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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I buy cars, repair them and recondition them to my level of satisfaction, and send them back out the door, typically targeting 55-65 year olds. I focus mostly on entry level luxury crossovers around 7 to 10 years old, though starting to also do hybrids since there’s more profit in it since everyone is seemingly allergic to batteries and pack replacement/rebuilds.
Parts are cheap, I listen to music or a podcast, I do all the “PITA” repairs (replacing wheel bearings, ball joints, tie rods, full brake service) that are really just labor in terms of professional repair cost, perform additional rust prevention, and for sale it goes when I feel a new grandma or grandpa would never give a hesitation to load it up with all their grandkids. They also see a very thorough interior cleaning, and a full exterior detail (including paint correction when required).
It has bought every very nice tool I could ever want, most are 20-30 hours of labor including acquisition, and I’m at the point where I have repeat customers (the put a 2nd alongside the first) and have direct referrals. Now the profit mostly goes towards putting a 2nd interesting car in the garage, and some towards moving up the ladder to try to earn more per vehicle.
Selling cars isn’t bad when you don’t have employees to pay, and it lets you sell really high quality stuff. I keep thinking of how much I couldn’t justify doing, and how much my product standards would suffer if I had to pay help.
Can you make YouTube videos about it? I watch Chris Fix all the time, not for educational purpose (I don't own a car), but because they are so freaking satisfying to watch. Seeing things go from 'meh' to 'wow.'
I think the unfortunate reality of ChrisFix is to make videos at that level of quality... takes real time and effort -- plus a vehicle that merits actual work he's not done a video on yet. Hence he only puts out one or two a month, but they're of an extraordinarily high quality, which is evident in his sub numbers and view count.
I've considered making videos, but the reality at the moment is there's not yet the time to do it to my level of quality. At least not yet.
The next time you watch one of Chris' videos, try to figure out how much prep is required for every single shot and edit. He works without a cameraman, so figure out where the camera is mounted and how it was mounted there. (hint: it's usually mounted _inside_ the car, somewhere harder to get to than the part he's accessing in the shot!)
It quickly adds up to an insane amount of effort. (Which is why he's got the best auto repair tutorials in human history!)
As an amateur shade tree mechanic myself I have so many questions! Feel free to ignore if you feel you'd be giving away your secret sauce.
1. Where do you find buyers? I'd be concerned about inventory either piling up or taking too long to sell at a price that even breaks even when you are spending time/money on fixing.
2. Do you feel your value-add is more on the sales side as a broker or is it in the repairs? I know people who just flip cars and do extremely minimal "freshing up" and are also profitable/successful.
3. How do you keep up with the increasingly locked down and opaque ECUs and other systems? More and more diagnostics require factory wizardry these days.
4. You implied that you do paint and body work. Where/how did you learn and become proficient? Most auto repairs are pretty much "follow the steps" work anyone can learn from YouTube, but body work is artistry.
5. Do you worry about liability? I'm OK fixing my own car since if I screw up it's my ass on the line. I'd be less confident in sending the car off to grandma, even if I knew what I was doing.
1. Mostly Craigslist, with a bit of AutoTrader. The reality is AutoTrader is swamped with dealer listings and sponsor listings that I don't feel I'm receiving any additional value for their listing fees.
2. Repairs and preventative maintenance. We average ~4 feet of snow a year, so tie rod ends, wheel bearings, control arms, bushes, flex pipes, exhaust hangers, etc. suffer since no one really maintains a steel car properly. The reality is when even a Honda or Toyota dealer is $125/hour and a Lexus or Acura dealer is $175/hour, people don't replace $18/ea bushings -- but when things rattle or feel loose, they sell the vehicle like it's going to explode.
These aren't difficult repairs, they just require lifting the vehicle (I have a Bendpak Quick Jack) and doing it. People also don't properly clean their undercarriage, and rustproof. I do. Very easy, very inexpensive. Though when many people treat cars as disposable, it lets a lot of nice stuff come onto the market for the well-inclined.
3. Not an issue unless you're in Porsches on up with encrypted ECUs, and even then, that prevents MODIFYING them, not reading diagnostics. Regardless, this has been a problem 0 times since I've started many years ago. OBD-II is a wonderful thing, and there's no weird shenanigans coming from Honda/Toyota at all.
4. I only do paint correction, as in "level a clearcoat" to a mirror finish, and only for vehicles that merit it (let's ignore that any car sub-$150K new comes with some level of orange peel). I do not buy any vehicle that needs a respray, ever. It can be DIY'd very well, but the amount of labor is prohibitive. Not enough money made for the time spent.
5. I've an umbrella policy, mostly because I have one for my primary business, in the odd event I ever were sued. In general, vehicles are sold as-is. Zero concern here.
Do you float the titles or just bend over and take whatever arbitrary limit for non-dealer title transfers that the dealers lobbied into existence in your state?
Do you live in the US? In my state (wa) you need to be licensed as a dealership to do this legally and I hear this is the case in all the other states too.
There's definitely a benefit to working on the same model/series more than once. Three fourths of my amateur mechanic hours are split between asking "now why won't this darn thing come loose?" and "Oh! So I didnt't need to take all this apart to get to this piece!"
Not really, except out of necessity. Mechanics aren't, cheap, and where I am, really not cheap. Cars are just giant metal Lego.
As for paint matching, I don't. If I car needs any significant paint work, I'm not interested in buying it. It's also a sign that when I get underneath a car, I'm going to find other issues which are going to be an immediate no sale (as in welding required).
Even at normal, non-insurance repair rates (as in, full price), an independent mechanic charges around twice as much per hour than a body shop does for your average paint work (high end a very different story) -- I can get much more $/hour for my labor doing repairs than I ever will doing anything more than leveling a clear coat.
Bread and butter is the Lexus RX, Acura MDX, Honda CR-V and Toyota Highlander. There is zero issue putting them out the door, because the demand is insane. I've also started with Toyota Priuses because there's high-demand, most mechanics are allergic to batteries, and people dump them for cheap over any battery pack issue.
Though I've worked on a ton of stuff, the above is where there's A) enough people owning the above who still think all vehicles explode when their odometer hits 100K B) have inexpensive and easy repairs for simple things that are rotting or are wearing out and C) plenty of people who know better and when they test drive a 10-year old one that feels as good and looks as good as new, won't even negotiate your asking price.
I've entertained the idea of selling BMW M cars, Audi S/RS and Merc AMGs, but the reality is there's far more labor involved, far more to usually fix, higher acquisition costs, less demand, and buyers who are completely insufferable. I've sold several, but in retrospect it wasn't ever worth the time and effort.
that's really cool man I'd like to check out some of your wares some time. I'm very interested in giving old things new leases of lives and just refurbishing some of my old stuffs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I established DamnInteresting.com in 2005, a place where myself and handful of others produce original long-form non-fiction in article and podcast form. Despite plenty of traffic, it didn't reach the break-even point for several years, because I despise advertisements and I refused to add them to my site. I funded the project in other ways, such as donations, publishing a book, licensing content, etc.
Nowadays it still only earns a little every month, but that's mostly owing to a rise in expenses (e.g., I pay the contributors more). But profit is secondary for me, my primary motive is to have an excuse to research and write this stuff, and for intelligent people to consume it.
Kudos and thank you for resisting advertising and figuring out an alternative business model. It would be awesome if there was a whole alternative Internet like this, where ads (and selling user info) was forbidden.
Thank you! I found your site long ago and I’ve enjoyed every article. I often wondered what your plan for it was and would be. This puts a little closure on it. I feel the same way about advertising and wonder what alternate business models could happily maintain such a place while keeping it mostly free and open.
Wow, I always thought damninteresting.com was wildly profitable. Not sure why - I have been reader since the early days and always found the content to compelling and "sharable" - I'd have imagined that it would be extremely profitable.
I suppose without ads there isn't a lot of high-monetization opportunities.
Thanks a lot for creating and maintaining the site. If you ever need any help with the design and front-end development of your site, let me know - I'd love to volunteer some time to the site that I love so much.
It's a long story, but the short version goes something like this:
At first we worked our cabooses off to publish new original content several times per month. This proved unsustainable, partially because we were becoming more ambitious with our work, but especially owing to stressors that had arisen in my personal life, and I burned out.
I spent a year-long hiatus putting things right, and when we resumed our writing, it was with the understanding that we were switching to a marathon-not-a-sprint publication schedule. The curated column arose to fill in the gaps between our in-house writings. Nowadays many readers specifically visit us for the links, so we feel duty-bound to persist.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Two things, both of which I stumbled into accidentally -
I make lots of jellies once the berries in the garden are ripe; I bought a house in a rural area a few years ago and it came with loads of berries. Might as well put them to use.
It is all done manually (in part because it is meant to be a diversion from my engineering job) - red- and blackcurrant and gooseberries mostly. Last year the harvest was some 1200 4oz glasses of jelly - some 1150 more than my family consumes. Sells by word of mouth.
Also, as my mother is quite into weaving tapestry and it was hard to find the exact hues she wanted for her yarns, I started dyeing for her, using traditional colouring. Turned out there was a (veee-eeery small!) market for that kind of thing, and I now make small batches for some 30-35 weavers. Again, fully manual as the idea is to do something completely different from my full-time job.
-Oh, I'd go nuts if I did either of the above full-time; however it serves as a wonderful diversion and it is great to do something which produces tangible results.
It helps being an engineer, too - I've found (much to my surprise) that keeping detailed notes to ensure repeatable results is quite rare in both pastimes.
I've written a couple of books that sell on Amazon and Apple iBooks - it takes zero minutes per month work for me, but brings a nice little side income. I won't get rich, but it's nice to have the money come in for doing nothing after I hit the "publish" button. Even the printed books cost nothing.
I'm about to hit publish on a photo coffee-table book from my three years around Africa, and I'll write an Africa guide book and The Road Chose Me Vol 2 in the next 12-18 months.
* The Road Chose Me Volume 1: Two years and 40,000 miles from Alaksa to Argentina (https://amzn.to/2vfCYvn)
Stories and lessons from two years driving my Jeep Wrangler down the Pan-American Highway
* Work Less to Live Your Dreams: A practical guide to saving money and living your dreams
(https://amzn.to/2OD6UtA)
An eBook about how exactly I can afford to take years off work to do what I want and live my dreams.
After driving the length of the continent, I collected a bunch of information that is extremely helpful to anyone else thinking of doing similar. The vast majority of the Western Worlds "knowledge" of West Africa is so out of date it's useless. My book is from info I learned during my drip from mid 2016 to late 2017, so it's relevant
Check PastBook.com I made a coffee table book from my NYC trip and it’s super cool. Stefano, the CEO, is a very close friend of mine, but I can guarantee on the quality of the products.
> Do you work on the road or take off years at a time?
For the first one (AK->Argentina) I just took time off and lived off my savings account. For around Africa I wrote my first book and I write for multiple magazines while on the road.
> Are you armed, or do you just avoid central conflict areas?
Crossing an international border with a firearm will result in instant jail time in virtually every country on the planet. No, it would be impossible to bring a firearm. You might be surprsed to know I have never heard a single gunshot in three years around the continent, and Ethiopia was the only country I ever saw regular people with firearms. In every other country it's only the police/military, who are extremely professional.
> I take it no family? (hence the 'solo' bit) or are they undersganding?
No kids or wife. I did have a girlfriend with me for some of the Africa Expedition - living in the Jeep proved too much for our relationship.
For eBooks you can write it in any editor you want - word, pages, it doesn't really matter. Then just export to ePub and you're done.
For my published books I want ultimate control over the layout, so I write them in LaTeX to get the pdf to go to the printer. To get it into an eBook I use pandoc to convert them. I wrote a script that does it for me, and massages the resulting ePub until it's exactly what I want.
My published books is about 70,000 words. Writing it didn't actually take very long (a few hundred hours I guess), but then I probably spent at least that much time again editing and revising multiple draft rounds.
I'm going to be self publishing a book this year - very curious about what have you found in terms of income? And if you have any ideas on how people find your work?
Nonfiction about my adventures or guide books. I find it much easier than fiction, though I'm an Engineer and not overly "creative" when it comes to writing.
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.
Readit News
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...
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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 could see someday having a github project for replacement parts, each one iterating and getting better an better -- far beyond the original.
Want to team up on an a milk gallon jug attachment to pour cleanly?
Parts are cheap, I listen to music or a podcast, I do all the “PITA” repairs (replacing wheel bearings, ball joints, tie rods, full brake service) that are really just labor in terms of professional repair cost, perform additional rust prevention, and for sale it goes when I feel a new grandma or grandpa would never give a hesitation to load it up with all their grandkids. They also see a very thorough interior cleaning, and a full exterior detail (including paint correction when required).
It has bought every very nice tool I could ever want, most are 20-30 hours of labor including acquisition, and I’m at the point where I have repeat customers (the put a 2nd alongside the first) and have direct referrals. Now the profit mostly goes towards putting a 2nd interesting car in the garage, and some towards moving up the ladder to try to earn more per vehicle.
Selling cars isn’t bad when you don’t have employees to pay, and it lets you sell really high quality stuff. I keep thinking of how much I couldn’t justify doing, and how much my product standards would suffer if I had to pay help.
I've considered making videos, but the reality at the moment is there's not yet the time to do it to my level of quality. At least not yet.
It quickly adds up to an insane amount of effort. (Which is why he's got the best auto repair tutorials in human history!)
chrisfix makes nice videos, kingofrandom, dan rohas; for french car/bike chops: '103 mob stories' and 'Garage, Bangers and Rock'n Roll'
matthias wandel and others for woodworking
AvE OldTony for mech/metal
Tons of electrical engineering
1. Where do you find buyers? I'd be concerned about inventory either piling up or taking too long to sell at a price that even breaks even when you are spending time/money on fixing.
2. Do you feel your value-add is more on the sales side as a broker or is it in the repairs? I know people who just flip cars and do extremely minimal "freshing up" and are also profitable/successful.
3. How do you keep up with the increasingly locked down and opaque ECUs and other systems? More and more diagnostics require factory wizardry these days.
4. You implied that you do paint and body work. Where/how did you learn and become proficient? Most auto repairs are pretty much "follow the steps" work anyone can learn from YouTube, but body work is artistry.
5. Do you worry about liability? I'm OK fixing my own car since if I screw up it's my ass on the line. I'd be less confident in sending the car off to grandma, even if I knew what I was doing.
2. Repairs and preventative maintenance. We average ~4 feet of snow a year, so tie rod ends, wheel bearings, control arms, bushes, flex pipes, exhaust hangers, etc. suffer since no one really maintains a steel car properly. The reality is when even a Honda or Toyota dealer is $125/hour and a Lexus or Acura dealer is $175/hour, people don't replace $18/ea bushings -- but when things rattle or feel loose, they sell the vehicle like it's going to explode.
These aren't difficult repairs, they just require lifting the vehicle (I have a Bendpak Quick Jack) and doing it. People also don't properly clean their undercarriage, and rustproof. I do. Very easy, very inexpensive. Though when many people treat cars as disposable, it lets a lot of nice stuff come onto the market for the well-inclined.
3. Not an issue unless you're in Porsches on up with encrypted ECUs, and even then, that prevents MODIFYING them, not reading diagnostics. Regardless, this has been a problem 0 times since I've started many years ago. OBD-II is a wonderful thing, and there's no weird shenanigans coming from Honda/Toyota at all.
4. I only do paint correction, as in "level a clearcoat" to a mirror finish, and only for vehicles that merit it (let's ignore that any car sub-$150K new comes with some level of orange peel). I do not buy any vehicle that needs a respray, ever. It can be DIY'd very well, but the amount of labor is prohibitive. Not enough money made for the time spent.
5. I've an umbrella policy, mostly because I have one for my primary business, in the odd event I ever were sued. In general, vehicles are sold as-is. Zero concern here.
Here's a video of someone failing to get pricing in advance for a medical procedure and an article about how many simple tasks need licences.
The fact that a lot of areas only have 1 broadband provider blows my mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tct38KwROdw
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/02/17/america-should-...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...
As for paint matching, I don't. If I car needs any significant paint work, I'm not interested in buying it. It's also a sign that when I get underneath a car, I'm going to find other issues which are going to be an immediate no sale (as in welding required).
Even at normal, non-insurance repair rates (as in, full price), an independent mechanic charges around twice as much per hour than a body shop does for your average paint work (high end a very different story) -- I can get much more $/hour for my labor doing repairs than I ever will doing anything more than leveling a clear coat.
Though I've worked on a ton of stuff, the above is where there's A) enough people owning the above who still think all vehicles explode when their odometer hits 100K B) have inexpensive and easy repairs for simple things that are rotting or are wearing out and C) plenty of people who know better and when they test drive a 10-year old one that feels as good and looks as good as new, won't even negotiate your asking price.
I've entertained the idea of selling BMW M cars, Audi S/RS and Merc AMGs, but the reality is there's far more labor involved, far more to usually fix, higher acquisition costs, less demand, and buyers who are completely insufferable. I've sold several, but in retrospect it wasn't ever worth the time and effort.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
https://forms.gle/ehuzNXmtdjCBgsjP8
I use psychographics to define customer values, opinions, and life-style.
[0] https://forms.gle/ehuzNXmtdjCBgsjP8
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.
Nowadays it still only earns a little every month, but that's mostly owing to a rise in expenses (e.g., I pay the contributors more). But profit is secondary for me, my primary motive is to have an excuse to research and write this stuff, and for intelligent people to consume it.
I suppose without ads there isn't a lot of high-monetization opportunities.
Thanks a lot for creating and maintaining the site. If you ever need any help with the design and front-end development of your site, let me know - I'd love to volunteer some time to the site that I love so much.
Thanks so much for all the damn interesting knowledge!!
The quality there never lets me down. Thanks for it!
Thank you for keeping it going. It’s great story telling.
Why the curated section though? I think it distracts to have links to articles from NYTime or Wired on the side.
At first we worked our cabooses off to publish new original content several times per month. This proved unsustainable, partially because we were becoming more ambitious with our work, but especially owing to stressors that had arisen in my personal life, and I burned out.
I spent a year-long hiatus putting things right, and when we resumed our writing, it was with the understanding that we were switching to a marathon-not-a-sprint publication schedule. The curated column arose to fill in the gaps between our in-house writings. Nowadays many readers specifically visit us for the links, so we feel duty-bound to persist.
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.
- 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.
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!
Can you expand on what you mean by this? Seems like straightforward design(s) that you can just keep printing over and over..
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.
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...
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.
Couldn’t you just make it in Adobe InDesign? Cool item, btw. I used to play saxophone years back.
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I make lots of jellies once the berries in the garden are ripe; I bought a house in a rural area a few years ago and it came with loads of berries. Might as well put them to use.
It is all done manually (in part because it is meant to be a diversion from my engineering job) - red- and blackcurrant and gooseberries mostly. Last year the harvest was some 1200 4oz glasses of jelly - some 1150 more than my family consumes. Sells by word of mouth.
Also, as my mother is quite into weaving tapestry and it was hard to find the exact hues she wanted for her yarns, I started dyeing for her, using traditional colouring. Turned out there was a (veee-eeery small!) market for that kind of thing, and I now make small batches for some 30-35 weavers. Again, fully manual as the idea is to do something completely different from my full-time job.
It helps being an engineer, too - I've found (much to my surprise) that keeping detailed notes to ensure repeatable results is quite rare in both pastimes.
I thought everybody kept log books! :)
I'm about to hit publish on a photo coffee-table book from my three years around Africa, and I'll write an Africa guide book and The Road Chose Me Vol 2 in the next 12-18 months.
* The Road Chose Me Volume 1: Two years and 40,000 miles from Alaksa to Argentina (https://amzn.to/2vfCYvn)
Stories and lessons from two years driving my Jeep Wrangler down the Pan-American Highway
* Work Less to Live Your Dreams: A practical guide to saving money and living your dreams (https://amzn.to/2OD6UtA)
An eBook about how exactly I can afford to take years off work to do what I want and live my dreams.
* West Africa Myths, Misconceptions and Misnomers (https://amzn.to/2veyQMt)
After driving the length of the continent, I collected a bunch of information that is extremely helpful to anyone else thinking of doing similar. The vast majority of the Western Worlds "knowledge" of West Africa is so out of date it's useless. My book is from info I learned during my drip from mid 2016 to late 2017, so it's relevant
Would love to help in any way we can on your next book (I'm the founder of Reedsy, https://reedsy.com)
Do you work on the road or take off years at a time?
Are you armed, or do you just avoid central conflict areas?
I take it no family? (hence the 'solo' bit) or are they undersganding?
For the first one (AK->Argentina) I just took time off and lived off my savings account. For around Africa I wrote my first book and I write for multiple magazines while on the road.
> Are you armed, or do you just avoid central conflict areas?
Crossing an international border with a firearm will result in instant jail time in virtually every country on the planet. No, it would be impossible to bring a firearm. You might be surprsed to know I have never heard a single gunshot in three years around the continent, and Ethiopia was the only country I ever saw regular people with firearms. In every other country it's only the police/military, who are extremely professional.
> I take it no family? (hence the 'solo' bit) or are they undersganding?
No kids or wife. I did have a girlfriend with me for some of the Africa Expedition - living in the Jeep proved too much for our relationship.
If you do have a family, don't let that stop you, I've met plenty of people on the road with families, ie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc61AxCQQR4
I've asked you a few questions on Instagram and you've always taken the time to answer my questions. I appreciated it.
I also have enjoyed following your journey, from one world traveler to another.
For my published books I want ultimate control over the layout, so I write them in LaTeX to get the pdf to go to the printer. To get it into an eBook I use pandoc to convert them. I wrote a script that does it for me, and massages the resulting ePub until it's exactly what I want.
My published books is about 70,000 words. Writing it didn't actually take very long (a few hundred hours I guess), but then I probably spent at least that much time again editing and revising multiple draft rounds.
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.
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https://imgur.com/a/necYS83