My side projects are primarily for myself meaning: - intellectually stimulating ...

textgel · on June 7, 2020

I don't know if you'd be willing to say or not but roughly how many of the clocks do you/have you sold? And does the website/online promotion bring you customers or is it more of a word of mouth/knowing the right people effort?

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.

matt_the_bass · on June 7, 2020

Great question! I’ve sold 5 clocks so far with essentially no marketing effort other than very limited social media posts. The plan was for my spouse to spend about 1 day a week marketing them but for various reasons, we haven’t had the chance to do that. We promote the website, but all of our sales have been through Etsy (which was a surprise for me). 2 sales were people we knew. Hopefully, by years end we’ll be able to spend more time marketing. It would be great to get to 1-2 units a month.

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).