

Ask HN: I have $1000 per month and 12 hours a week free. Looking for ideas. - atroyn

I&#x27;ve created a budget and am successfully saving around $1,000 per month. My cost of living is low and I have no debt. I&#x27;ve worked out that I have about 12 hours per week (mostly on weekends) to commit to a side project.<p>I&#x27;m looking for ideas. I&#x27;d like to develop my sales and product sense, so I&#x27;d rather create a business selling physical products rather than SaaS or consumer software&#x2F;apps. Candy Japan is a big inspiration.<p>I could get a return on the cash with the standard personal finance approach, but I want to generate a return on my own.<p>Do you have a successful small-capital business, or an idea that might work?
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fataliss
Do you have room? Build yourself a workshop! Transform your dark ugly useless
garage into a super cool man-cave! You will need various skills from cutting
wood, to making wiring to get light and maybe have a bathroom in here or a
sink? You will get a lot of experience in being awesome, and get a new place
to hang/work depending on what you build! On the way you will buy tools and
stuff that might give you ideas for other projects once you done with this
one!

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atroyn
Unfortunately I live in an apartment in an urban center, and can't make big
changes to my living space. Ideally what I'd like to do is also make a return
on the money I invest.

Great idea though!

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thenomad
What does success look like here?

Are you purely looking for additional income? If so, how much risk are you
prepared to take on, are there any industries you don't want to work in, and
what's your income goal?

Or are you looking to make income AND do something else? (That's the case for
most people - very few people are just looking for money at the end of the
day.)

If so, in addition to the questions above, what's the "something else"? Do you
want to use skills you enjoy? Learn new skills? Help people? Help less
fortunate people? Build something?

You've already mentioned you want to develop your sales skills. Why do you
want to sell physical products specifically? Do you want to build something,
or just do sales?

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atroyn
Great points.

The income isn't the main goal - my day job keeps me comfortable, and to be
rational I'd at least like to make a return above what I could get on a term
deposit, but with interest rates being as low as they are that's not an
especially lofty goal. Definitely not trying to build a replacement income.

With respect to risk, I'm ok with losing about 50-60% of that amount over 12
months, so long as by the end I've learned what I set out to. No specific
industry in mind, but I'd like to deal with people whose needs I understand.

The main goal is to learn those sales and marketing skills in a hands on way.
I'd like to be building something as well, but that's secondary. And I'd like
to do that by selling something useful and/or enjoyable for people.

Physical products seem like a nice counterpoint to my day job which is a bunch
of coding and abstract thinking, math and so on.

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Metatron
If I had that time and that money to spare I'd try my hand at selling
mainstream electronics on Amazon, using their Fulfilment program. Buy items
like Beats headphones wholesale, have them delivered to an Amazon depot,
Amazon stock them and sell them for you essentially. Couldn't be simpler.

There are overheads for having them do so much, but I'd think profit was
possible, and because of the simplicity it'd be incredibly easy to scale
should it work.

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slosh
also... i have a company that i'm looking to build along the lines of candy
japan if you'd be interested in a partnership.

email me for details

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jtchang
what's your e-mail? I might have time to work on some stuff.

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jamilv
If your looking to make a return, make a simple landing page offering low cost
MVP builds (low cost because you will work on it in your free time) and I'm
sure you will be able to take on clients quite easily. Especially if you take
equity for a discount.

You can promote it on Reddit or here somewhere I'm sure.

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kocsmy
To be honest the idea itself doesn't really matter.

Find some niche you love and you can talk about by heart. Then put marketing
and promoting behind it and it will work out.

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Someone1234
So if the OP's idea was a Twitter clone and they put "marketing and promotion
behind it" it will "work out?"

In my view the idea is the most important part. It doesn't have to be a
"great" idea, but you have to have some kind of basic concept and have to look
at the market to see if there is any kind of need. That's particularly
important if you're spending $1K/month behind this concept and need it to give
a return.

~~~
kocsmy
"niche" \- to answer your question: no it won't. I can find you a couple of
blogposts about the importance of ideas. It's just overrated.

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dpeck
Spend a few months experimenting with anything that interests you. 1k goes a
long way to setting up a lot of hobby businesses.

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ark15
Can you elaborate with a few examples? I am curious.

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markcrazyhorse
Volunteer your services to help the less fortunate?

