Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's really cool to see the boxes), and I've sold a few boxes so far. Trying out some advertising now and working on building a presence on Instagram, since that seems like a great place to reach dog people, and the product is pretty photogenic.

https://coopersdogtreats.com/

Interesting, I'm a chef (ex?) and a friend of mine wanted to start a dog food company in 2016-17 but never got around to it. Your approach looks pretty straight forward, for some reason I thought you'd have to be at a commissary kitchen and have food handlers paperwork on top off all the stuff you mentioned.

I'll share your link with them and maybe they get re-interested, do you have any interest in a collaboration for dog food in the future? Provided it met your standards etc...

I actually wanted to see if we could do it entirely upcycling the loss in food waste in the supply chain and restaurants as I know that Industry well and have made efforts to try and reduce as much as possible. I honestly would take home multiple 3 pans full of high grade sashimi grade salmon from saute's prep, and at least 5 lbs of blood lined yellow fin tuna from my station every week.

I still have a bunch of it sitting in my freezer and I know tons of restaurants and farms are sitting on the same or more.

I'm happy to chat with anybody in the space - I'm very early on, so it may be too early for any kind of collaboration, but definitely never hurts to talk to other folks who are interested in this kind of thing.

I'll see what they say and reach out if they still have the motivation.

I'll refer to this post and drop you a line to your gmail account listed on your site of this materializes an take it from there.

On the legal side, I've got business insurance, which thankfully isn't that expensive. I've been holding off on forming an LLC since that's gonna run me about a grand here in CA including the cost of setting it up and LLC tax, but if there's continued interest in the product, I'll do that soon.

Edit: Also AAFCO is a group that has standards for this sort of thing that are pretty straightforward: https://petfood.aafco.org/Portals/1/pdf/eight_required_labei...

https://www.lobbplewe.com/blog/2019/09/rules-for-out-of-stat...

Why an LLC instead of an S-corp?

"The FDA’s regulation of pet food is similar to that for other animal food. There is no requirement that pet food products have premarket approval by the FDA. However, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) requires that pet foods, like human foods, be safe to eat, produced under sanitary conditions, contain no harmful substances, and be truthfully labeled."

For example:

https://www.purina.com/frosty-paws

And:

http://dogstersicecream.com

In hot weather, I imagine a lot of dogs would go for something cold to consume if it was made available.

Might as well put the info to good use, so if correct: happy birthday!

(I suspect this was around the time a year or two ago that I was testing out my HN tagger extension/server)

Might be a geographical/climate thing. I'm in San Diego, so frozen treats are good year round here.

Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.

I think the most informative one I read was on something like shtf fourms. It stayed tame, other than everyone wanting to buy the dehydrator after the author was done.

As opposed to say someone who keeps a month of food, water, fuel, meds, entertainment on hand, which looks pretty normal now.

That said, when you're taking freeze dried meats and putting them in a food processor to turn them into powder, it stinks to high heaven and you end up with a light dusting of meat powder all over your kitchen. I don't recommend trying it :P

Edit: I see now that your comments indicate that you're US only. Just to make sure you're aware, your site calculates and suggests shipping to Europe.

In the mean time you can always just skip the Starter Kit and buy the mix directly (https://coopersdogtreats.com/collections/frontpage/products/... and https://coopersdogtreats.com/collections/frontpage/products/...), then use any ice cube mold/tray you happen to have around.

Google Ads are pretty straightforward, so at this point I'm just running a couple and watching conversion rates - you basically just need to look at how much you're spending vs. how much revenue they're bringing in to figure out if they're worth it.

IG advertising is new to me - I'm planning to reach out to some dog accounts to see if I can offer free samples and possibly money for them to promote. No idea about what the going rate for that sort of thing is or how effective it'll be, but I'll find out soon :)

For the most part my margins are pretty decent and at this point I'm more interested in proving that there's product-market fit than optimizing for profit, so I don't mind losing some money when my shipping charges don't cover it or people hit the free shipping threshold. Definitely something I'm going to need to get a better handle on long term, though.

After that, I thought folks might want to buy these, so I had packaging and logo designs done on 99designs, set up a Shopify site, and here we are.

My dog loves the frozen bones with marrow, which I dub frobos.

I’m sure he would love these!

I'd certainly be a customer if I lived in the US.

Something I'm very familiar with for treating older woofs in pain, and spazzy "I hate the vet" woofs, haha! Hope to hear from you.

It's been done:

https://www.carolinahempcompany.com/products/lalas-cbd-dog-t...

When hemp was still in the grey area they got hit with shut down by CDPHE at the behest of an undisclosed pharma giant. The creator of those treats was a friend of my co-founder and a regular at our parent company's events in CO where she sold her products. She might have gotten an award at the hemp awards, I'm not sure.

The efficacy of CBD is well understood, what isn't is the standardization and practices for effective administration be it in Humans or animals. My guess is you'd get into issues with freezing the hemp oil/extract infused cbd effectively. I mean you could use shatter, if you were really motivated.

Also, this could subject you to bank account shutdowns and business license delays if your bank(s) find out.

Source: Ex fintech founder with hemp farmers, and ex biodynamic farmer that studied hemp and its various properties during apprenticeship and biologist.

I use burners on social media, so, no info in my bio.

I just thought she really captured the feel I was looking for - it's an upscale product, but it's for dogs so I still wanted it to feel fun.

The designer gave me image files that were formatted correctly, so I just sent them in and had boxes at my door a few days later. They look great: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-srBIsJgND/

I worked on a paid tier (learnt a tremendous amount about actually selling an app, integration with payment processors, licensing, more legal stuff than I wanted to etc.)

Almost from the get go, it started making +$3k/mo. With more changes and offering a Mac version along a Windows version, it averages around +$7k/mo of revenue consistently. I'm the only person on it and have a full time job. Barely need to make code changes and it requires minimal effort for customer support.

So congratulations for finding a niche which did actually result in paying users.

I was wondering about any resources you have to learn about licensing and legal stuff, or any common caveats that you ran into.

Second will be dealing with sales tax and it's a nightmare. If you sell to customers in Europe you need to pay VAT to different countries at different rates. Same goes for US states that tax very differently. We moved recently to paddle.com which acts as a reseller and so they take care of all sales tax collection and remittance (they are the one selling the app after all). We moved away from PayPal and so far it's been very smooth.

On a practical level, no foreign government is going to bother you until your sales are in the millions, at least. They don’t have the ability to know your sales in the first place, and you’re way too small to bother trying to go after. Especially since there’s no real enforcement mechanism for, say, France to try and collect $200 from some random American online software business.

Philosophically, I vehemently disagree with the premise that a foreign jurisdiction can tax my business because their citizens choose to visit my website and buy things. Should German websites pay a 200% tax if citizens of Eritrea buy things from their website, just because Eritrea passes a law that says that? I have zero representation or connection to these jurisdictions, and if they want tax money or to stop their citizens from using my website, that’s between the citizens and their government. Until there’s some enforcement mechanism, I’ll just keep ignoring them like I always have.

Congrats on a product successful from the beginning!

And sure enough Mac users account for 30% for the revenue today.

Another advantage is that it runs completely on the user's computer. So I have no database or back-end to maintain. There is only a small server to generate licenses + handle some analytics the app emits both built on ASP.NET. The only data I store is in a Microsoft Azure table. I pay around $2 a month for all azure costs.

So basically a license is public info, the app enforces that the logged in user must match the user in the license.

Do I have to pay every year to keep using the app?

Question - Does something like this exist for Facebook?

My code is open source by the way, and I wrote about it here: https://snir.dev/blog/apartments-bot/

Do other people here in the US have this experience as well? I was thinking it'd be Facebook marketplace, craigslist, and apartment sites (like apartments.com)

1. It allows for "team search". My friends knew I'm looking, so they tagged me in relevant posts they saw. Can't do it anywhere else (including marketplace by facebook themselves)

2. It allows for group communication with the publisher of the post. One asks - everybody sees.

3. It gives a sense of power to those who seek to rent. Many posts with high prices have comments like "You are crazy", "You are a pig", "whoever pays this much is as sucker". It almost warms the heart, we fight the greedy landlords. It almost make it fun, like a witch hunt.

I’ve only seen posts of apartments for rent in Facebook groups that are aimed at college students. (In the US)

Otherwise, Craigslist is basically king.

So if your apartments target young couples or room mates, facebook is your place. For families we have craiglist-like solutions.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/235368102105

I listed my rental flat a bunch of places before using the group, since I started using it I'd not look elsewhere.

1) any illegal technicalities 2) is it a dick move to the website owner

In short about legality - it depends on the country. But most will define user content as owned by the user, not the platform, therefore legal to scrape and use, as the user intents for the data to be public.

But sites will fight you on this. Amazon specifically give up a really good fight.

Ofcourse, this talks about user content in an "open" platform. If the content is owned by a business that has no intentions for it to be open for everyone in every medium, its probably illegal.

In regard to being a dick move, it depends. If someone posted an ad in facebook, he intended for it to be seen. He doesn't care how. I just tunnel it to myself in easier way for me to consume.

Then, of course, the way you go about it is important, too. Sapping the resources and bandwidth of a small site by sending it thousands of requests a minute is very different from automatically checking a public index once an hour.

2) I ask the owner first (perhaps they even want to send me the data directly). If they don't respond, I go ahead and scrape, spreading the requests over a long time so as not hit their website too hard.

FB gets more user engagement out of this, which is their goal. No harm, no foul.

You'll find various subreddits where people are buying around 5-10spools a month. Imagine how much virgin plastic is being added like that to the environment.

I've been creating filament and selling it:

https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...

This activity also help recycle waste plastic.

Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool

It's trivial to get the quality right.

You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Etsy or your own Shopify store and use Facebook ads/Google Ads to advertise your website.

That said I didn't use any ads to sell filament! Only few days ago I started Shopify store and paid $5-10 in Facebook ads. Since we accept credit card, it's not too much of a risk for buyer to buy it from us (even when are new)

I work from home so I take 5 minute break and walk to my garage and check if the filament machine successfully is running on auto pilot

Thing is filament doesn't have huge demand, neither it has very less demand. So you can dominate local demand by creating quality filament.

I focus on fulfilling local demand, I've gained customers who need large supply of filament of ABS, TPU and Nylon12.

If people do actually come to compete with me, it's a win win. More plastic recycled = less plastic entering landfill.

Right now I do nothing for emissions.

It happens inside a barrel that reduces a lot of emissions.

The emission will appear near the nozzle and the hopper. As those are the only opening in the barrel.

Once filament exists the nozzle, after 10inches, it goes into a water bath.

In future tho, I'll add HEPA+Activated charcoal filter lid on the hopper and use same for nozzle but with an extraction fan.

as someone who has 3d printed nearly 100kg with FDM machines in the past year, I can't disagree more.

Filament extrusion foaming coefficients are all over the place, even only looking at 'cheap' PLA, let alone PETG. This leads to excess oozing and inconsistent extrusion widths, leading to failed or out-of-tolerance parts.

Color is all over the place for anything but the darkest or lightest colors for the cheap stuff.

Filament widths are wildly inconsistent even within the same companies products -- this leads to extruder jams on the cold side.

Cheap filament spools are commonly fused or spliced together mid-roll, leading to a bump at the splice that has to be shaved -- often it isn't, again leading to extruder jams.

Spools that are spliced together often have poor circularity near the splice -- another chance for a jam.

I've received dusty spools that were vacuum packed, and spools that were vacuum packed with condensation visible on the inside of the packaging (humidity and moisture can damage many filaments, leading to lengthy rebake procedures if the filament survives at all.).

I appreciate your effort, and i'm glad you're doing well in business -- but the quality of your product must come from efforts you don't realize, because the quality on the market for cheap filament is , in HN parlance, a dumpster fire.

If you run into problems, feel free to reach out to me. My telegram is in the medium article - I'll help you solve all your problem while extruding filament.

>even only looking at 'cheap' PLA, let alone PETG.

I don't extrude PLA or PETG at all, buying these special resins is difficult and costs 3x or 5x the ABS. I ask for the lowest wrappage and viscosity blend specially made for extrusion.

I buy general purpose polymers like extrusion grade granules of TPU, Nylon12 (it absorbs the least moisture in all nylons) and ABS - buy them from reputable companies they come in membrane sealed bags of 25kg. These polymers are mass produced and finding them for cheap around $1.4-$3 is easy.

>Filament widths are wildly inconsistent even within the same companies products -- this leads to extruder jams on the cold side.

Before jumping into making filament I researched on Amazon and found most filament being sold is within plus minus 0.05 to 0.02mm tolerance. Upon further research I found that these tolerances are trivial to achieve with sufficiently powered extruder and the industrial machines used for making medical grade silicone tubes can achieve plus minus 0.001mm tolerance using dual axis laser and feedback loop controlling pulling speed at high frequency.

You extrude fast, you lose tolerance. Companies might want more througput if their customers don't care about the dimensions and only want ultra cheap stuff.

I don't splice, all my filament is continuous length.

>I've received dusty spools that were vacuum packed, and spools that were vacuum packed with condensation visible on the inside of the packaging (humidity and moisture can damage many filaments, leading to lengthy rebake procedures if the filament survives at all.).

You need to seal the filament spool right after it's ready with a 10-20grams of dessicant. There are special vaccume seal bags and handheld vaccum sealer for low volumes like I am doing it's good enough.

>but the quality of your product must come from efforts you don't realize, because the quality on the market for cheap filament is

You'll have to troubleshoot the issues with your filament yes but once you've figured it out - it becomes easy.

I've written several part articles on my medium blog with many more to come where I'll write about common issues and their solutions.

I have had more difficulty in shooting down bugs in production code than building extruder. Just saying that skill level of a programmer and some random guy off the street might have difference. With some guidance anyone can do it.

My wife is now tuning extruder, filling the hopper and extruding filament as good as me. She doesn't have technical education background. Arguably, I find baking to more difficult than extruding filament, but it could be just that baking doesn't exite me.

I appreciate you concerns but quality of filament has lots of parameters but most common problems appear when:

1. Seller has bought the filament like PLA in bulk from china for $3-4 a spool. They buy a full container load at once to make it as cheap as possible. After a year on shelf even when placed in vaccum sealed bags, PLA becomes brittle. And you'll have very hard time printing with it - it will snap at different places randomly and your prints will fail.

2. Inconsistent diameter - these are extruding too fast or using low quality resin with no good operator on machine available for tuning. For example if I want to extrude 1kg filament and I add 200gram resin of A company, I ran out then I add 200gram resin or B company, you'll have to tune extruder again. Better create filament in large batches from the resin from same batch.

How about recycling plastic waste ground on the beach?

Well, picking up beach plastic is too much work - I am not that involved, I need easy automated work haha.

There are already companies who pick and sort, shred and wash plastic for you and even convert it into granules - so it's much better to give them more business so the are able to pick more of the waste.

If you are interested in plastic recycling: https://preciousplastic.com/

Here they report improved ABS properties on recycling

Interesting findings though.

People can start with extruding clay or Noddles to start

Together they almost covered the Apple Developer fee :-)

Things continued like this for years, until one day Apple started getting harsher on gambling. While my game has no other players, and the "money" you win doesn't save anywhere or get you anything, it was still gambly enough that I could no longer have it in the store as an individual developer. Then the Japanese name app was also removed because it wasn't substantive enough (I don't disagree).

I don't mention them usually, because the loss didn't mean much to me and I'm still fine with developing for iOS in the future. But here you asked especially for projects that made money but that we wouldn't usually talk about.

At least my domain registrar and hosting provider probably won't remove my website.

Uh oh. I am developing a single player game that's somewhat similar to yours and was planning to release it on iOS. It doesn't involve money, just points, but it is push your luck. Do you know what I should be looking for to see Apple's new guidelines for this?

"In order to reduce fraudulent activity on the App Store and comply with government requests to address illegal online gambling activity, we are no longer allowing gambling apps submitted by individual developers. This includes both real money gambling apps as well as apps that simulate a gambling experience."

That being said, I do have a board game design where you do bet chips that I would have liked to make a software version of. Guess I'm not releasing that one on iOS.

When I think that Apple would allow that, but not an honest paid app that transliterates a name into another language, I start questioning whether I should get into that ecosystem, or rather focus on Mac apps only and distribute them outside of the store.

"We noticed that your app has not been updated in a significant amount of time... To keep your app on the App Store, submit an updated version for review and make sure it follows the latest App Review Guidelines. If you are unable to submit an update within 30 days, your app will be removed from the App Store until you submit an update and it is approved."

Spent 5 minutes to make the video and upload it.

Was making $2-3/month, which is a great ROI for 5 minutes of work.

All positive comments and upvotes because the video is useful.

Then YouTube demonetized all small publishers because they can somehow block spam, but not identify “offensive” content.

Fuck you Youtube.

It consistently brings in around £100-300 per month and if I put any time at all into marketing it could probably do a lot better.

I also maintain a directory of UX tools, resources and information [1]. It currently doesn’t bring in anything but it’s more of a repository for stuff I find interesting than a commercial venture.

[0] https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheDoveAndTheSeagull

[1] https://www.uxlift.org/

There’s a form on the site, but if you’ve got anything else you want to share just send it to uxlift@kevan.tv.

I’m really interested in self-hosted, privacy-respecting alternatives to the big tracking platforms so this is right up my street. (Having said that, I do use GA, but I’m not happy about it.)

And did you automate the print/production initially or do it only after you'd been around for a while? If you don't mind me asking, what print/production company are you using, how did you find them and why did you settle on them (vs. someone else, say)?

Any more information would be welcome.

I knew I wanted to do something with public domain art prints, so I researched other sellers to find the types of things that were popular. Lots of places like the Library of Congress, NYPL and the Rijksmuseum have open access policies, so I regularly hunt through their collections to find interesting stuff. The problem is always finding something in the public domain that’s also very high resolution.

For a long time I produced the pieces myself as buying top quality paper and a decent printer worked out cheaper than using a print company - and I quite enjoyed it. However I’ve decided now that the convenience is worth the extra cost.

I’ve also automated creating listing images by using Cloudinary and a few shell scripts. This has been a massive time-saver.

As for print companies, it’s a balance between cost, quality and price. The big ones like Printful or Gooten are cheaper and do everything from t-shirts to phone cases, but have a limited range of paper and sizes. Specialist fine art places have a huge range of paper and produce better prints but are much more expensive.

Edit Never mind, I see your response to another question.

Have you thought about padding your collection for the sake of exposure?

I’m also working on a Jekyll-based site that uses the Etsy API to build a stand-alone e-commerce site from all my Etsy store listings.

People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding.

This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because I was renting space in a fulfillment center combined with shopify and a marketing contractor.

How did you charge the marketing contractor?

I wanted to reached out to marketing contractor but haven’t had much information

Thank you!

As one example of the kind of tasks he handled:

Prospective customers could send in their measurements via WhatsApp and he would then look up into our internal measurement tables to determine which bikini size to order.

Or we would get collaboration invites from Instagram Influencers via PM or E-Mail. He would check their follower counts, bot ratio, etc. and then use an (internal secret) Google Docs to calculate the estimated value for us. He'd then use that to either decline or determine how generous our promotional gift would be.

Nowadays, the concept is called VA = Virtual Assistant, for example like what https://timesvr.com/ offers.

All the best with your side business (and all)!

I got started with my endeavors from people explaining things to me on programming IRC channels, so despite its bad reputation, advice from random strangers on the internet can be good advice.

As for this particular project, I stopped it when I ran out of bikinis and couldn't buy more at the same conditions anymore. At the same time, competition from China was also arriving in the form of dropshipping. I could have switched suppliers to reduce my purchase costs and remain competitive, but selling a high volume of cheap products is a lot more work than selling a low volume of high priced items.

What he did was mostly to reply to whatsapp messages and to grant free bikinis to Instagram influencers.

One particularly good angle was yoga teachers. They'd usually be doing retreats at exotic locations and posting inspirational photos multiple times per day. Plus the yoga teachers that are popular on Instagram tend to be extremely attractive girls doing slightly suggestive poses. So that was a great fit for my bikinis.

And you'd be surprised how cheap Instagram influencers are. There's so many people who want to be famous that it's 100% a buyer's market.

The marketing contractor organized a list of Instagram handles, follower counts, and email addresses. I don't really know from where, but my guess would be that it was from his marketing buddies. I mean it wouldn't make sense for an agency to just grant us direct access to all of their members.

He then initially emailed some of them manually. After our brand became more popular, we sometimes received offers via email or pm. He would then determine the value for us and reply accordingly.

But that was a pity later on when I ran out of bikinis and didn't manage to hire him again.

I knew him through a shared friend. I lived in Asia for some years, and that's where most westerners go if they want to create a manufacturing business.

Plus screen printing tends to have much stronger colors and feel more valuable than the offset printing used in on-demand production.

I'd suggest a Kickstarter to finance a 100+ shirt bulk order at $15 per shirt. That way, you have good profit margins and good quality.

As in: now he's a dead firemoose.

I would stay awake some nights and jot down every product mentioned in overnight infomercials (before I knew what TiVo was). then write a review on them the next day.

Thousands of people would search for “X review” in the days after watching those infomercials and I would rank #1 because some of them were brand new products.

BTW, writing fictional reviews for money is not only unethical, it can be illegal too

For what it’s worth, i am no longer involved with this today.

Bit of background - lots of Amazon sellers use a software called tactical arbitrage that scrapes retailers to get prices and compares prices to Amazon. It comes with a couple hundred sites built in, and the ability to add new sites using custom xpaths. I made a chrome extension that lets you point and click on arbitrary sites to automatically create an xpath file that would be compatible with this software. Charged $199 for it, although I had some launch specials at $149 and above.

Still have a handful of organic sales a year, although it's not really worth the time spent in support anymore. In retrospect I should have made it $99 upfront plus $10/month or something and provided ongoing support.

Thanks.

Primarily have yoga instructors using this as a better way to collect payment for Zoom classes compared to collecting payment on Venmo or using another tool they’re not comfortable with such as Gumroad.

Only charging .6% on top of Stripe’s fees and no monthly. Only making a little money at the moment but it’s scaling and seeing interest from lots of random online instructors.

ClassUp - https://www.classup.io

For now it's very basic, but I'm working on a few features that are specifically geared to helping live class creators sell more easily, primarily calendar integration, support for multiple classes being sold, and support for monthly subscriptions to all classes from an instructor.

It's fairly simple: 1) Commission Russian 3D artist to make model of aircraft -$1000 2) Commission Audio Engineer to do sound - $500 3) Tweak model to work well with simulator + animation - 12 hours 4) Paint model in Substance - 12 hours 5) Set up flight model in X-Plane's "Plane Maker" - 8 hours 6) Coding - 12 hours 7) Misc loose ends & testing - 12 hours

I don't talk about it because I don't want too much competition figuring out what an easy way this is to make money.

How can you be reassured that the outsourcers won’t steal your idea?

This is interesting and sounds like it could be applied to game plugins in general.

I serve developer-focused ads with CodeFund (and Carbon as a backup when CodeFund doesn't have an ad available). I get about $45 in revenue per month. Hosting costs are $0 because it's just a static site served from Netlify, so the only cost is the domain.

I never intended to make any money off of it, and I care much more that it's hopefully a helpful resource for some people. But it is nice to get a little bit of passive income.

Really, though, your site is awesome. I just emailed you about sponsoring it, if you're interested :)

[1]: https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/

After the success of one of our interviews on HN [1], someone contacted me and suggest that I interview a highly successful value investor. We had a great 'Taaalk' [2] and he then put me in touch with an investing friend of his in London who runs a fund. We met for lunch and he taught me all about how he invests in shares, it was very straight forward, so I started following his guidance and made 50% on my money last year [nothing magical, just solid and practical value investing advice] - meaning I could take the year off and do a masters in Psychology of Mental Health - which is (slowly) helping change my career into a direction I love.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300017)[the link to our site wont work, to see the interview go here: https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess]

[2] https://taaalk.co/t/value-investing

P.S. Anyone can make their own interview, so if you have a friend you think should be interviewed - please keep Taaalk in mind :)

They're either too naive to realise it was luck, or trying to scam you.

This allows you change the start time of a Strava (Garmin, etc.) activity. Useful for WFH situations where you really just want a nice midday run or bike, but don't want to deal with the potential judgement from coworkers who follow you. Might be overthinking things, but oh well :)

- intellectually stimulating

- excuse to acquire toys (cnc, miter saw, linoblocks and inking supplies, etc)

- can be used a fun projects/learning experiences for my kids.

My project that has generated the most revenues has been selling (in very low quantities) a limited edition wordclock that I designed and build. Except for the Qlock2 all the wordclocks I’ve seen are diy or compete on cost. Mine is (imho) a high quality art piece. And I price it similarLy to Qlock2 but with a totally different aesthetic. My wordclock making started as presents for friends and family then evolved to a workshop I taught at a local maker space. Some discussion on my Show HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950130

Website: finewordclocks.com

Etsy: finewordclocks.etsy.com

I bought a cnc machine for the clocks but most of my cnc work currently is making projects with the kids. Some of them have been refined into other products (Like custom engraved magic marker holders) on my Etsy site.

Lately As a side project to my side project I’ve been making wooden sneeze guard stands. These started by my neighbor who’s a dentist asking me to help him make some. Then I made a few for friends that own a local bakery. Last week I received an order for $1000 worth from an urgent care provider. Feels good to help small businesses reopen post lockdown. Even cooler if they are willing to pay me to help. It also serves as a teaching moment with my kids.

Next is to figure out how to use my maker skills to help BLM movement. I’m still trying to figure that out. Ideas welcome!

I'm always curious about the limited run, higher-quality, higher-cost items because it's so outside the typical buying habits I see and I imagine would be closer almost to art dealing than the usual business paths we see on HN.

I’ve paid for the cnc I bought and all the other miscellaneous tools so far. I’m not yet accounting for My time spent. But currently that’s still intellectually interesting since I’m learning how to fabricate things better and still experimenting. I’d say that if I sell 2 more I’d be at break even even if including my time.

More importantly my kids 4 and 7 are really excited about making things and are constantly coming up with projects that use the cnc machine (I obviously design the thing and run the machine) but my oldest “helps” me set up and even made a video explaining to their kindergarten class how the machine works. I found that ad a big win.

I also REALY like making various presents for family and friends as I wrote in this blog post: https://www.finewordclocks.com/blog/2019/10/10/what-is-the-m.... To me that is worth a lot and nearly all kids birthday party presents for the last 2 years have been home made and VERY highly received.

I agree this is very different that what most side projects posted here are. Atm I’m not really focused on making money as I am doing something interesting. If I was optimizing on money, I’d have a different day job. Though I’d certainly love to have more money, I don’t need it and my quality of life would likely be much different (worse).

It has grown organically to 1,000 visits per day and ~$1,000/month. I have a couple of additional materials in the pipeline. Of course, I've already seen everything from the site shamelessly copied and posted elsewhere. That's fine; I never built it for the money (I built it for my wife, who is a teacher).