future product lines (different sizes, for example) using code made it easy for me to, essentially, provide the dimensions of the book and have the code make the "right" design choices to generate a new PDF.
I think most users went digital, like iPad or kindle. There're apps where you can type notes or search and buy existing sheets. Of course paper is better for kids or beginners, so you could push your product in that niche.
BTW those digital sheets are pricey, so I wrote some scripts to generate PDF for my kindle, the output looked quite neat. I used LaTeX, Lilypond and perl to comb out unsupported stave notation from songs I ripped from public sources.
Hey, taking a look at the picture on the site I saw that you only offer a format of 8.5" x 11". If you'd like to grow to Europe, other formats like A4 would be very interesting and probably needed. I'd also be happy about one in A5! :)
I actually really really want to do this! It's a chicken and egg thing: do I try to get this 1 product profitable, and then use those profits to invest in new product lines? Or do I try to do multiple versions of the product at first (which comes at higher cost, since I'd start with a small production first?)
Also need to figure out how to ship to Europe more cheaply, since right now I'm sending everything from my little apartment in Brooklyn!
Maybe printing in Europe might already help? – See www.wir-machen-druck.de, probably the most inexpensive German printery (try Google Translator).
I can imagine using Amazon and its FBA service might be an option here – not sure if that's something you'd like to consider.
Please find a way to ship these to Europe! It would become my new notebook of choice in a heartbeat but I run through them like (insert some kind of simile here). I would also happily share this with all my musician friends.
This sounds awesome! I've been looking around at printing specialized notebooks (for various worldbuilding tasks) lately. Do you use local print shops and/or have any you'd particularly recommend?
I feel like the hardest part to get into would be finding a way to keep costs and shipping times down without maintaining a large floating inventory. Have you found that is a problem at all?
First, great job!
Second, I'm confused. When I used to play music, I remember buying staff music pads at a low cost. A quick check of Amazon shows a bunch of staff pads for sale.
What am I missing? Is it the combination of staff and notebook pages in the same book? Or do you use higher quality paper (e.g. are you the moleskin of music staff paper?) Just curious.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you find print shops? I've had random ideas for notebooks that might be useful to someone else before, and getting something printed has always been kind of interesting to me.
Lots of googling,and then emailing stores with my specifications until I found a place that responded and could do it within my budget and with quality.
If you're not fussy about some of the notebook features (eg, the specific kind of binding, or rounded corners) then you can do custom books at your local UPS Store, office max, etc. You'd save money and time by prototyping that way, wish I'd done more of that.
Very cool! I'm the CXO of TrueFire (leading music education software company with the largest library of online guitar lessons in the world) and would love to find a way to work together to get your notebooks in the hands of our 1+ million students :-) Let's jam on some ideas!
Would love that! Lots of folks have been asking for a guitar tab version, so if you think there's opportunity then I have a few ideas myself. What's the best way to reach you? jay@themusiciansnotebook.com
Investing. It takes a lot of time to have an understanding of filtering the good long term stuff from the bad short term strategies, but it's worth it.
If you're going long term, the platform doesn't matter at all. With short-term trading quants have a huge advantage (I went through an interview at a hedge fund, I know how smart they are, but their downside is that they have to have high sharp ratio to attract investment). I'm always looking at 5 year+ investments only
I've got accepted, but at the end I decided to go back to work at Google for personal reasons, so I don't know that much of the inner workings of the criterion.
If you're conversant in financial accounting, I can recommend https://www.portfolio123.com . They use Compustat data. However, building your own models will require significant effort, but it's worth it. I think of it as a site for the thinking investor.
I'm focusing on Bitcoin and physical gold / silver, as I view stocks and houses overvalued, but I always get downvoted here on HN when I go into details, that's why I prefer if people read a lot for themselves.
I like Mike Maloney's youtube series as a start on macroeconomics.
Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them.
Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are:
- Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns)
- Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust).
- Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at the energy that's securing it...there are a lot of reasons why I never ever thought of buying any alt coins.
Ethereum is very interesting, but it has some red flags for me:
- It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary.
- Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients.
- With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier).
- The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts.
- It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world.
- State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol
I got into crypto investing last year but with a strategy that nobody else seems to be doing (except maybe hedge funds). I don’t have the stomach or emotional stability for risky trades so everything I do is delta-neutral. Mostly leveraged futures basis trades, i.e. selling contango futures and buying spot, or vice versa on backwardated futures.
It will never generate the same returns that skilled long/short trading can pull, but I also never have a drawdown. Still managed >50% return last year so I’ll tale it.
I hope you know what you're doing and making money, as I was afraid to go into futures / leveraged trading so far.
I'm also working on making more money with some trading, but I don't want to talk about it, and even in the best case it has only a small of upside compared to just holding Bitcoin itself.
I understand your viewpoint totally, as I saw many friends getting into deep depression because of the volatility of the Bitcoin price. It is very serious thing. One friend of mine got very strong into cocaine, another friend's marriage burned down, another friend started day trading alts and lost half of his Bitcoins, and another friend (the smartest one) realized that he can't take the volatility and sold after a 10% loss. I view holding Bitcoin as a revolution, so I'm emotionally attached to holding it even if its value goes to 0. Still, I'm a software engineer, so even in the worst case I just work and get a high salary and probably start investing again.
One thing you could do is to just buy Bitcoin with 1-2% of your net worth, which is a great hedge for the current financial system, and also maybe that loss / volatility you are able to stomach. You're upside will be tiny, but you will get used to volatility a bit more.
Look at my top comment. Probably Bitcoin and physical gold is not for you, the important part is that for me long term investing is a great side project to make money. There are lots of ways to do it, and if you don't like my tools, there are lot of other options to be profitable.
I tried making a single player clone of your game agar.io: https://www.agar22.cf : can we be friends or can you share your discord? Did you make Diepix arena 2?
$150. At that price it was a much more risky investment. The software, hardware, regulation environment improved a lot. I bought as a high risk high reward long term investment, waiting for 1 BTC to worth millions of dollars in the next 20 years, or 0.
Photography in the early 2000s. Made enough to level up my gear multiple times over. Renovated houses from 03-07. But now my money making side projects are programming-based.
If one sleeps well, one might work better in his regular job, might live longer, be better able to engage in more activity as well as more strenuous activity, all potentially allowing one to make more money, be a better companion, parent and member of society.
Launched in 2016 for free. Started making money in 2018 with $3,000+ MMR. Referral only (side) business. I work full-time as an engineer/principal in growth.
I conduct a form of ethnography, embedding myself in the lives of consumers the way Margaret Mead did among Samoans. I interviews my subjects and the people around them, itemizing the contents of their home (photographing and videotaping), and accompany them as they progress through their day. Then I sift the resulting information for weeks, even months, looking for connections and telltale behaviors.
The service is used mostly by founders for small businesses and startups. I takes questions about sales figures and product lines and reconfigures them into questions about worlds, the context in which people unthinkingly live their everyday lives. The idea is that examining the beliefs and unconscious biases that people have will eventually yield profitable insights for these businesses.
So far, I've done market entry for a few Chinese companies into Japanese market, helped indie game design company launch a successful game, a boutique lingerie shop launch a new summer line, street musicians, and a few cafes and bars.
I do this on the side with hopes to go full time into it soon.
This is the most fascinating side business I've read of! Does what you do ultimately help whoever you are following in their business? Have you seen them make changes that have helped the business in small or even larger ways?
The goal of my side project is to use human science to put people back at the center of business decision-making. I work specifically with the founders of business and not their sales or marketing personal.
Studying consumers on their own isn’t enough to be successful. I look at all the data I can regarding technology, marginal practices, client and industry data, and speak to many experts with knowledge on the topic. I analyze the assumptions underlying what I observe happening and identify the gaps (e.g. between the client’s assumptions about their customers and what I observe in the real world, or between the industry’s assumptions about the future and consumers’ marginal practices).
Analyzing these gaps helps me see white spaces that have impact in the market, which allows me to advise my clients on where the market is likely to be years out and ensure that my recommendations are actionable. Since these are new perspectives they often make it actionable. Execution is something they handle and all of my clients have seen a change. Most are repeat customers.
The philosophy behind my approach to research is based on the phenomenon, the science of how things are experienced. I start by working with my clients to identify a human phenomenon at the heart of their business.
I use psychographics to define customer values, opinions, and life-style.
It sounds like this is a form of consulting where would-be founders outsource the idea-gen / problem discovery work to you.
How does the problem statement from the client manifest -- is it usually something like "I want you to determine if there's a market for X", or "I want you to explore this demographic of people," or something else?
Clients come to me with major and fundamental business issues, characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. Most of my work is focused on helping my clients get a view of their business from outside.
As others have mentioned this is a very interesting side gig. How did you find leads on these companies to turn this profitable though? I imagine any company that does this sort of research would have to be relatively forward thinking.
I used to be in technology consultancy and I built relationships and kept in touch. I sent out a newsletter, some reached back and asked for more information, others made introductions and got me connected. Most of the business I get is through referrals / word of mouth.
My base of operations is in Tokyo right now and there's a lot of demand for these services once people hear about it. Often people approach it for curiosity and then I work my leads to turn them into clients.
Not all companies were forward thinking but they have a common traits: empathy, more concerned on providing value to their customers, and emphasize long-term problem solving over quick fixes.
I think this is a fascinating project, but I have to ask. How do you get your foot in the door with consumers? I'd feel a bit sketched out if someone showed up and just asked to follow me around for a while. What's the incentive?
I have done a lot of consumer research for a previous job - I honestly think if you give someone an ear to talk to about almost anything a lot of people will do it.
With that being said, you might get a handful of, "no, absolutely not that's creepy" responses to the request, but if you ask enough people someone will say yes and be excited about it.
Getting started was (really) hard. There are agencies out there who enable the connection between the researcher and consumers for a fee. These agencies usually have a directory of people who volunteer for this type of research work.
It also helps to build a network, for starters I partner-up with many prominent content producers on YouTube and Twitter and pay them a small fee for introductions.
I also pay the people I study on the field (but not always, some are happy to help once they understand what it's for). A lot say no, but you only need a few yes. It's about drawing insights from a small set of data.
I've been reading books on philosophy, cognitive science and behavioural psychology for half a decade.
For ethnography I don't have any recommendations. I've read books largely to complement my thinking, phenomenology and existentialism. Here's what I've read (notable ones):
Being and Time – Martin Heidegger
The Principle of Reason – Martin Heidegger
Phenomenology of Perception – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time – Ernesto Laclau
Introduction to Metaphysics – Martin Heidegger
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy) – Martin Heidegger
I negotiated with my current employer, sacrifice salary for time. I get a few extra hours each week. My full-time job doesn't demand a lot. I manage it quite well and get things done during business hours.
I manage my time quite well, I get eight hours of sleep everyday and the rest I try to be productive. I have a wife who understands what I'm trying to do and helps me out. Needless to say I work on weekends and holidays and gave up all hobbies.
It's not easy but it's a choice. This has helped me build habits and a discipline. I am mindful and try not to bite off more than I can chew i.e. understand my limits.
My side project has also changed the way I think about engineering problems and solutions. Since I work on the growth team its complementary rather than diverging.
How do you convince founders, small businesses and startups to pursue this kind of ethno work? In my experience only big companies with dedicated consumer insight teams have the budgets and patience to do this kind of exploratory qualitative research. Just curious as to how you’ve ‘sold’ this service in to smaller organizations...
I did not market or sell this service. Back when I did this free, I worked closely with my mentor who had a startup (which later was acquired by a publicly listed company). I helped his company a lot. They were building an BI platform for big data.
That success gave me wings for a while. Word of mouth referring helped and I only took on clients who were recommended to me (i.e. they were aware of it)
Sometimes I meet business owners and founders at meetups or for lunch and we organically start talking about what we do (with no intention to sell). I always try to make the other person curious and then feed their curiosity. Also, I do an initial consultation for free.
The motivation is not money and my rates are pretty compelling (low) for the ROI I promise. Not every small business takes the opportunity but some did.
Do you live in Japan, the US or somewhere else? I work in marketing strategy and we use in-home and other ethnography vendors all the time. I'd be interested in someone who can work in Japan/APAC, or even to have someone else to call here in the US.
I'm a lawyer who doesn't do much (any) marketing. But when someone gets referred and calls or sends an email asking for help with setting up an LLC, helping wind-down or sell their business, or even something small like reviewing an NDA, I can jump in.
I'm solo, so I don't have any overhead and I can charge far less than anyone else. This is also entirely a side gig, so volume is so low that I can be responsive, helpful and more like a thought partner who is also helping out on legal.
Got any advice on getting a referral to someone like you? I’m a founder who could use some advice independent of the company’s counsel. I’ve tried my non-startup network but am only getting leads for the big firms. How do I find an attorney like you? (New account for privacy reasons)
My practice is corporate law, yes. Everything from basic stuff like commercial contracts, incorporation and financings to complex mergers & acquisitions.
That is pretty cool. I have a friend who mentioned he helped another friend sell his company once. He was a business guy, not corporate, but it kind of piqued my interest.
It depends on how busy my practice is. If it's pretty busy and what I'm taking in would at least cover the cost, I'll purchase insurance for the period.
If I'm not handling very many matters, I might affiliate with a firm that has insurance to keep costs down or forego insurance. If I forego insurance, I take care to disclose that fact to the client before beginning the engagement.
Tried everything:
youtube channel,
multiple tutorial websites,
music video making/videography,
photography, for artists and bands,
and finally sound design and mixing
The last one is the only that is actually working somewhat
Incredibly this almost exactly the path I've taken outside of my day job as a software engineer.
Product photography -> headshot/corporate event photography -> corporate video -> field recording -> music production
The "problem" that I've allowed myself to have is that I have the disposable income to take care of the gear bottleneck that many people in these fields dream of, but not the time overall to invest in the skills bottleneck.
Landlord, private equity investing, business and real estate project consulting. I take topics I’m curious about and translate the experience and skills learned into revenue.
Cold emails and calls, networking mostly. Get some business cards, hand them out freely and include it as part of your pitch if the audience is a right fit (person or small group of persons). Email in profile if you want to discuss further.
I used to run an Airbnb on the side. It was a mad success, but took so much work that I stopped being a good engineer and all my coding projects went to shit. So I closed the Airbnb, and projects I proved. Recently the guy sitting next to me on a flight suggested one day a week driving heavy trucks (semi trailers). In Aus, this pays $50-75/hour. Probably the same in the USA.
I had a coworker who literally did a rant, slammed the door of the conference room and quit. He was earning some side money playing online poker then made a go of it full time. His conclusion: This is a lot less fun when it's your sole source of income.
Yeah, even if you are good enough to make a decent wage, it can be boom or bust. On a long enough timeline, there will be times you say, make a bet with 4 aces but get beat by a straight flush[1]
Also, most poker players are American - so they're going to need to cover health insurance.
Maybe when I retire I'll give it a go, but I don't think it's practical to envision retiring early to play poker unless you amassed enough savings you could live without the poker income.
I do business strategy for startups through topographical business maps. It's the best strategy tool out there and helps avoid costly mistakes. It also aides in acquiring funding.
No website. Just referrals. Every founder I've worked with will always talk to other people about it and share my contact info. Works great because I cannot do it full time at the moment.
Email in profile if you have context-specific questions.
Could you talk a bit more about what services you offer? Do you have more of a consulting relationship or are you offering a service at a set price?
Also, one random question: do you find most of your clients are from the UK? For some reason I've always associated Wardley maps with the UK but I'm not sure if that's actually the case.
Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL and BCG600SIL Grinders.
The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use iFixit[2],[3] to drive the traffic. It passively makes enough to cover my own coffee needs forever. I spend about 20 minutes per month fielding questions. This all happened because my grinder failed and I could not get parts.
I would like to if time permits. There is a huge untapped market here. The difficulty is in locating the parts that are both unavailable and 3D printable. I keep it in the back of my head as I repair other items. So much expensive stuff ends up in a landfill over a tiny part.
I could see someday having a github project for replacement parts, each one iterating and getting better an better -- far beyond the original.
All plastic parts for appliances: dish drawer wheels, fridge shelves - are all designed to not last, run for $$$ on vendor site if possible to find at all. If you print it - they would come.
This. A friend buys and restores old Porsche 911s. He will pay anything for custom made parts that are rare as hens teeth. As an example there is a housing around the main cooling fan that seems to be titanium or aluminum or something very exotic. [1]
A company does sell a replacement, which he paid a fortune for, which had garbage tolerances and we spent weeks modifying it until it fit more or less well enough.
I suspect if you spent time on "classic car" forums you'd find owners of very specific models of cars searching for things you could make and sell for any markup, and every owner would buy one.
I would actually like to hear a little more about why the tolerances were poor. Were the major diameters the issue here? I could see a lot of adjustment happening on a car-to-car basis to get concentricity between the alternator fan and the shroud just right. I have very little experience with Porsches, but am a coordinate metrologist for a major aerospace parts manufacturer. I don't see something like this being a huge issue, at least compared to what I deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Edit: I actually looked into it a little more- it looks like the part is probably machined from casting given that there appear to be four stators which also locate the center mounting point. That's where the concentricity would be set; not by the casting, but by the machining of the center flange. So assuming that the fan's mounting points are within spec, I would say that your friend's part could just be chalked up to machining process that leaves something to be desired. This is actually a trickier part if machined from casting (without the appropriate tooling), but actually pretty simple (and wildly expensive) if machined from billet.
Probably some entrepreneur ordering them in small quantities from China from a place that makes frying pans one day, car parts the next.
I used to order a lot of custom things from China. Took a lot of trial and error to find good suppliers. They only accept bank wire as payment, so they risk little other than repeat business if they choose to be sloppy.
You're right, it was a cast part that had been machined, and (from memory) the machining was not precise enough to locate the alternator (and thus the fan) in the exact center. It kind of seemed liked a backyard job, but the price was anything but.
I think from memory the inside of the circle (which was cast) was not perfectly round. From memory the original Porsche part was titanium, and this replacement was aluminum. But I might have that backwards.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that circularity on the casting would be messed up, you would just think that the person on the mill would have the presence of mind to take a look at it before sending it off to the end-user. We reject castings pretty regularly, and that ID could be turned true without a great deal of difficulty provided the deviation in roundness didn't exceed something like 1/2 material thickness.
What doesn't sit right with me is the fact that for a small run, the price of even an aluminum casting would absolutely motivate me to get it right the first time. At the level of volume that the guy would have to be operating at, I would be test-fitting every part to a car before sending it out the door.
I feel like the relative scarcity of air-cooled 911s coupled with the difficulty of machining the part correctly as a third party is why the part itself is so hard to come by. If a person were motivated, though, there is definitely another way to make a suitable replacement more cheaply and easily with a modified design. That's provided someone is okay with not having a completely factory 911.
A 5 axis mill? Once you had the model you could get one offs in many contract shops. It is by no means trivial but if it is an expensive part you could make a very workable copy. Given the required characteristics of the air flow there are some programs that calculate blade profiles.
Maybe the part would end up even more expensive but that sounds like an interesting and worthwhile project.
I am into older Maserati's. Own a couple of them. I do a lot of manufacturing myself. 3d printing, cncing. The problem is that whenever I design a replacement panel, wishbones or various other stuff and try to sell them commercialy I will get sued by the original Maserati company. On a low scale it's fine, but you will never get a living out of it.
The only parts which are in a gray area are rims, exhausts, filters, springs and couple of other parts.
If we had a right to repair law, presumably it would allow third parties to make replacements when the original manufacturer lo linger was.
Even without that, I'm kind of surprised they sue. Are they patenting each part? Is there case law that covers this? Or is it just a case of bringing a suit to scare people I sto stopping? I wonder.
What do they sue you for? If you are upfront about what you are selling, and you didn't steal any IP, it isn't fraud or theft of trade secrets. Maybe they have patents, and claim you are violating them? I can't see how it is illegal to reverse engineer a part and sell a similar version.
Similarly, a German-based company started producing replica Mercedes 300 SL bodies but they were shutdown and the bodies had to be crushed. Although, this isn't quite the same, because the bodies weren't used as replacement parts to keep existing cars on the road.
I do this for old (15yrs+, not old-old) JDM cars. There's a massive untapped potential in this for any car-nuts who have 3D printers.
Just take a quick look through your favourite forum for your car of choice and there's endless threads begging for some random old plastic part that can no longer be found.
Interior trim clips, centre console fascias, exterior body plugs (where tow hook goes, where roof racks go, etc), stereo surrounds, door handle surrounds, etc etc etc.
Depends on your pricing and margins. There's a huge number of parts that are available but ridiculously priced, often coming out an order of magnitude in excess of what seems reasonable.
Take for instance a kettle scale filter. OK you probably can't 3d print these, but for something so simple they're insanely priced - £5-£15 for a bit of plastic. A whole kettle with filter costs typically £15-£35. Dyson parts are even sillier.
After material costs, time, shipping, advertising, & customer support, how much margin do you think there is to make on a part that already sells at £5-15 (ESP in an environment where spending £15-30 to get a new one is an accepted norm already)?
This is def not viable from my view- at least not for parts that are this cheap already.
lol. 99% of it is margin - it's 50% of the whole retail item cost for <1% of the material or complexity.
That's most of it left for promotion. Domestic appliances, large and small, regularly have small spare parts that attract 25 or 50% of the price of the entire item. Never used to.
That they're already doing well with small appliances in the niche of non-available parts says enough about pricing floor.
I recently had to replace the side wheel motor assembly on a Roomba. The motor and housing were fine, but the gears inside had worn out. I think they were just made out of ABS, so if they were printed in Nylon they would be a lot longer wearing. Roomba do make their robots (at least the 620 I have) repairable and a replacement of the whole assembly was only £20 so I'm not sure if the margin is there, but it is a bit wasteful when the only issue was the gears.
I've also considered creating some upgrades to the stock parts, but it's on my "some day I'll get around to it" list.
The hard part is finding appliances that need fixing. This is super easy if you happen to own a lot do things that break. If not, it becomes quite boring and tedious to scout out things that are breaking for other people, that you have no personal motivation to fix, to get the broken appliance and then figure out the 3d model for the bad part.
It seems like once you build up a critical mass of reputation/SEO you could get people to send you their broken parts to reproduce (then start advertising that specific part too)
Then that depends on either how much they're paying for the part and how much you enjoying 3d modeling and the trial and error dof 3d printing. You'll also need at least a real version of the part to copy and maybe even the appliance.
It's a neat business model: The person posts DIY repair videos on youtube, which drives traffic to his site. The strollers can easily cost $1000 new, and are often handed down / resold, so there is motivation to keep them running, and they have some weak spots which tend to break. The 3D printed replacement parts can be of superior quality to the original parts.
If you buy a bag with rollerblade wheels vs the plastic castering garbage that comes on a lot of bags you’ll get significantly more life out of them. I spend 15-20 days/month on the road and get several years out of rollerblade wheels.
Had a Breville expresso machine I repaired multiple times for my wife. The pump was decent, but the electronics were complete garbage for a $500 machine. The main problem were unsealed switches in a humid environment.
If you are someone that drinks no more than 1-3 cups a day, then I see no pointing getting an electric grinder over a higher-quality manual grinder, like the Comandante C40.
If OP is selling via Shapeways, it's printed and shipped by Shapeways in the user's choice of material. From the link, it looks like the only option for this one is Nylon, but that's about the strongest plastic you can get for things like gears.
Not necessarily suggesting it for this, but for anyone not used to shapeways they have a wide range of materials, with plastics of different types, metals (I have silver wedding rings I got printed there) and ceramics.
I think sellers may be able to limit the materials to known working ones (each material has it's own requirements).
The goal was the unique design, but they were cheap too for wedding rings. I recorded each of us saying something to the other, then took the waveforms and made a ring from each one. Printing came to about £40 for each ring.
> is there any way to scan it from your phone and hear it?
It's not detailed enough for that, though you can tell the cadence and reliably guess at the number of words. If you know what we said, and only we do, then you can see it.
If you take a look at the shapeways page OP links he mentions that the nylon material is technically not rated food grade due to it being slightly porous. This can cause particles of the food to stick in the holes. He mentions it's not much of an issue with coffee since that just means some stale coffee, however I imagine it might be more of a problem with milk. It looks like shapeways has a variety of material, however.
I recently ordered a part for my daughters dresser drawer - the Kenlin Rite-TrackII, and paid $12 for four including shipping. 6 to 7 years ago I paid $68 for a single part. To my surprise when I opened my recent plastic mailer envelope, I discovered it was a 3D printed piece. Any idea how one can 3d scan a part for exact copy?
They make full on 3d scanners but most parts do not need "3d scanning" so much as they need a few minutes in the hand of someone with a caliper and a sketch pad.
There are a few services including Autodesk ReCap which you can give a number of high quality photos and a 3D model will be produced which you can then scale appropriately in your CAD software
The field of photogrammetry deals with taking multiple photos of something to create a 3d model. There is free software for consumers that can do this. But there are a lot of limitations and currently the traditional way of making a CAD model more or less by hand is almost always faster/cheaper and more accurate.
For most things scanning works pretty poorly. IME, you are better off you use some calipers and a free to use tool like Fusion 360 or TinkerCAD, or a really free tool like OpenSCAD to generate the model.
are you concerned about the low amounts of ground nylon that your customers (or really the original customers) were ingesting if this part does wear down over time?
PA2200 Nylon is not water soluble so any particles would stay with the discarded grounds. It’s pretty harmless stuff anyway. Breville’s version wears fast but the ShapeWays one has held up really well. Check out the two year wear study on the ShapeWays shop page; I am really happy with how minimal it is.
Aah I wasn't thinking it through. I guess as long as the fragments are caught in the filter during the coffee making it's likely fine. And for some reason I forgot that coffee is essentially strained/filtered. I have a jura and so I just press a button and it goooooess.
I know a guy who runs a multi-million dollar business making replacement parts for a particular type of business machine that you find in a lot of places. There are only a few OEMs and they all stopped making a similar (critical) component for their older models.
He was originally in the business of repairing these machines and then discovered he could no longer buy these parts from the OEMs so he learned CAD and CNC and injection molding and started making them a few years ago. He has a 3D printer for prototyping, but he needs to injection mold part of the final product because there is no filament in the particular material that he needs. His business has transitioned from repair to manufacturing and now he mostly sells replacement parts to other repair shops.
I don't want to disturb his business by talking about it in detail, but the point is that I think there are and will be many opportunities around repair parts that manufacturers are unwilling to provide because they'd rather be selling new machines. Aside from the environmental impact, that's fine since there are many people who won't go the repair route, and then there's a secondary market for those who will make parts and repair the machines.
I used to know tool and die makers that did that back in the day. Sadly, a lot of manufacturing was sent off to China. I assume there are Chinese people doing similar things.
I'm willing to bet the quality of a lot of these is shite, though. Plus people in the US would most likely want to buy from a seller in the US (faster shipping + implied better quality).
There is a solution to so many problems here (creating usually unavailable parts for machines/devices/products) but the problem is knowing which parts are in demand and currently have no supplier.
A maker would need to have an interest or hobby in such a device & discover a need for the item for it to come into fruition. But just think of how many general 3D printed parts could be printed as solutions for so many products out there that are going unmade.
Not all Chinese stuff is bad, but there's so much bad stuff that it's hard to know what's good. "Chinesium" is an accurate description of the situation.
In the case of American-made products, it's easy enough to do the research to determine if a product is good, or even try it before you buy. I don't know how good Chevys are these days—the newest one I've driven is a 2005 truck—but they're a known entity and you can test drive one for free. Ordering something online from China is a stab in the dark.
I use a super cheap hand grinder I bought off amazon (the stainless steel one that there are 100 different variations of on amazon). There is a plastic part that breaks after about 6 months of usage. Someone modeled and uploaded a replacement piece to Thingiverse. The grinder is cheap enough that it is disposable, but since it is so easy to print a replacement piece with my $179 3D printer, I haven’t needed to throw it away. I hope that at some point 3D printing becomes more accessible and affordable, and with more materials, that more and more products are repaired instead of replaced.
Another random datapoint. I have been using a Monoprice MP Select Mini V2 [1] for a couple years (similar price point) and am extremely pleased. After leveling the bed the first time I've done no maintenance and it seems to print when asked with no trouble. I typically use it not at all for a few months, then up to multiple times a day when working on something.
I've helped a friend with this one (I have a MP Select V2 full size), and I can tell you the thing is a workhorse. Pretty sure he has it running 5 days a week with 5-7 hour prints per day. He keeps the moving parts lubricated but that's about it. Just set him up with Octoprint to make the loading and monitoring easier.
It's quite toxic. It causes cancer among other problems. A lot of things used to be Cadmium plated because it's an excellent rustproofer. Some things in the aerospace world still are, because for some things, the safety risk from corrosion outweighs the health risk.
It's not a great idea to grind or sand Cadmium plated items, because it kicks the Cd into a fine dust that you will inhale and will be absorbed into your system.
So far I only brushed it, and am not sure my model is Cd plated or not but well. The more you dig into materials, the more you realize you were handling toxic things all the time without knowing it.
My father-in-law as a kid used to go to the junkyard and break open thermometers and dump the mercury out into his hand. Seems like he did it a lot. Dunno if he ever suffered any health consequences because of it; but, you know, he didn't know any better. He just thought it was neat.
The other day i accidentally broke a magnetron ceramic heatsink. I knew of the potential toxicity (disassembled a dozen so far) but this time i fucked up. Cue 3 days of ventilation and cm by cm wet cleaning.
Your father-in-law wasn’t in any great deal of danger. Thermometers used elemental mercury, meaning pure mercury that hasn’t reacted with anything. The only real risk from elemental mercury is that it has a low vapor pressure, and can therefore be inhaled, which can be dangerous. Since your FIL was outdoors, the risk of vaporization was high, but risk of inhaling a concentrated amount was low. Had be been doing this in, say, a tool shed, then the danger would have been much greater.
The kind of mercury you hear about that is incredibly toxic and can absorb through your skin are actually mercury salts (ethyl mercury, methyl mercury, etc.) and aren’t as likely to be found.
Metal on metal knee and hip joints replacements contain cadmium. It can ruin your life. If you want to see a good documentary about problems with modern medical devices, check http://bleedingedgedoc.com/
Don't want to share the website publicly, but the reason Amazon affiliate works so well is that people don't just buy the product you're referring but a ton of additional products too.
On a given day, a customer might buy 1 MIDI keyboard that I referred. But he will also buy books, CDs, home tools and anything else he needs, and I get 6% of all of that
Not op, but the alesis V ones have such a comfy key weighting and are quite cheap. Only thing I don’t like is the drumpad on the left feels cheaply made
Stay away from M-Audio. The newer Akais aren't very good either. Try Nektar.
It all depends on how well you already know the keyboard though. A cheap Akai LPK25 is good enough for absolute beginners. But if you have some piano playing experience, I would go for something like an Alesis VI49
I used to do POD stuff, but bailed on my former platform a few years ago. How do you find Red Bubble's quality? I have a few designs requested by family that I'd like to get onto shirts (and also sell).
I taught myself circuit board design and found a niche market that I designed a few products for that sold like gangbusters with zero marketing for a few years until the market cooled off and low cost knock offs started entering the market.
I also found that you could use the same CAD program that I learned to design PCB's to draw outlines to cut out on the laser CNC machine at the local maker space. I ended up finding a niche on ebay building open air computer cases. Because of the economics of shipping large items from overseas and the low cost of the materials I was using I was able to under cut the imports on price by like 60% and still make a nice amount of money on a $/ hour basis.
In hind sight the best way to find these kinds of opportunities is not to be looking for them. You really just need to get a really deep understanding of a hobby or industry or market that interests you in some way and once you have that then these sorts of things kind of pop out of the woodwork.
> I taught myself circuit board design and found a niche market that I designed a few products for that sold like gangbusters with zero marketing for a few years until the market cooled off and low cost knock offs started entering the market.
Can you elaborate a bit? Did you teach yourself literal circuit board design (but already had a background in electronics/hardware)? Or did you start from scratch and learn how to design an electronic circuit?
What was the niche (broadly?)
> In hind sight the best way to find these kinds of opportunities is not to be looking for them. You really just need to get a really deep understanding of a hobby or industry or market that interests you in some way and once you have that then these sorts of things kind of pop out of the woodwork.
1000% agree. The single best way to find an idea is to be seriously and deeply involved in a hobby/area of interest. There are so many ideas out there screaming you in the face.
It was a bit of both, My degree is in CS, I only took one EE/hardware class in school that was more about programming CPLDs than anything else. These days really all you need to know math wise to build simple stuff is V=IR and P=IV, things everyone learns in high school physics class. Everything else you can usually get by looking at the reference circuits in data sheets or looking it up as you go. The hardest part for me was finding the time to get over the learning curve of the PCB design software, in my case I learned EagleCAD. After I did that and formed good habits with how I used the software I now able to do some pretty complex stuff. The limiting factor now is probably that my ambition has outgrown the software I learned.
The niche was building adapters for old server power supplies so you can re-purpose them for use as general purpose 12 Volt power supplies. It was a thing in the RC community for a while to charge batteries but it got really big in the 2014 - 2017 time frame due to the Bitcoin mining industry needing low cost high wattage PSUs.
Helping organize small music concerts and festivals and recording local indie bands. Mostly friends or friends of friends.
I've been doing it since I was a teen, before I started programming, and the first significant amount of money I made was after I invested all my savings in a small festival I organized with my friends.
As for recording, it's been a fun ride because equipment go so much better and accessible since I started 15 years ago. For recording, having portable stuff is nice, but affording to pick studios because of the room instead of the equipment was a real game changer.
I do electronics repair for cars. For many older and rare cars it's usually no longer possible (or desired) to replace broken electronic components such as the engine or transmission controller. So owners contact me to have the part repaired instead of replacing it.
The repairs are usually not that challenging for me, and it won't make me rich, but it's a great way for me to clear my head from challenges with my tech startup. It also gives me access to some very rare and expensive cars. Obviously you need to test drive the car if you just fixed the ECU ;-)
That sounds really interesting. By repairs do you mean mostly board level type stuff? How do you handle all of the encryption and road blocks OEMs like to put on the software? Doesn’t that make it challenging to get a board diagnosed or operating properly again?
Mostly board repairs, but also wiring on the cars itself.
Like I said, I mostly work on older cars, since those are the ones where it makes economic sense to do this kind of repairs. Those cars are usually from the era where ECU's had little to no encryption, or even no software at all (pure electronic based ECU's).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadWe did a little twist on the business model. Starbucks sells nice places to sit down. We sold drugs. The model, from logo design to promotions, was designed to create a habit loop where people would get their morning coffee from us.
It was so profitable that I seriously considered making it my full time career, expanding cafes all over the country. The only thing that changed my mind was 1) the startup boom 2) dealing with minimum wage workers is extremely depressing. The tech industry has its abundance, whereas with food and drinks, it was clear that income was limited and had to be managed carefully.
We weren't competing with other cafes. We were competing with cigarettes. We aimed to be daily, unlike Starbucks.
Our key metric was quantity: 1. The more purchases they make, the more the lock themselves into the habit loop. 2. More quantity means we could negotiate cheaper prices for beans, cups, marketing, etc. 3. The main factor for quality was bean freshness. If a bag is opened for more than an hour, it rapidly loses 70% of its flavor. The faster we go through a 1kg bag of beans, the higher the quality of the next cup. 4. By selling 100-200 cups a day, our baristas skill up far better than those selling 30 cups a day.
Unfortunately, this process requires little skill other than the team being charismatic and pulling in more loyal customers. The race to the bottom is part of the business model. With food & beverage, you start at 20% profit margin and save money by controlling the supply chain (roasting, etc).
The system let us create a better product than the competition, but we couldn't really charge more because the target market just didn't have the money.
Starbucks is an entirely different thing. As mentioned in other comments, ours was closer to cigarettes in market size and problem solved.
Reward: Caffeine Reward: Coffee flavor
The caffeine acts as the bubbles in your toothpaste, it's there to remind you of the loop without being too strong.
Cue: Entering work/class, before 9 AM. Promoted with steep 'discounts' during this period - it was already profitable and looked cheap anchored against overpriced coffees like Starbucks.
Cue: Seeing logo on cup. The coffee was all in paper cups, not sitting down. It saved a little money on rental area and training. But the main reason is that people would walk away with the cups and throw it in a trash. They'd bring it up to their offices and their friends could see it. Students would take it to other buildings. We didn't have to put up any banners - the cups were the banner. The logo was bright yellow and black, designed to be highly visible.
Cue: Stressful periods - after classes, before exams, at the end of the day.
Marketing? It was quite straightforward for us. If saw someone walking by, we'd ask them to try. Especially if they were staring at the menu.
Those who were hesitant, we'd offer a 100% refund if they didn't like it. Nobody ever requested a refund.
First day, we sold 100 cups. After that, many were repeat customers. A lot of people are afraid to approach strangers. But if you do it playfully and without any pressure, they never get angry.
It's more fear than greed. As an employee, you're always working hard trying to not drown. As a business owner, that feeling is multiplied. You don't just have to feed your kids, you have to feed your employees' kids. You can lose $500/month as an employee or $2000/month as a business owner.
But even if the pay was doubled, it would still barely be a "living wage". There's an argument that traditional businesses drive down prices and drive wages up, which is true, but it's still pretty bad.
I'd rather focus on startups, which creates few jobs, and destroys other jobs, but there's plenty of incentive to pay people well, and their salary scales well with the company's success.
One cup made about $3* unit profit. We sold 75-300 cups a day. $5k to $20k of profit a month to start with, 5 days a week. Rent is about $1k. So let's say $4k-$19k, with it more likely being around $6k/month.
Peak hours were 6-7 AM, 12 noon, 7 PM and it takes an hour to open and close. We can't miss any of these periods, and often have lines too long to manage. But that's a 14 hour shift or two 7-8 hour shifts.
To sell 100-200 cups, the minimum team size is two, because people get sick, go to the bathroom, pick up kids, etc.
If someone wants to do an 8 hour shift, that boils down to an average value of $1500/month. If they can do 14 hour shifts, we could pay them $3000 instead, but we lose some benefits of redundancy. I'd be paying 2x for a 1.8x gain or so.
Scaling the company means more quantity. If I had 5 kiosks, I could negotiate 10% better prices and push the 20% margin to 30%. My $3 profit margin becomes $4.50. I can give raises, but not double salary.
Let's say salary and rent totals $5000/month. At 1 kiosk, we'd take home about $1000 on an average month, lose $1000 on a bad month, take $10000 on a good month. If I paid them 20% more, that makes it $-2k/$0/$9k. There's a huge incentive to pay as little as possible.
If we expand to 5 coffee spots, it becomes more like $1.5k/$4k/$9k per kiosk because of economy of scale. Multiplied it would be $4.5k per month pessimistically, $20k realistically, $45k per month optimistically. Scale to 20 or 200 spots, and it does become hugely profitable.
In the tech world, if you pay 2x, you'll often bag a 3x programmer. Quality scales very well with salary. The output also scales.
With coffee, not so much - we sold great coffee at low wages, the kind that people come in skeptical and end up buying two cups a day, or take a bus from the other faculties just to buy. If we improved quality by a lot more, I doubt they would buy three cups a day instead.
* not actual dollar value, just normalized for simplicity
Drugs? As in prescription drugs?
That's exactly how they operate - you walk in, ask for an espresso, get it in 30 seconds, down it, slam down a coin, walk out.
Also comparable to Italian coffee shops or "bars" (different meaning from standard English usage) which are also found at walking distance from any inhabited neighborhood. But not open 24/7, because of cultural and regulatory differences.
Eventually other people wanted to know if I can make them custom pieces so I began doing it for money, mostly to cover cost of materials and a bit of time for labor.
Not making big money from it but it’s fulfilling work and good to know I could still have a place in a world with no technology. Surprisingly, woodworking shares some things in common with building software.
Wondering what you've found to be a reasonable amount of income vs work for sale? I'm not really interested in making money, but covering costs and feeling satisfaction would be good.
For commonality with software, personally, I like to do a fair bit of up-front design work before building something. Not days worth for most stuff, but hours worth. Scribble ideas, riff on them, iterate to a design I like before building it. And then during the build process, you’ll probably discover something you missed in the design process and have to improvise a bit; software is generally more forgiving in this regard, but it’s the same shape of process.
I find that when I’ve been doing more hands on stuff (small woodworking, welding, car repair, bigger construction), I get better at doing the software design stuff. My brain gets better at thinking through the consequences of design decisions and picking out small details that can have significant implications.
People see computers like a black box that does magical stuff, in the same way they will look at a curved wooden chair and simply sit in it, without thinking how it got to be in that shape and how the carpenter knew it would be a safe design for holding a person's weight. People also don't think much about the types of woods used and their special properties, similar to how people don't think much about technology stacks and why certain applications work better than others.
In wood working it's also common to make other tools and jigs out of wood for you to use, to make other kinds of cuts easier. This is the same as writing smaller programs that do one task to help accomplish other tasks. A woodworker may use a series of tools and jigs to produce some end result the same way a programmer may pipe different programs together to make some end result. Each tool is a lot like a discrete program with input parameters that applies some effect to a piece of wood, and their combination allows for the production of a multitude of wood works.
Also, when you get good enough at building furniture, you will begin to wonder why people would pay so much money for something you could easily build yourself, similar to how people wonder why pay for Dropbox when you could just mount an FTP server on a filesystem and use some version control. $400 for a coffee table is ridiculous, I could build the same thing for maybe $100 in wood, and probably better, because I can be sure it wasn't mass assembled by a crackhead following basic instructions in a sweatshop.
I've been wanting to get into this for awhile, but find myself procrastinating mostly out of uncertainty and fear of failure; but somewhat out of just having no idea where I should start, what tools I need to start, and what is achievable for a beginner.
How about a simple picture frame?
:D
To get a solid feeling of satisfaction from that project, I’d recommend a picture frame that doesn’t require mitres in the corners. Getting the length and angle exactly right is pretty frustrating for a beginner.
There's not much failure in woodworking as a hobby, if what you build isn't great just toss it out and try again. It doesn't matter much if you're just building cheap pinewood prototypes. Perhaps the only failure would be like losing a finger on a table saw or ruining very expensive wood.
I'm an avid saxophone player and am taking evening classes in theory, so I made this to solve a problem that I myself had. Nothing else like it on the market!
Every part of this notebook is automatically generated with a bunch of python scripts: the cover design, the interior, the line placement, the margins. The program basically spits out a PDF which I can then send to print shops (which is the hardest part of the whole thing!)
The product is good, people like it, and the hardest part for me right now is sales - trying to get stores to carry it, or get traffic to the site to drive sales! If you know anyone who might be interested...
edit: Okay I've opportunistically created a coupon code THANKSHN for 10% off.
Couldn’t you just make it in Adobe InDesign? Cool item, btw. I used to play saxophone years back.
BTW those digital sheets are pricey, so I wrote some scripts to generate PDF for my kindle, the output looked quite neat. I used LaTeX, Lilypond and perl to comb out unsupported stave notation from songs I ripped from public sources.
Also need to figure out how to ship to Europe more cheaply, since right now I'm sending everything from my little apartment in Brooklyn!
and it appears they have at least some info for some other european countries :-)
disclaimer: not affiliated with them, though i did some work for them a few years ago
I feel like the hardest part to get into would be finding a way to keep costs and shipping times down without maintaining a large floating inventory. Have you found that is a problem at all?
- Marketing
- Finding a shop which produces at acceptable quality
- Finding the balance between order volume and cost
If you're not fussy about physical characteristics (eg, rounded corners) then I'd prototype at the local office max - pretty affordable and fast.
If you email me I can maybe give some more details! Maybe I should start a business doing print shop consulting...
- combination of staff paper and college-ruled lines
- perforated to easily tear out pages
- three-hole punched
- decent quality paper, binding, cover material
You'll find that there's surprisingly nothing like it on Amazon! My inspiration was those cheap Mead spiral notebooks - incredibly functional.
If you're not fussy about some of the notebook features (eg, the specific kind of binding, or rounded corners) then you can do custom books at your local UPS Store, office max, etc. You'd save money and time by prototyping that way, wish I'd done more of that.
Can you expand on what you mean by this? Seems like straightforward design(s) that you can just keep printing over and over..
I like Mike Maloney's youtube series as a start on macroeconomics.
Thanks.
This is the video series I was writing about: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE88E9ICdipidHkTehs1Vb...
Mike Maloney most important part of the film about investing in silver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAAIwef3dOg
Why you should invest in Bitcoin (Tuur Demester, 2013): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LQu-eIOO0
Bitcoin Whitepaper: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Origins of money (by Nick Szabo): http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html
Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are:
- Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns)
- Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust).
- Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at the energy that's securing it...there are a lot of reasons why I never ever thought of buying any alt coins.
- It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary.
- Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients.
- With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier).
- The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts.
- It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world.
- State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol
It will never generate the same returns that skilled long/short trading can pull, but I also never have a drawdown. Still managed >50% return last year so I’ll tale it.
I'm also working on making more money with some trading, but I don't want to talk about it, and even in the best case it has only a small of upside compared to just holding Bitcoin itself.
I understand your viewpoint totally, as I saw many friends getting into deep depression because of the volatility of the Bitcoin price. It is very serious thing. One friend of mine got very strong into cocaine, another friend's marriage burned down, another friend started day trading alts and lost half of his Bitcoins, and another friend (the smartest one) realized that he can't take the volatility and sold after a 10% loss. I view holding Bitcoin as a revolution, so I'm emotionally attached to holding it even if its value goes to 0. Still, I'm a software engineer, so even in the worst case I just work and get a high salary and probably start investing again.
One thing you could do is to just buy Bitcoin with 1-2% of your net worth, which is a great hedge for the current financial system, and also maybe that loss / volatility you are able to stomach. You're upside will be tiny, but you will get used to volatility a bit more.
2. This [1] is the guy that you think is a good economist? Really?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/whygoldandsilver/featured
I conduct a form of ethnography, embedding myself in the lives of consumers the way Margaret Mead did among Samoans. I interviews my subjects and the people around them, itemizing the contents of their home (photographing and videotaping), and accompany them as they progress through their day. Then I sift the resulting information for weeks, even months, looking for connections and telltale behaviors.
The service is used mostly by founders for small businesses and startups. I takes questions about sales figures and product lines and reconfigures them into questions about worlds, the context in which people unthinkingly live their everyday lives. The idea is that examining the beliefs and unconscious biases that people have will eventually yield profitable insights for these businesses.
So far, I've done market entry for a few Chinese companies into Japanese market, helped indie game design company launch a successful game, a boutique lingerie shop launch a new summer line, street musicians, and a few cafes and bars.
I do this on the side with hopes to go full time into it soon.
Studying consumers on their own isn’t enough to be successful. I look at all the data I can regarding technology, marginal practices, client and industry data, and speak to many experts with knowledge on the topic. I analyze the assumptions underlying what I observe happening and identify the gaps (e.g. between the client’s assumptions about their customers and what I observe in the real world, or between the industry’s assumptions about the future and consumers’ marginal practices).
Analyzing these gaps helps me see white spaces that have impact in the market, which allows me to advise my clients on where the market is likely to be years out and ensure that my recommendations are actionable. Since these are new perspectives they often make it actionable. Execution is something they handle and all of my clients have seen a change. Most are repeat customers.
I use psychographics to define customer values, opinions, and life-style.
It sounds like this is a form of consulting where would-be founders outsource the idea-gen / problem discovery work to you.
How does the problem statement from the client manifest -- is it usually something like "I want you to determine if there's a market for X", or "I want you to explore this demographic of people," or something else?
My base of operations is in Tokyo right now and there's a lot of demand for these services once people hear about it. Often people approach it for curiosity and then I work my leads to turn them into clients.
Not all companies were forward thinking but they have a common traits: empathy, more concerned on providing value to their customers, and emphasize long-term problem solving over quick fixes.
With that being said, you might get a handful of, "no, absolutely not that's creepy" responses to the request, but if you ask enough people someone will say yes and be excited about it.
Do not be discouraged by the no’s. Starting with friends and network is an option.
It also helps if you have a code of conduct/governance documentation for them to read and understand how their data is gathered and used.
I usually send a copy of all data to my subjects with a thank you letter and how it helped (with a gift card).
It also helps to build a network, for starters I partner-up with many prominent content producers on YouTube and Twitter and pay them a small fee for introductions.
I also pay the people I study on the field (but not always, some are happy to help once they understand what it's for). A lot say no, but you only need a few yes. It's about drawing insights from a small set of data.
For ethnography I don't have any recommendations. I've read books largely to complement my thinking, phenomenology and existentialism. Here's what I've read (notable ones):
Being and Time – Martin Heidegger
The Principle of Reason – Martin Heidegger
Phenomenology of Perception – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time – Ernesto Laclau
Introduction to Metaphysics – Martin Heidegger
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy) – Martin Heidegger
History of Western Philosophy – Bertrand Russell
I manage my time quite well, I get eight hours of sleep everyday and the rest I try to be productive. I have a wife who understands what I'm trying to do and helps me out. Needless to say I work on weekends and holidays and gave up all hobbies.
It's not easy but it's a choice. This has helped me build habits and a discipline. I am mindful and try not to bite off more than I can chew i.e. understand my limits.
My side project has also changed the way I think about engineering problems and solutions. Since I work on the growth team its complementary rather than diverging.
[0] https://forms.gle/ehuzNXmtdjCBgsjP8
https://forms.gle/ehuzNXmtdjCBgsjP8
That success gave me wings for a while. Word of mouth referring helped and I only took on clients who were recommended to me (i.e. they were aware of it)
Sometimes I meet business owners and founders at meetups or for lunch and we organically start talking about what we do (with no intention to sell). I always try to make the other person curious and then feed their curiosity. Also, I do an initial consultation for free.
The motivation is not money and my rates are pretty compelling (low) for the ROI I promise. Not every small business takes the opportunity but some did.
I do provide remote services to a few startups in california but their audience is usually online and has ties to Japan.
I'm happy to listen to you. You can fill this form [0] out and I'll react out to you by the end of the week.
[0]: https://forms.gle/fafgq2kBTEQiMjsm7
I'm solo, so I don't have any overhead and I can charge far less than anyone else. This is also entirely a side gig, so volume is so low that I can be responsive, helpful and more like a thought partner who is also helping out on legal.
Did you think of scaling your prqctice?
If I'm not handling very many matters, I might affiliate with a firm that has insurance to keep costs down or forego insurance. If I forego insurance, I take care to disclose that fact to the client before beginning the engagement.
The last one is the only that is actually working somewhat
Product photography -> headshot/corporate event photography -> corporate video -> field recording -> music production
The "problem" that I've allowed myself to have is that I have the disposable income to take care of the gear bottleneck that many people in these fields dream of, but not the time overall to invest in the skills bottleneck.
Also, most poker players are American - so they're going to need to cover health insurance.
Maybe when I retire I'll give it a go, but I don't think it's practical to envision retiring early to play poker unless you amassed enough savings you could live without the poker income.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability#Frequency_of...
Rather spend time with family and friends.
However, if I was forced to change job for whatever reason, probably something related with cooking.
Who needs a side project when the day job is enough and there are loved one with whom we have limited time.
Live is short. Take time to enjoy it.
Email in profile if you have context-specific questions.
Also, one random question: do you find most of your clients are from the UK? For some reason I've always associated Wardley maps with the UK but I'm not sure if that's actually the case.
2. No, US only. Wardley does originate in the UK. The US is slowly catching up. I predict this will be taught in college in 10 years.
The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use iFixit[2],[3] to drive the traffic. It passively makes enough to cover my own coffee needs forever. I spend about 20 minutes per month fielding questions. This all happened because my grinder failed and I could not get parts.
[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-coffee-...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...
[3] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG600SIL+Dose+Control+Pro+Coff...
I could see someday having a github project for replacement parts, each one iterating and getting better an better -- far beyond the original.
Could even be something silly, like a plastic fuse extractor tool that people will pay $50 for if it looks OEM.
A company does sell a replacement, which he paid a fortune for, which had garbage tolerances and we spent weeks modifying it until it fit more or less well enough.
I suspect if you spent time on "classic car" forums you'd find owners of very specific models of cars searching for things you could make and sell for any markup, and every owner would buy one.
[1] Its the silver part in this photo, which the alternator mounts to and must be precisely centered https://rennlist.com/forums/attachments/993-forum/1236047d15...
Edit: I actually looked into it a little more- it looks like the part is probably machined from casting given that there appear to be four stators which also locate the center mounting point. That's where the concentricity would be set; not by the casting, but by the machining of the center flange. So assuming that the fan's mounting points are within spec, I would say that your friend's part could just be chalked up to machining process that leaves something to be desired. This is actually a trickier part if machined from casting (without the appropriate tooling), but actually pretty simple (and wildly expensive) if machined from billet.
I used to order a lot of custom things from China. Took a lot of trial and error to find good suppliers. They only accept bank wire as payment, so they risk little other than repeat business if they choose to be sloppy.
I think from memory the inside of the circle (which was cast) was not perfectly round. From memory the original Porsche part was titanium, and this replacement was aluminum. But I might have that backwards.
What doesn't sit right with me is the fact that for a small run, the price of even an aluminum casting would absolutely motivate me to get it right the first time. At the level of volume that the guy would have to be operating at, I would be test-fitting every part to a car before sending it out the door.
I feel like the relative scarcity of air-cooled 911s coupled with the difficulty of machining the part correctly as a third party is why the part itself is so hard to come by. If a person were motivated, though, there is definitely another way to make a suitable replacement more cheaply and easily with a modified design. That's provided someone is okay with not having a completely factory 911.
Even without that, I'm kind of surprised they sue. Are they patenting each part? Is there case law that covers this? Or is it just a case of bringing a suit to scare people I sto stopping? I wonder.
https://mercedesheritage.com/classic-mb-culture/mercedes-ben...
Just take a quick look through your favourite forum for your car of choice and there's endless threads begging for some random old plastic part that can no longer be found.
Interior trim clips, centre console fascias, exterior body plugs (where tow hook goes, where roof racks go, etc), stereo surrounds, door handle surrounds, etc etc etc.
Depends on your pricing and margins. There's a huge number of parts that are available but ridiculously priced, often coming out an order of magnitude in excess of what seems reasonable.
Take for instance a kettle scale filter. OK you probably can't 3d print these, but for something so simple they're insanely priced - £5-£15 for a bit of plastic. A whole kettle with filter costs typically £15-£35. Dyson parts are even sillier.
e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genuine-Philips-Kettle-Filter-HD467...
There may be a far wider range of parts you could profit from than you may think. :)
This is def not viable from my view- at least not for parts that are this cheap already.
That's most of it left for promotion. Domestic appliances, large and small, regularly have small spare parts that attract 25 or 50% of the price of the entire item. Never used to.
That they're already doing well with small appliances in the niche of non-available parts says enough about pricing floor.
I've also considered creating some upgrades to the stock parts, but it's on my "some day I'll get around to it" list.
It's a neat business model: The person posts DIY repair videos on youtube, which drives traffic to his site. The strollers can easily cost $1000 new, and are often handed down / resold, so there is motivation to keep them running, and they have some weak spots which tend to break. The 3D printed replacement parts can be of superior quality to the original parts.
Want to team up on an a milk gallon jug attachment to pour cleanly?
I think sellers may be able to limit the materials to known working ones (each material has it's own requirements).
was it to save money? or for some unique design?
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMECi57zKtD6arv_-sL83gp...
> is there any way to scan it from your phone and hear it?
It's not detailed enough for that, though you can tell the cadence and reliably guess at the number of words. If you know what we said, and only we do, then you can see it.
He was originally in the business of repairing these machines and then discovered he could no longer buy these parts from the OEMs so he learned CAD and CNC and injection molding and started making them a few years ago. He has a 3D printer for prototyping, but he needs to injection mold part of the final product because there is no filament in the particular material that he needs. His business has transitioned from repair to manufacturing and now he mostly sells replacement parts to other repair shops.
I don't want to disturb his business by talking about it in detail, but the point is that I think there are and will be many opportunities around repair parts that manufacturers are unwilling to provide because they'd rather be selling new machines. Aside from the environmental impact, that's fine since there are many people who won't go the repair route, and then there's a secondary market for those who will make parts and repair the machines.
There is a solution to so many problems here (creating usually unavailable parts for machines/devices/products) but the problem is knowing which parts are in demand and currently have no supplier.
A maker would need to have an interest or hobby in such a device & discover a need for the item for it to come into fruition. But just think of how many general 3D printed parts could be printed as solutions for so many products out there that are going unmade.
I was not commenting on the quality of the work. BTE, saying the Chinese quality must be automatically shite is a ridiculous idea.
[1] https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=15365
It's not a great idea to grind or sand Cadmium plated items, because it kicks the Cd into a fine dust that you will inhale and will be absorbed into your system.
The kind of mercury you hear about that is incredibly toxic and can absorb through your skin are actually mercury salts (ethyl mercury, methyl mercury, etc.) and aren’t as likely to be found.
It brings in a steady $1k+/month almost completely passively through Amazon affiliate commissions
On a given day, a customer might buy 1 MIDI keyboard that I referred. But he will also buy books, CDs, home tools and anything else he needs, and I get 6% of all of that
It all depends on how well you already know the keyboard though. A cheap Akai LPK25 is good enough for absolute beginners. But if you have some piano playing experience, I would go for something like an Alesis VI49
[1] https://www.redbubble.com/people/nurikolan/works/34221227-i-... [2] https://www.redbubble.com/people/nurikolan/works/34221296-i-...
I also found that you could use the same CAD program that I learned to design PCB's to draw outlines to cut out on the laser CNC machine at the local maker space. I ended up finding a niche on ebay building open air computer cases. Because of the economics of shipping large items from overseas and the low cost of the materials I was using I was able to under cut the imports on price by like 60% and still make a nice amount of money on a $/ hour basis.
In hind sight the best way to find these kinds of opportunities is not to be looking for them. You really just need to get a really deep understanding of a hobby or industry or market that interests you in some way and once you have that then these sorts of things kind of pop out of the woodwork.
> I taught myself circuit board design and found a niche market that I designed a few products for that sold like gangbusters with zero marketing for a few years until the market cooled off and low cost knock offs started entering the market.
Can you elaborate a bit? Did you teach yourself literal circuit board design (but already had a background in electronics/hardware)? Or did you start from scratch and learn how to design an electronic circuit?
What was the niche (broadly?)
> In hind sight the best way to find these kinds of opportunities is not to be looking for them. You really just need to get a really deep understanding of a hobby or industry or market that interests you in some way and once you have that then these sorts of things kind of pop out of the woodwork.
1000% agree. The single best way to find an idea is to be seriously and deeply involved in a hobby/area of interest. There are so many ideas out there screaming you in the face.
The niche was building adapters for old server power supplies so you can re-purpose them for use as general purpose 12 Volt power supplies. It was a thing in the RC community for a while to charge batteries but it got really big in the 2014 - 2017 time frame due to the Bitcoin mining industry needing low cost high wattage PSUs.
https://imgur.com/a/necYS83
I've been doing it since I was a teen, before I started programming, and the first significant amount of money I made was after I invested all my savings in a small festival I organized with my friends.
As for recording, it's been a fun ride because equipment go so much better and accessible since I started 15 years ago. For recording, having portable stuff is nice, but affording to pick studios because of the room instead of the equipment was a real game changer.
Now I invest my spare time in being better at my full time job, and it’s paid off.
The repairs are usually not that challenging for me, and it won't make me rich, but it's a great way for me to clear my head from challenges with my tech startup. It also gives me access to some very rare and expensive cars. Obviously you need to test drive the car if you just fixed the ECU ;-)
Like I said, I mostly work on older cars, since those are the ones where it makes economic sense to do this kind of repairs. Those cars are usually from the era where ECU's had little to no encryption, or even no software at all (pure electronic based ECU's).
Stuff like early Bosh and Lucas, Porsche CDi.