My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates.
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.
Kudos for providing jobs. If I were to create a successful company, making others busy doing something nicer than what they would otherwise have given themselves would be the greatest accomplishment I could think of, professionally. But starting with oneself on exactly that is not a bad starting point, at all.
It adds more complexity to relationships, but it can also keep families/friends closer because they have more shared goals.
There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
I would be interested to hear other founders' first-hand experience with this.
In my experience, hiring my younger cousin for occasional work during school/uni breaks has been great, but involving close friends looking for work has been disastrous 3 out of 3 times.
My parents worked with my grand parents before taking over the business and I have occasionally worked with them through the years. You don’t really hire family members. They join you in the family business. It’s a different dynamic but I t doesn’t really cause issue because the family business has always been a part of our family life. The frontier between personal life and work is very blurry but that’s nothing unusual for SME owners.
There's a huge difference between bringing your children into the family business (presumably also preparing them to inherit it) and employing your sister to work for you at your business.
In my parents business it has been a disaster 100/100 times. All friendships all family relations have been completely destroyed by them trying to run a business together. I know it's just an anecdote, but yeah, I'd be careful.
>There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
Yes. Among Indian comunities, Gujaratis (particularly the Patel sub-community who own the majority of US motels, the Ambanis - Reliance group, big) and the Marwaris (some big Indian businessmen among them, like the Birlas, Ruias, Goenkas), are examples of this.
Possibly Kashmiris (handicrafts shops), Punjabis and Sikhs (auto parts shops, dhabas, etc.), Bunts (a Karnataka sub-community, Udupi restaurants), and Chettiars (gold and jewelry shops, money-lending, trading abroad) too.
And I am only writing about those I know about. There could be others too.
Their parents have no interest in turning their kids into programmers (to my great dismay!) but this looks like something they'll have a blast with anyway.
I saw a TikTok of your book another day, & saved it. Would love this for my future kid.
How do you manage sakes tax collection & other stuff like shipping & such? Assuming you are in US. Do you use Shopify or Etsy or dome online one? Did u apply for a seller's permit to deposit sales tax? If manually, how do you calculate sales tax, because its based on buyer's address right?
I haven’t spent much time on sales tax yet, but I do know there are Shopify plugins (tax jar being the one that comes to mind). I’m currently in Squarespace but don’t love it, and will probably swap to Shopify soon.
Looks so cool! Do you have any blog or writing to share on the actual process of producing the physical books, which are very customised? I.e. this isn't something someone could fulfill using Amazon's publishing service.
That’s on my todo list. The tldr is that I designed the circuit myself and just started messaging people on alibaba, and that’s how I found my PCBA shop and my book manufacturer.
Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
That's not to say generic words / phrases cannot be trademarked. Just look at Apple. However, trademarks for a generic term must be very limited in scope initially. If the brand obtains substantial recognition, then a broader trademark may be granted. These broader trademarks are typically reserved for household names. Even Apple had trademark issues when they entered the music industry due to Apple Records.
> Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
Neither is "For Babies" specific to the series I am describing. The book series is not for babies, as far as I am aware, very few, if any, babies are capable of reading, let alone fully understanding stories that are read to them.
"For Dummies" effectively means using laypersons language to convey complex topics more easily. Not, as you said, to literally mean the readers are of low-intelligence.
Likewise, "For Babies" effectively means using language, images, and story telling to convey complex topics more easily to young children, not just for literal babies.
I have about 6 years of applied AI experience and I have been trying to work on something that can use that experience and be useful to others.
Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo these days with over 3000 paid users. I think I'm the most fortunate person in the world, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this much.
I still work on it solo and have no plans on hiring a team, because solo is where I have most fun, and that's important.
Selling hope to the hopeless. Nice. If any of this worked, you would either use it yourself to make FAR more than $120k a month or sell it to a quant fund for an 8-figure payout.
How do you answer the following inevitable questions?
If you have good trade ideas/signals, then why do you not use them yourself? I assume you do not use them yourself because it' does not make sense to share your edge (if you have one). If you do not have an edge, how can you be offering "trade ideas"?
These are common questions people ask that haven’t actually been involved in generating trades professionally.
But people who have don’t ask those questions because finding edge in the markets is actually pretty easy. Finding edge that is scalable is the hard part.
For professional traders it doesn’t make much sense to engage in all the small edge trades because it won’t pay more than your opportunity cost if you did something else. For retail traders that constraint isn’t true.
Now, I don’t have any idea if this particular product actually offers good trades, but it’s not true that as a class you can’t make more money selling profitable trades than you can using the trade yourself.
Well, sure - it could certainly be the case that it's easier to scale selling trade ideas than trading them on yourself - hell there's a whole industry around it (alphacapture). I am somewhat skeptical, especially as this is marketed towards retail who have fewer instruments to guage themselves if the product their getting actually offers trade ideas with positive expected value or not.
Same could be said about a concept of solo traders. If you are as successful as you claim why don't you run a fund? However, a lot of people do solo trading as its more of job/hobby where the only thing you risk is your capital. Plenty of people don't have stomach to deal with others lifetime savings? (or even potential of such person in your client pool)
Its different. Not everything scales as nicely and dealing with responsibility is going to become a burden soon. Here you are selling your advice, most likely all traders have similar access to this advice and can perform trades with their own judgement.
> Same could be said about a concept of solo traders. If you are as successful as you claim why don't you run a fund?
This doesn't make sense though, running a fund is not necessarily natural progression of being a successful trader. But if one says they have a real edge that the average retail trader can monetize, then why doesn't one just take advantage of it themselves as this is effectively the lowest size of scale.
Initially, just posted in a bunch of subreddits on reddit to get engagement. But the retention was quite low. I still used that engagement to get a couple hundred followers on twitter.
Afterwards, realized that twitter had the most solid trading community out of any other platform. So all I've been doing for the last one year is build a community on twitter now (and of ofcourse discord too since everyone's there these days). I try to post ideas from the system every day, and when people see them work and make some money off of them, they subscribe to the paid plan.
Discord has a massive portion of the overall trading community, so I created discord bots to pull data from the web product, and every data item had our logo on it. That helped quite a lot in expanding the brand name and reaching more people. We're in about 250 discords and reach about 100k members in them overall.
Finally, 12 hours of sitting in front of a laptop every day lol.
I bought a coffee farm in Colombia. Annualized it makes around $800 / month and growing. Should double to $1600 / month next year as we’ve doubled our production. It’s barely profitable, but is profitable nonetheless. The more we plant the more profitable it will get, and we’ll be planting 10,000 more trees soon!
I am dying to hear more about this. Please, if you have time and are inclined, write up a longer comment like some of the others in this thread describing how you got into it and what the process has involved. For starters, how much did it cost to buy the farm?
I can not find it now, but I recall reading a post from the (former?) founder/owner of a coffee company. His goal was to have an ethically justifiable supply chain, free from slavery and human exploitation. Or at least less of it. His conclusion was that this is impossible and became very disillusioned that due to various reasons he would not be able to not be part of the problem.
In my experience living in a poor country, most of the issues brought up against globalized supply chains are either made up or sensationalized by people in developed countries who lack perspective.
Low wages? Actually they are a really good entry-level option for people doing rural-urban migration. Expensive middlemen? They serve a purpose in the marketplace and smooth out logistical inefficiencies. Greedy multinationals? These are often dream work destinations for the locals.
I could go on and on... bottom line is, globalized supply chains aren't broken and don't need fixing
> In my experience living in a poor country, most of the issues brought up against globalized supply chains are either made up or sensationalized by people in developed countries who lack perspective.
Agreed. It's also being heavily used to put a thin humanitarian sheen on what actually boils down to racism/xenophobia - not in all cases of course, but to a significant extent.
> I could go on and on... bottom line is, globalized supply chains aren't broken and don't need fixing
I wouldn't go that far, I'd say instead that they're not particularly more broken/unethical than pretty much anything else in the business world, but are easier for media to point fingers at and sensationalize without getting into much trouble from businesses.
Would love to hear more about the entire story, from getting the idea, to searching for a farm to purchase, and taking over the day to day business, managing staff, etc.
After reading all this, I admit I feel kind of silly for working so hard (50-60h a week on average) to earn my Silicon Valley FAANG comp.
I am wondering how much survivorship bias is at play here, some ideas look relatively simple compared to the amount they bring in. Or maybe one really has to take the leap of faith and trust that there is demand for virtually anything?
Maybe it’s not so simple, my partner opened a small e-commerce store selling some genuinely nice craft she produces, and has been seeing $0 revenues even with some aggressive ads campaigns, so go figure.
My job currently compensates me above $1M a year depending on stock price (public FAANG company), so I never even considered it worthwhile to invest my evening/weekend time in a side project, and always funneled every second of non-recreational time back into my job. But maybe I’ve been doing it all wrong when I see people bringing in several thousands a month for minimal time investment after the product is stabilized.
To somewhat answer the thread: my “side project” is my investment portfolio of boring index funds, where I funnel all my savings. This year is up about 15% (unrealized gains) and realized income of ~$50k via dividends.
Certainly huge congratulations to the business owners, very humbling thread.
The powerful part of passive income isn't that you could make some more money, but that you could make more time. Even with a huge salary, you've sold your best 50 hours every week, as well as most of your mental energy. The richest people still have the same amount of time. Making $50k a year passively is worth so much more than making a few hundred thousand a year actively. It could mean having your whole life to yourself.
You are much luckier and more of a “survivor” than any of them I feel. I also work at Faang, but only graduated college last year and only make 200k a year, barely. I will never reach your income at a job with where the stock market is at now, and how much the competition increased, you rode the wave all the way to the top of the corporate slaves pyramid.
So I’ll quit next year to start something because otherwise I’ll never become anywhere near rich with my income.
I am not entirely sure your premises are correct, but it certainly boils down to personal opinions so no point in debating.
Just for fun, I went back to my 1040 tax statements for the first three years of my career, about a decade ago: $35k, $65k, $89k.
The fact that you are starting with $200k is fabulous and not to be taken for granted imho. If you are able to put the majority of your after tax savings in the market, compounding over a decade might surprise you even if we are at an all time high.
$200k is a lot, but it doesn't really go far in the bay area if you don't want to cohabitate.
That being said, people have done more with less under similar circumstances, and thinking $200k is not enough is harmful. I used to make $130k, then I made $90k, and now I make $300k and I don't feel any different, even though I once thought it would make me happier. I don't regret focusing on my career, but I now spend time doing things that make me happy instead of working all the time.
As the saying goes, "you can afford anything, not everything." it's important to determine what brings you most joy. For me, it's being able to buy meal kits so I don't have to worry about cooking (save time).
Of course, saving / investing money is important too.
I’m in a similar situation as a backend tech lead at a FAANG-like company but I also have a side project web app that generates about $500/month from ad revenue. I find that I learn a lot from the side project that helps me at my day job like front end development, ux, listening to user feedback, deployment all the way out to end users, and programming in other backend languages I wouldn’t have an excuse to play with at work.
Also the higher up I move on the engineering ladder at a bigger tech company, the more valuable it is to spend time doing things that aren’t coding. The side project lets me scratch my coding itch while doing the more valuable stuff all day.
Running a side project or a full business is not just about Money (even though money is imp. part of it). Lot of people just like creating things, sometimes they accidentally end up monetizing it and some are looking to create a product that can make some money but then doesn't take a whole lot of time to operate. However, most side project will never beat FAANG level income especially $1M incomes.
You are one of the most privileged people on the planet. Making 1M for working 50-60 hours is amazing. I say this as a business owner myself. So unless you have the real entrepreneurial itch to create something of your own, you are almost always better off working at a FAANG and investing all that cash that you already are doing.
In your position, you have so much leverage in the job market, the most sensible route would be for you to maximize on that. Get a silent auction going of companies bidding for your talents, then get a job that is fully on your terms
More importantly if you want to put survivorship bias on your side, never develop anything until you have a working sales funnel.
Put $1000 aside a month on a design and site for your idea, followed by a marketing person w/ a budget.
The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built)
> The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built)
If a website did this to me they'd also be getting a very angry e-mail and zero recommendations from me.
Yup agreed 100%. I see this often as a suggestion for testing your project hypothesis and I think it’s a terrible idea. Starting your relationship with a customer by misrepresenting your state of development is bad advice.
They aren’t customers as they haven’t bought anything.
Second not spending hundreds of thousands to millions in dev on a product with no market vs having to buy a new domain because your site went viral and you now have millions of bad reviews. (Hint: this never happens) Is great advice.
There’s also other ways to do it, my friend was creating a course so I got her to do all the marketing first, set a date six months out and used the proceeds of the first sales to fund development.
What I’m trying to get at is to verify sales you need to get people to put their money on the line.
Then you're not the target customer. I hear this often that people, especially on HN, don't like this tactic, but most people don't really care, they'll just shrug and move on.
For me at least, the answer is that my side projects are about more than money (though they are about money too!). Developing things myself is the primary goal - it’s deeply satisfying to build your own project from the bottom up without having to write specs, argue about design trade offs, do code reviews, etc. The fun is just being able to build without the social overhead. As soon as you have people working for you, that whole equation changes.
Honest question: why not leave FAANG/SV, take a relaxed remote job of maybe 30h/week and live in a low-cost, warm and cosy Mediterranean city (since you mentioned you're from Europe that shouldn't be a problem)?
In a similar boat. Out of curiosity, what's your target number? How do you make sure you're not getting stuck in an infinite "just need about 30% more" loop.
I'm thinking 3M in invested assets should do. If properly diversified (real estate + stock) that should be sufficient to generate about 90k/year of passive income.
Close to $10M for me, currently sitting on about $4M. I fully understand the 4% rule and a conservative 3% withdrawal rate wrt historical returns, but I have no confidence that those will continue to be true moving forward.
So for my calculations I am assuming my portfolio will have a 0% real growth, and that it will just keep up with inflation after volatility. In the best case I am expecting about 65 years to live (wildly optimistic), so my withdrawal rate is 1/65 ~= 1.5%.
I understand this might be overly conservative, but everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and when I pull the plug I better be damn sure I won’t go broke ever.
As mentioned earlier I should be getting there in about 5 years with some luck, so it’s not too long. If the luck won’t materialize maybe I will revisit my plan and the opportunity cost trade-off.
How is that silly monetarily? If extra work get's you even a 5% raise, that's $50k year pre-tax that will compound (with future pay bumps/stock grants). What is the equivalent amount of time to build a side project to that level? That said, if you spend extra time that does not translate into extra pay, it's essentially opportunity cost of a side income.
Silly because the two types of income are not fungible in my mind. With a job, I am a mercenary of my time and the income will dry up immediately if I decide to stop (let’s set aside the long tail effect of investing the savings). With a successful side project, it becomes a very passive income, like many people mentioned below.
Ultimately I guess I am genuinely jealous of people clawing back their own time, while I am working incredibly hard with life passing me by, that’s it.
I'm not sure if its realistic calculus to think you'll be easily able to make $1m passive income side project. Would you trade $1m a year for $100k passive?
It’s clearly tough to say without having a real opportunity in front of me, but if the passive income was diversified enough and with minimal time investment, I would most definitely trade my 60h/week job for a side project bringing a fraction of my current income (the exact fraction would be on a case by case).
I think I personally am at the point where time is a scarcer resource than money. Getting a lower paid job or consultancy is not an alternative either, both would still be too big of time commitments.
You’re doing well so I don’t think you are doing it wrong. But given that base, could you build a side project dedicating just a couple of hours per week to the effort? If/when it turns into a product, great. If not, you’ve not used up all of your free time making something. I’m obviously oversimplifying but curious if you think 2-3 hours of side-work per week is still a non-starter?
You're already earning 50k/year through dividends, if you can live with a lot less money then just quit and start some side project. Or just take a part time job and live for a while.
I think you answer this question when you say you “never considered it worthwhile to invest [your time] in a side project” but: how much of that perspective is based on comparing ways of earning income vs the desire to want to build something yourself?
I think for me it’s pretty clearly about maximizing the total income (immediate and cumulative for passive sources) per unit of time invested, as opposed to building something myself. This might also be the reason why I never actually started anything, which is just a different way of stating what you quoted from my previous message.
Maybe you have a case of “the grass is always greener.” 1 million dollars a year is a lot. Couldn’t you pretty easily save up and take 5 straight years off if you wanted? What’s to stop that from happening?
Fear. Specifically, fear that I would walk away from that kind of income forever and that I could become destitute in the future (I have a weird relationship with money, having grown up rather poor).
I have read your comments about income, spending patterns and dreams about a simple life in the Mediterranean.
You've played the money game smartly and won. You just don't seem to realise that yet. You've described fear of poverty instead.
Can I respectfully suggest you to consider seeing a good psychotherapist if that's not yet the case? A therapist can help you conquer your fear. Please do read my suggestion in the friendly way I wrote it!
No tips, it’s truly all about luck. My job is not particularly difficult or anything, I mostly herd cats all day without producing much, as I am at the whims of massively over engineered systems that are almost impossible to comprehend.
The only thing I would say that can affect your luck is to always say yes to any opportunity that has a chance of taking you forward, even if it is incredibly uncomfortable. A couple random decisions I’ve taken in my life that affected my luck:
- Relocate at a young age to the US from Europe, leaving a promised incredibly cushy job (imagine well paid, for local standards, European tech job with 60 days off a year etc) for a crappy internship at a no-name American company, with no promises whatsoever. I relocated entirely by myself, leaving family, friends and (ex) partner behind. I am still separated from them.
- Took some risks in my career, joining early stage startups to build experience while most of my coworkers would call me crazy for taking a 50% paycut from the job where we were all “stagnating” maintaining old systems.
- Accept new work opportunities even if they mess up your life. They said: “Do you want a job for a 50% raise in NYC?”. I said: “Yes Sir, I’ll be there next Monday and throw my San Francisco life down the toilet, break my expensive rental lease and convince my girlfriend who lives with me that we will have a long distance relationship for a while”.
- Live a frugal and minimalist life like a college student, it’s easier to take bets in your life when you don’t have a mortgage/car/kids and your monthly expenses are under $3k in a very expensive city.
Most people I know would say a sound NO to all the above, and I’m not saying they would be wrong in doing so.
I don’t have a clear plan for the future, right now I’m just accumulating assets until I get to a point where I can feel financially unbreakable. I might be getting there in ~5 years with some substantial luck, or never if shit hits the fan.
I decided a long time ago that I won’t have kids (not for financial reasons), so there is not much urgency in my life beside the itch to get back more personal time.
Current dream is to early retire with my partner in a small beach town in Mediterranean Europe, and live a simple life.
Good luck - does your financial planning team say you can retire now? The one at your bank? They can help define the details, if you've not done that yet.
I've been drawing pictures and publishing them as desktop wallpapers for ~20 years now, selling Vlad.studio accounts with unlimited access to downloads [0]. In 2021, I earned $4761, which means ~$400/month. It's not horribly little amount, especially for Russia (where I live), given it's a side project. However, I feel I need to do something more active, rather than just drawing new pictures.
Promoting and marketing is alien space for me (as well as for many other designers and developers here, I'm certain). Please wish me luck promoting and marketing my art in 2022 :-)
Thank you! Vlad.studio is not a big source of income these days, but it sure is a huge source of inspiration and appreciation. I am addicted to positive comments, I must admit :-)
Oh man! I've been a lifetime member for ...wow, two decades indeed!, and I have saved hundreds of your pictures. These have been my favorite desktop backgrounds almost exclusively (although I now make some generated art which sometimes is worth showing/using).
This might not be your cup of tea, but if you had facebook (even though I don't like them, this is how it's done) and twitter where you post one image every week or month, it might grow like it did for Alexander Jansson (https://illustratorcentrum.se/author/alexander_jansson/)
Thank you! I do have Facebook and Instagram and they seem to be my main source of traffic. Every week / month is the hardest part, but I'm hoping to make it happen in 2002!
Hi Vlad,
I love your pictures and I'm using your wallpapers for more than 10 years for sure on all my devices (including mobile phone). Hmm I did not check your page for some time, I think I know what I will be doing today .
I love your artwork, some of it reminds me of this style that I have bought prints of https://www.mateo-art.com/ You need to add the option to have prints delivered like they do!
Also, on your site it took me too long to realise that the 'next page' image was a link.
You know that if you really did just keep up the pace of new art and enjoyed it as a side project you might have a sustainable business in a few years stress free… or you could go the marketing route and possibly end up eventually hating the work.
I mean it could go either way, just make sure you also consider the upside of a fun (slowly / organically growing) side business.
I was there actually :-) Some time in 2010+-, Vlad.studio was my primary source of income. Good times! Then, life events happened, and I left wallpapers abandoned for several years. I've been increasing my pace of drawing last couple of years, and I do enjoy the comeback! However, I'm also honest with myself that you can't step in the same river twice. Or maybe you can :-) I'll draw and see!
thank you! I never actually learned to draw, and I still believe I am not good at drawing :-) but I'm a pretty good designer, so I practiced skills of turning my pencil sketches into polished designs. And a "favorite" visual drawing style naturally occured along the way.
Sell maybe $1k/mo of these through the website and another $3k through Amazon at a margin of around 50%.
The biggest things that I see a lot of people get wrong in the hardware business is the importance of manufacturing and logistics. It doesn't matter that you're constantly producing new and improved revisions of your board if you're out of stock all the time and overseas customers have to pay extra for shipping.
This literally made me say "WTF?!" when I went to the page.
I think you're burying the lede here. It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping! WTAF, that's awesome.
I'll be ordering one as soon as Christmas is out of the way.
Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? I'm prepared to wait the 2-3 weeks for free UK shipping tbh, but if you're adding more local distribution early next year I'd hold on.
Oh yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The one time I'm not in a shilly mood (Christmas and all) and the post actually gets interaction. Murphy's Law!
>Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point?
Sorta kinda maybe. I did have one, but a whole lot of VAT compliance bullshit caught up with me. In most countries, GST/VAT is handled automatically by large eCommerce platforms (if you sell something on eBay to an Aussie, for example, we'll pay 10% GST regardless of the item's physical location and the seller won't even necessarily know).
However, the EU requires every single individual business with any stock located on EU soil to register and file individually in every single country where the stock is distributed regardless of revenue. I can only assume this is to create jobs for bureaucrats.
Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane, I'll probably get something set up over there. This will be months, though. Trying to set up a (different) startup while raising a small child means a lot of Espotek stuff gets pushed to the side!
> Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane
Interesting perspective - in the main everything around international trade got a whole lot more complicated for us here in the UK since leaving the EU.
VAT is just as complicated as it used to be, especially if you sell into Northern Ireland. The only thing that improved is we don't have to do those bloody EU sales lists.
> However, the EU requires every single individual business with any stock located on EU soil to register and file individually in every single country where the stock is distributed regardless of revenue. I can only assume this is to create jobs for bureaucrats.
You've just misunderstood what EU was it's not a . You have to file individually in every country because they are individual countries: you wouldn't expect to file for VAT also once for all Asia, would you?
Yeah, I might have read the parent comment, thought "oh neat, good on ya", and not thought more of it if you hadn't pointed out that it's $29. Also it has open source software! Which runs on Linux! I had to order one just now for the funs and learnings.
Good job AussieWog93, and all the best to your business!
The logistics are covered by a mixture of Amazon FBA (USA/Canada) and a Chinese 3PL company (all other countries). The only orders I handle myself are the Aussie ones, as well as large orders to overseas universities.
I try to keep at least 6 months' work of stock at any time spread across multiple locations. Given the way social media and online communities work, sales tend to be very bursty. When it got on Hackaday, for example, I sold something like $12k worth in a weekend.
I did run into issues at the start of COVID, as American universities would place huge orders or ask 100+ students to do it individually, but we're now robust to this too!
In terms of manufacturing, this is also outsourced. Full PCBAs are made by a group in Shenzhen. The only work done in-house is packaging them. Combined with the above, this makes the chain immune from the Slashdot effect. If (when) we go viral, I just fulfil every order remotely and then replenish the stock with a large order.
I built a board game in 2021 that has been just breaking the cutoff for this post, all I do is mail out a few games a week as we get orders. We do all our own fulfillment to save money. Currently trying to design a real video game. I got lucky with the board game because it targeted a really niche audience (rock climbers) and so we weren't really competing with the full board game market, which is honestly super saturated. I think launching a real video game will require taking a similar strategy, and I have some good ideas for this. If you know how to do 3D modeling and animation and have always wanted to make a game as a side project, send a message.
For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!
On a discussion thread like this one, I think there is no shame in providing the homepage URL. Here it is after using your Google hint: https://five15game.com/
Awesome project. I initially youtube'd you, and there was no mention of your card game. I then startpage'd you and found a kickstarter page with a pretty well-made video... why don't you crosspost your video to youtube? and why don't you get someone to review it?
good point... I'm not sure why we never made the youtube video public. Thanks for bringing it up! This is why I feel like making that first game was good practice, I won't make these mistakes for the second one.
1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?
2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?
Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.
I really like the idea of games for a niche audience. Does your game lend itself to being a "print & play" game? I launched a Print & Play version of my (very) niche game[0] because I didn't (yet) want to deal with the physical manufacturing and it's been a pretty good experience. Have you written about your journey on creating or manufacturing the game?
In early 2022, I'm going to manufacture a small number of the game using The Game Crafter (it's more than just cards), but the whole idea of manufacturing 500 copies and the logistics of shipping are daunting.
Looks like a fun game, I'll pass that on to some climber friends. Curious - where did you get the cards printed at? Working on a card game myself, but have been putting off researching that much after getting overwhelmed with options.
Depends on scale. For our initial play-testing I bought a bunch of plastic card sleeves and regular playing cards, and then printed out the 3"x5" game cards on my home printer. The playing cards are to make the card sleeves stiff and this way you can really quickly swap out your cards while play testing.
For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.
If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.
Thanks for the information and details! Yeah, we're using blank poker cards now and just drawing on them for play testing and that has worked well. I'll check out Game Crafter as a next step as I want some nicer sets to send to friends to help play test.
I started an OSS project to enable me and my team to receive webhooks at a big co where Ngrok was banned and so was SSH. It works over an HTTP proxy using websockets. One of the requirements I had was for 1st class container support - so it could be run inside a K8s pod and support LoadBalancers for TCP traffic as well as HTTPS. The OSS project was very popular, but drew very little sponsorship. I then pivoted to a commercial license and got some more sign-ups, but not as many as I wanted - companies were happy to pay up front for a one year static license, but individuals and home users were not.
So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.
Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.
If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)
Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.
>Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel...
I think I understand how the second case you list would be abuse. If I'm understanding correctly, they're having a tunnel active without a subscription. Is that right?
I don't understand why cancelling a subscription when you know you aren't going to use the service would be considered abuse though. I'm asking as someone who do that without considering it might be abusive until I read your post.
That short notice cancellation flexibility is something I look for in a service, and it enables to sign-up for things I'm unsure of without being tied to them, or I can't afford a commitment to. If there was a minimum contract length, there are services I wouldn't bother with at all.
I generally do it with larger companies though. I look at it as, "I'll pay for what I use, or I won't use your product." (Crunchyroll, the anime streaming with the worst stagnant platform being the example that springs immediately to mind.)
Is there something specific to the way they do it or to the nature of the product? Or is it just a dick move to do specifically to a lone dev or something?
I don't know if I can even call it a side-project any more. I stopped working professionally 3 years ago.
Bought an e-commerce business that was making ~$2k/mo profit and ran it on the side while I had my DevOps job.
That project has now turned into ~$30k/mo profit, and I've bought two more e-com businesses that average ~$10k/mo between the two - these are early and I expect them to scale up once I smooth out a few bumps.
I go through phases of a lot of work, and next to no work. Depends if I'm busy on growing the businesses or just want to enjoy the income. I'm out of 95% of the day-to-day operations and I have a team of 3 that handle most things.
If you don’t mind me asking, what are the e-commerce sites? Also, how does one get into such a business? Were you interested in this space beforehand or did you simply acquire a business that looked promising?
In my personal interactions with people in the e-commerce/drop shipping space, the odds of them telling you what they sell is extremely slim. The barrier to entry for anyone else is very low, so once someone has a winning product, they remain very tight lipped about what exactly it is.
Seconding the interest in this. Some research showed that SoulCeramics and ZenConcessions are two of the commenter's businesses, but I would love to hear details on how he found them, decided to buy them, and then dealt with operating them. Selling popcorn machines and pottery kilns, such fascinating niches to become wealthy off of.
Unfortunately, he won't tell you, because like someone else said, the barrier to entry is so low, that their only real competitive advantage is other people not knowing about the opportunity.
Hi,this sounds amazing. If you have to to post, do you have any advice how what level design f competence is required to analyse a business like these before buying?
Also how did you find the businesses.
If anyone is curious, czue and I chatted about how he built and hosts Place Card Me at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-let.... Basically a full break down of his tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. It also touches on his Django SaaS example app he linked above too.
Really nice to see your Django boilerplate is pulling in those figures, congrats.
I literally shared your /open/ page the other day, I find it very cool that you have a USD/hour and that for static-ish projects it makes sense that it only increases! That does put a lot of perspective, since I feel it's similar to some of my open source projects (minus the $) in that it just keeps on giving value.
Awesome, so cool you are sharing it and that's exactly the goal I have (both for myself and to inspire others).
I had the idea of adding a "time travel" feature to it, so you can see literally how terrible the numbers were early on. My hourly rate for the first year was about $3!
This is awesome! Your dashboard is awesome too. I’ve been wanting to track time spent on my side projects, but I’ve never implemented anything. You have a chart for your time spent! So I’m wondering what you use to track that with?
You may want to use Paddle (which takes a bigger chunk of your profits) for that or some other marketplace: in that way Paddle is selling to end customers, taking a cut and then paying you in a business to business transaction.
You are also responsible for other types of taxes (assuming you are working via a limited liability corporation): sales taxes / VAT, corporate taxes, personal taxes, capital gain tax.
Some countries allow you to do some trading without setting up a company but as your earnings go up it will become either not very efficient from a tax perspective or not allowed by the law.
From my experience:
You need to pay VAT in European countries no matter where you're selling from (I use vatlayer.com for getting all the different VAT rates).
You generally don't need to pay taxes in other countries until you reach a threshold of earnings / number of sales.
Quaderno.io is another service which track all these different factors for you.
Sales tax / VAT is displayed and charged to customers and you need to pay it to the relevant authorities every quarter.
Then you can pay yourself a salary (which is a cost) from the money you received in the company, based on your country's personal income rates.
On what's left, on your company's profit you need to pay corporate tax rate, based on your country's corporate tax rates.
On the remaining profits in the company you can generally chose to pay yourself dividends (on which you pay other taxes, based on your country's tax rates on dividends).
If you sell your company, you'll have to pay capital tax gain taxes on the profit you made with the company (the delta between the company's capital and how much you sold it for).
Do you mean, sales taxes or personal income taxes? How a person manages those depends on their country. If you can, hire an local accountant to help or at least get advice. If the amounts get large enough you may need to open a business for yourself.
Someone already added a great summary below, but yeah the short answer is "it's complicated". I personally have a single LLC for the businesses and also now hire help to make sure I'm compliant.
When you say invested, was this as in time (you wrote the content and worked on SEO yourself), or did you pay to outsource this? I'm struggling with this myself at the moment.
Hi Cory—your dashboard is really impressive. Did you have to reboot the wedding place card app? Because I remember you commenting somewhere—I can't remember where—that it had tanked. But obviously since this is an end-of-year report that can't be true, right?
Just curious- how did you advertise/market your saaspegasus solution? I Google “boilerplate python and Django SaaS app” and your site is not front page, so I figured SEO probably isn’t the answer.
That's odd. It's mostly SEO and content, actually.
I believe it's in the front page for Django SaaS, Django boilerplate and related terms. I haven't gone as hard after Python keywords, though I probably should...
Your Open Project Dashboard is really cool. Do you have a system for keeping track of everything? Is it somehow automated? I'd like to create something similar for my own work.
Thanks! The tech behind it is pretty embarrassing.
Source data is Stripe (profit), Toggl (hours) and a tiny amount of manual accounting for expenses. I manually dump the raw data once a month into a CSV file, and then have some Python scripts that do intermediate calculations and transform the output to JSON. Then a tiny bit of JS to wire up the charts. So, in short, not automated at all, but takes ~10 minutes a month to keep up to date!
Love that dashboard! Makes me wonder what your Line Impact would be for the various projects, seems like you get a lot of business value from each line of code.
Probably the secret is that I try to spend as much time marketing as I do coding... (I usually fail but I'm guessing I still manage to market more than most devs)
Place cards was a ton of content, SEO and a long game.
Chat stats is so niche that I've literally just shared it a couple times on reddit and that's basically it. But somehow Google has figured out to show it for relevant queries.
I went full time independent in June of this year which gave me a lot more time. Since then I've averaged 60-80 hours a month on it, so I guess it's approaching a half-time job...
I am surprised you're making $1000/mo when you're not printing and sending out the cards. Have you thought of doing that? Would it make it more profitable?
Yeah, I'm sure it would but it would also increase the complexity a lot. I like how simple and low-touch the business is - it's one of my primary criteria for choosing projects!
I made that cool frontend for FTP server with an interesting twist as I've abstracted:
1. the backend storage: meaning it connects to a wide range of existing storage like FTP, SFTP, S3, Dropbox, ...
2. the authentication layer: meaning you can use your own identity provider to put your S3 buckets behind your corporate SSO
3. the authorization layer to create business rules
At its core, the software is a framework to develop file manager like web applications by implementing a simple interface (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/f7a4e52703...). This does enable all sort of interesting use case. For example, the mysql implementation shows database name as first level folder, tables as second level folders and each row in a table is shown as a file within the table folder which a user can edit directly through the generated form built from the schema information. That way people who are used to the Dropbox interface can edit the database directly, create shared links, search through stuff without having to know about sql
Most of the money comes from companies who needed various degree of customisation and support or didn't want to host on premise.
seo and specifically creating online tool for niches like "ftp online", "sftp online", "s3 client online" and referral from existing customers who share the product with others.
We sell glass water jugs targeted at desk workers, to help remind you to drink enough water. I created it because I wasn't drinking enough water.
Running paid ads has been very hit or miss, and I don't have a knack for the marketing. But word-of-mouth has been good for us and we get the odd corporate sale here or there.
Pigcat, if you ever need advice for marketing ideas, feel free to pm me. I have a 14 year marketing career under my belt spanning growth & inbound for B2B/B2C/D2C businesses.
I know exactly what it's be unable to come up with the ideas that stick in putting your product in front of a receptive audience of buyers. Especially in this day and age, where it can feel hard to find the confidence or angle for an organic non-spammy message.
That's pretty brilliant. I have the same problem, and I think the time gradations are a perfect solution.
I saw your other comment about down-selecting factories. How do you do quality checks? For example, as a wild hypothetical, how do you know the product isn't made in hazardous environments or isn't safe?
I did do a bit of QA myself: dishwasher cycles; hot & cold liquids (a good test of borosilicate glass); drop tests from very low heights (it is glass after all).
Most factories worth their salt also undergo some third party testing and I asked for these certificates which detail the chemical breakdown of the glass. Granted, I suppose these could be forged, and I would have no way of knowing.
Finally, there is quite a lot of back and forth with videos on Whatsapp, where you see the factory floor, and get a sense of the type of show they're running.
Part of the down-selection process is also just how willing each factory is to engage with these types of questions!
This is awesome. Great idea, great execution, and great story. You scratched your own itch and turned it into a business. Thanks for sharing the project and background.
I found a factory on Alibaba. I started with a list of about 40 factories that seemed legit and might accommodate a small order (MOQ in their terminology). Since it was a custom shape that I wanted, I shared my designs, and after a bit of back and forth, I eventually settled on 4 factories. I paid for a sample from each, and one factory was far superior. I then had to negotiate down from a MOQ of 2000 units to eventually do a first order of 200 units. Once that one sold out, I ordered 400 units, and now I order 1000 units at a time.
Fulfillment is done in house (I live in Toronto), and the warehouse is my basement!
ahh very awesome! i do have one other question at the moment. is it common for the factory to provide individual packaging already for certain size of products or is it more like sending a pallet over and packaging is sourced elsewhere? thanks so much for entertaining this - this thread has been really cool!
As a disclaimer - I don't have a lot of experience manufacturing in China, but I can tell you what I learned from my experience! And from what I can tell it is extremely common, yes.
Our factory works with other factories they know to provide that kind of thing. For our first order they gave us a choice of plain cardboard boxes or white glossy ones. These boxes were clearly custom shaped because they fit the product perfectly. After selling the first 600 units, I then asked them if we could customize the packaging with a design, and they sent us what's called a "dieline" (google it). Our designer did up a nice design on top of the dieline and that's what we're still using.
From memory, I think it was something like 45 cents more per box for the colour printing.
Another example is a little info page that we include. At the beginning I was printing them at a print shop, then opening each box, putting it in, sealing it back up, etc. I eventually asked the factory if they could do that as well, and they did (for a small additional fee)
I bought one too. I tried to make the giant water bottles work and they just don’t for me. They’re too clunky to use. I like that this pitcher is made of borosilicate glass and has a good profile for desk usage. Good job OP.
My life-partner and I both used to work in separate WeWorks, for our full-time jobs. My colleagues (and hers) were very supportive and bought a couple, then people would see them around on desks and word-of-mouth kind of just spread that way! The product benefitted from a bit of a viral effect in the pre-pandemic days :P
Also, one thing I'm really proud of is that a lot of our sales (around 12%) come from repeat customers. I've reached out to many of these customers and a lot of them tell me they buy the first one for themselves, and then the next orders are gifts for their friends.
Eventually I started running facebook ads. That worked pretty well for a while but I really noticed a change after the iOS privacy ads opt-in change. I've run experiments with reddit/pinterest/facebook/instagram ads since, and paid ads are overall just not profitable, at least the way I'm running them! We stopped running paid ads entirely two months ago, and I wish I had stopped a long time ago.
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.