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This sort of thing is just killer in the hobbyist market - think people out there making miniature train towns, very-high-setting-realism RPG campaigns, etc. It
by bpicolo 9y ago
This sort of thing is just killer in the hobbyist market - think people out there making miniature train towns, very-high-setting-realism RPG campaigns, etc. It's not a billion dollar business, and it doesn't have to be.
There's endless potential for lifestyle businesses in the hobby world. There are people out there doing 6 figures selling artisanal mechanical keyboard keycaps.
- joncrane 9y ago>There are people out there doing 6 figures selling artisanal mechanical keyboard keycaps Source?
- bpicolo 9y agoThe actual numbers would definitely be a guess out of thin air, but the mechanical keyboard community is pretty massive and spends a bunch of money on this stuff. Here's a drop that is currently at 88k revenue for massdrop: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-redsuns-gmk-red-samurai-keycap-set https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-redsuns-gmk-red-samu... 638 purchases @ 139.99/set Somebody has dropped 1k on a single custom made key on the secondary market. https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/keyboard_trivia#wiki_world.27s_most_expensive https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/keyboard_t... The gaming market has produced all sorts of hobbyist businesses, and that's a market actually big enough to see a few potentially billion dollar businesses. I'm not entirely sure whether something like DXRacer[0] would fall into line of a hobbyist/enthusiast business but it feels like it should to me (and I'm mentioning it because it feels like a larger sort of hobbyist business). It's definitely in that realm in terms of having a pretty specific target market and a relatively higher price point. [0] https://www.dxracer.com/ https://www.dxracer.com/
- zachruss92 9y agoI'm one of those people who admittedly spend way too much money on keyboards :) I don't have any artesian keycaps, but I have bough aftermarket (?) keycaps that uses plastic of a higher quality. You can tell the difference. There are also people in the DIY mechanical keyboard market selling circuit boards, plates, cases, etc... Again, it's a really niche market, but people are willing to spend a lot more money at a hobbyist/enthusiast level.
- coldtea 9y ago>I don't have any artesian keycaps Artisanal. Artesian means related to a special type of water wells :-)
- Klathmon 9y agoI'm there too, I have 4 $100+ keyboards now, and 1 of them is an "ortholinear" style (keys are in a perfect grid) that I built from a kit and had custom keycaps printed with names of programs on them. With some semi-custom software I use it like a physical "whole computer" shortcut pad. I now have a button that can launch a terminal window, a button that launches HN, one that does a git pull on all my current projects, etc... Like you said, it's a niche market, but it's one where most people are happy to pay the higher prices for something more tailored to their needs, and it's a rare "physical" area where a guy in his garage can compete with big companies. I just recently got a new 3d printer, and I think after I get it more tuned I will be able to print fairly good quality keycaps. If they are good enough, I might try selling custom made-to-order keycaps if there is any interest.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- roel_v 9y agoWhere can you get custom printing on keycaps? I have an Ergodox but what I really can't get used to (even after 2 years of full time use) is the lack of labeling for the special keys. I've looked for years for ways to do custom printing or labeling but all methods I found suck.
- diabeetusman 9y agoThat set is actually produced by GMK, a large-ish German company [0]. There is a designer who gets a cut (I'm not sure the percentage off the top of my head), but it's almost definitely not enough to live off of. [0] https://www.gmk-electronic-design.de/en.html https://www.gmk-electronic-design.de/en.html
- funkaster 9y agoI don't have a source, but I wouldn't be surprised. I used to make custom fighting sticks (I even designed the firmware, which for me was the most fun part) and sold them north of $300 each. They were gone really fast. I didn't continue because it was time consuming and we just had a son :)
- insulanus 9y agoWhy did your fighting sticks have firmware?
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoAren't all sticks made out of firmware? But I, too, am very curious to hear the answer.
- softawre 9y agoFighting sticks - like gamepads for fighting games, maybe? https://www.frys.com/product/8805412 https://www.frys.com/product/8805412
- egypturnash 9y ago“Fightsticks” - joysticks for fighting games - often have the ability to program macros into their buttons, so as to make it easier to pull off the lengthy input sequences these games are built around.
- funkaster 9y agoOh... it's basically a joystick. Fight stick -> arcade like joystick that is usually used on fighting games. The firmware was basically usb-hid to behave like either joystick or keyboard. It also had some fancy de-bouncing code for the buttons.
- castis 9y agoMost of these keycap sets are kinda pricey, and this company is apparently doing pretty well. https://pimpmykeyboard.com/ https://pimpmykeyboard.com/
- Double_a_92 9y agoHow are they not getting replaced by chinese manufacturers? From a naive point of view those don't seem to hard to manufacture.
- bpicolo 9y agoSome are, some aren't (e.g. KeyCool). Lots of these have low production counts.
- sleepybrett 9y agoMaxkey, Tai Hao and others in the chinese market are making their presence felt, but generally the quality just isn't there for the enthusiast community.
- nerdponx 9y agoTai Hao is really coming into their own with the Cubic keycap profile. They're doing for keycaps what Kailh is doing for switches.
- ljosa 9y agoThey are, but from the low end. Often the quality is not quite there: the colors are off, the legends and not properly aligned, the plastic is warped, the keys not quite aligned, and so on. It is probably because the production runs are so small that the only way to make a decent profit is to order a blind production run and ship it out no matter what it looks like. Higher-quality low-cost options are starting to appear as this new market matures. In contrast, the group buys in the enthusiast community are works of love, with multiple rounds of checks and adjustments to get it right. Sometimes facilitators like Massdrop force projects out the door because of cost even though the creator of the design wants to do more rounds of tweaking are necessary, and it shows. (Example: the recent /dev/tty keycap set.)
- jetpacktuxedo 9y agoI mean it isn't like any of these makers are sharing their tax returns or anything, but for example eat_the_food is the designer and manufacturer behind "Nightcaps" [0]. He ran an event called "Poisoned summer" where he had 80 days of "micro batch" sales, where each sale was for somewhere between one and fifteen or so caps, priced between $60-80 each. Most days the sale was only open for about one minute, and in that minute he would have hundreds of entries to randomly draw "winners" from, and then the winners would get to buy the keycaps. I'm pretty sure he hit six figures in sales on those 80 days of sales alone, and those were not his only sales throughout the year. He isn't even making keycaps full-time yet, he still has a day job. Several other members of the mechanical keyboard community (especially in the artisan keycap subsection of the community) have managed to turn their keyboard hobby into a full-time job and make a pretty decent living out of it. [0] https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79513.0 https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79513.0
- kirykl 9y agoThere's a whole industry selling real $2 bills for more than face value https://smile.amazon.com/Two-Dollar-Bill-Pack-Bills/dp/B01N2ABL3Q/ https://smile.amazon.com/Two-Dollar-Bill-Pack-Bills/dp/B01N2...
- notyourwork 9y agoI find that really strange because yesterday I literally walked out of my bank with 50 brand new $2 bills.
- otterley 9y agoFor some people, time is money. So the convenience of avoiding a bank branch visit is worth paying a little more for the bills.
- Double_a_92 9y agoWhat do people do with them? Store them in mint condition in hope of creating collectors items in the future?
- at-fates-hands 9y agoI still remember one of the first HN stories that caught my eye was the developer who created bingo cards and was making a good living selling his cards online and to bingo parlors. He did the same thing. Found a niche industry which needed this service and he was doing well all by himself with nearly zero overhead. It really made me start looking at very small niches for opportunities since there's already a ton of people trying to disrupt large entrenched technologies.
- roel_v 9y agoI think you're referencing bingocardcreator.com, which made software for diy bingo cards. Also it never made a living, let alone a good living. It ended up selling for low 5 digits IIRC.
- will_brown 9y agoWell maybe that makes it all the more impressive because it got him notarity in a community which he parlayed into a great job with a unicorn startup company.
- pvitz 9y agoNevertheless 25.000 to 40.000,- USD profits per year without spending a lot of time on it sounds nice.
- jpindar 9y agoOnly in SV is $40,000 profit not making a living.
- anitil 9y agoThis would be https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
- prawn 9y agoIn those days, SEO was fairly trivial. You could easily rank well for a keyphrase with a matching domain or get longtail hits with a script that dynamically built pages. It's much, much harder now. At one point in that era, I ranked top two in Australia for "make money" with one page about AdSense on an otherwise unrelated site. I had another site that took half a day to build, and involved no upkeep, making similar money to Patrick's BCC. I stupidly let it (and other sites) languish and it was slowly overtaken by competitors and SEO changes.
- _sdegutis 9y agoI've been really wanting to get into the artisanal business world as an entrepreneur for a while now, it always seems so full of potential, and I've had good experience on the other side as well (having purchased a hand-made Atreus keyboard from @technomancy). And it fits inline with my philosophy of quality craftsmanship being very important, especially in this age of disposable low-quality goods and services. The hard part is finding something that is pretty low-risk to jump right into. That's part of what drew me to software, because there's almost no costs except what you'd already have at home (electricity bill, computer, rent). So it's just a matter of finding a software niche that's low-risk enough to bootstrap without VC if possible, and in a very small time limit. That's probably why I started making Mac apps 10 years ago and have kept doing so since. Mac apps used to be known for their fine craftsmanship and attention to detail as well as niche market.
- bpicolo 9y agoSeems like the best entrypoint is being a target customer. Make something you'd want. We're a bit spoiled in the software world. Startup cost is just non-existent. Most other businesses in history have at least a little bit of associated input capital. But if it's something you want anyway, it's worth a big of dough!
- _diyu 9y agoThat's what I've always tried to do: make something I use. The most successful example of this is when I made an app that I use on a daily basis (https://github.com/sdegutis/AppGrid https://github.com/sdegutis/AppGrid) and have for several years straight. But it's so niche and small that nobody was willing to spend money on it, so I open sourced it. But I still think of it as a success because of how dependent I've become on this tool whenever I use a computer.
- robterrell 9y agoPeople totally would have spent money for it. Lots of people struggle with tools for exactly this (I’m currently using Moom but just yesterday was wishing I had a keystroke to shrink a window but didn’t feel motivated enough to crack open my Hammerspoon configuration.) You should consider selling it on the Mac App Store in addition to it being open source. I think you’d be pleasantly surprised.
- rtkwe 9y ago> think people out there making miniature train towns, very-high-setting-realism RPG campaigns, etc. It'd be a poor fit for miniature train towns, the scale is too large for them. The largest is G which is 1:22.5 (approx 8 inches high) and the most popular is HO (1:87.1). HO runs on a 16.5mm track so the blocks are about as wide as a train track on their shortest dimensions. Overall it's kind of an awkward scale for any hobby miniatures.
- stickfigure 9y agoThe live steam hobby commonly works in 1:8 and 1:5, sometimes even 1:4... and that's just the folks on 7.5" gauge track. Tilden Park has a RR running on 15" gauge. It's a beast.
- rtkwe 9y agoOh yeah I've seen those. Never really seen them talked about in the same category as the rest of the model railway world though. Seems like it still kind of leaves these mini materials in an awkward position at 1:12 scale so they're too large for traditional model railways and too small for these live steam guys. 1:12 is a common action figure size though. Maybe it'd make interesting materials for that.
- bpicolo 9y agoYeah, I only intended that as an example of the sorts of communities where realistic miniature-things are desirable. You could definitely produce different scales for these sorts of things to match.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> very-high-setting-realism RPG campaigns, RPG miniatures are typically 1/64 (25mm) to 1/58 (28mm); these items are 1/12 scale. There are display miniatures around that scale, but they are way too big for RPG or wargame minis.
- AFNobody 9y agoI have to disagree. Having one mini cinder block = 5 properly scaled cinder blocks (approximately) is close enough. You just use 1-3 instead of 5-15 to build the appropriately sized walls.
- dragonwriter 9y agoAh, I realize the “they” in the last sentence is potentially ambiguous; I was saying that the construction pieces aren't in scale with RPG miniatures but with display miniatures that are much larger. I actually agree that the cinder blocks and bricks could still be useful—though “high realism” would probably prefer alternate materials in-scale to out-of-scale but realistic materials; visual realism seems to usually be the priority for high realism.
- Fomite 9y agoYep - and a lot of this stuff is nicely high margin. I've bought tiny sandbags, 32mm circles that look like zen gardens, and a ton of other stuff for my hobby. There's tons of small shops out there making neat hobby materials. I always thought the people who use "lifestyle business" as a pejorative were missing out.