So, playing around with doing some more Coasters on the Merbau hardwood (decking).

Lasers Created With Laser
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@Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y
T shirts. I’m using a Silhouette to do the vinyl work. I sprung for a $600 heatpress with sliding platen etc, as I tried a few cheap ones and wasn’t impressed. I have a thing about my stuff NEVER coming back, 100% satisfaction, etc, and I test washed shirts done with the cheap presses, they started to peel @ 8-12 washes. Never had a failure with the new press.
I looked seriously into dye sublim, by the time you get a printer special ink tanks, special shiirts - Dye won’t work on cotton, must be a poly blend or 100% poly (Yuck)or (the big deal breaker) print white. Or print on dark colors. Plus you still need good press. $3000 to get set up right, and then you have to tell customers your shirts are $2 more because you can’t print on cotton, which most people prefer anyway. Or white lettering on dark green, blue, red which many sports teams use. You probably know all that, but I didn’t until i started seriously looking into it. The big plus is you can do photos well.

I did a couple dozen shirts for Family and friends, got my system worked out, I’ve sold a few dozen on Ebay, mostly my original designs. And some for RC clubs. I am hoping to get into the schools around here, (figures, my youngest graduates in 2 weeks) If you can get in good with the coaches, there’s a lot of business there for the Soccer, Softball and football teams… hard to make much selling 1’s and 2’s on ebay, everybody takes a cut, especially the shipper. It costs about 5 bucks to ship a shirt, and 5.50 to ship 2. 20 will go for $10.

Now I’m committing to selling Laser stuff, laying out a lot of cash for parts. My big product is going to be a Plug in kit for the smoothie.
It includes a custom power supply,(2 options) a plug in wiring harness, and all hardware, instructions and support. Buy a smoothie, my kit, and plug it in. In 2 hours you can be running. The parts are expensive and you have to buy large quantities to get a decent price. Just sent off $100 for connectors. I don’t mind doing the engineering or building, but the marketing and Shipping (paperwork) is a drag.

Been up all night designing, planning etc. Gotta sell some stuff I’ve got to cover expenses. Do website. Not my thing, the web design.

Sorry to ramble on.

You should pound out those coasters, and run them on ebay around Christmas for $50/set plus shipping.- More with holder. Run them off now and put them away till November. You’ll do great.
Save a set for me.
Scott

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Wow @Scott_Marshall very interesting read as usual. Shame about your shits being more expensive though. :stuck_out_tongue:

Are you committing to the laser because the shirts aren’t profitable enough, takes too long to produce?

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I’ll still do the shirts, but I am an engineer, and always enjoyed the work. I was building FPV screens that mount to your transmitter and a little camera/transmitter about the size of a Matchbox for a while, then the Chinese started making the same thing, cheaper than I could buy the parts. I also do custom groundstations in 2 sizes, one with a 19" screen and another with a 8" (mini case). I also have a line of model plane speed controls, I modify and improve chinese ones with heatsinks and better power supplies. I really neeed to get a website going, and put this stuff up for sale. I’m like Yuusuf like that I guess, don’t sell much because it’s not my thing. Never WAS a salesman.
I jump around, doing what I can when I can. My health is pretty spotty, I can’t tell from one day to the next how I’ll be doing. That’s why I spend so much time here, when I don’t feel well enough to get up and around, I can help people (or at least confuse them) from here.
I’ve had 86 surgeries since 1998 and things aren’t real good right now, been all over the US looking for a Dr who can help. For the time being I’m trapped, and figure I’ll make the best of it building parts for people etc.

Good catch, I get to typing so fast sometimes I hit the backspace key before I screw up: P
Anyways that’s part of what going on with all my “experimental” stuff. I think I could make any of several fly if i ever get my health back, in the meantime I keep trying the “mini-enterprise” approach. Usually COSTS me money, but it keeps me from going crazy (er).

Scott

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@Scott_Marshall Yeah, the mini-enterprise stuff is the way I try & go (usually due to startup funds required) but as yet, no success (probably due to the lack of customer service/advertising/marketing skills). Websites these days can be done for super cheap (if you pay people from india or wherever to set it all up). There is a website I came across a while ago called “AirTasker” where you put up your task & people send a message to try accept the task. I saw a lot of people wanting website, or social media campaigns, etc & paying not much at all, yet people still jumped on happy to freelance it.

That’s quite interesting what you’re planning to do with the smoothie plug in kit. Would be great for people like me with minimal electronics background. What sort of pricing are you looking at for the finished product? I’d be interested as it will save a lot of time/effort for me (rather than trying to figure out all sorts of electronics stuff I have no idea about).

Maybe an idea for all of us is to combine together & create a shop-style website where we can all sell our laser stuff. Although, I have to do some work on the Everything Laser before I start any extra projects lol.

I’ve in the meantime placed up my coasters on my Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/YSCreationsAU) for AU$55 (cover material costs, some of the time involved although not all, machine maintenance, etc). I’m thinking though, to improve the coasters I need to do something like route the edges with a nice curved bevel. Although, never used a router haha. First time for everything I suppose. Would love a CNC router setup though, then I could just control it via computer.

Actually, you are engineering background right? So is there a specific field of engineering that you have experience in? I’ve got an idea I am working on (for garden related products, something I think might be able to turn into a real business rather than a micro-business). I’m in need of some advice from someone with engineering knowledge however, for mechanical related aspects (e.g. how to determine the size & type of bearings to use for something that is going to have 100-200kg weight spinning on an axis). I tried read some data-sheets for different types but had no clue what it was on about lol.

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Standard Chinese practice, they find someone buying a lot of their hardware wholesale, find out what they’re doing with it and then produce it with local labour for a tenth of the price that it costs to do it in the first world…

Not much of a salesman myself either, though I do have an IT background and have setup/run a few ecommerce magento sites with varying success. Nothing to quit your full time job for though. Anyway hope you find a doctor and get your health issues sorted!

I’d be extremely careful about offshoring a web build, plenty of horror stories around. Usually the language barrier leads to misunderstood requirements / scope creep. If you’re looking for a simple static site check out one of the do it yourself mobs (ie wix), though it can add up if you want ecommerce functionality.

I do have a background in software/web dev but a bit rusty now, not much good at UX (just incase Anthony sees this post!). To be honest, building a site from scratch to sell laser goods on would be a fair task, you’re basically building eBay/gumtree functionality and likely there’s not enough targeted interest to make it worthwhile. Happy to be proven wrong though! Anyway good luck with the coasters. :smiley:

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@I_Laser I’ve never contracted someone offshore for any web work, just saw it & thought it was an interesting idea. Maybe not worth it to contract them for a full site, however for specific features or components could be useful (if you explained well what you wanted/didn’t have language barrier issues). I was meaning something more simple, just for this group, not full-scale like eBay etc. But yeah, there are plenty of already existing platform for selling things online (ebay, etsy, etc).

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@I_Laser You’re probably right about the website. I’ve been looking at the WIX site, they claim you can build your own world class site in no time. It’s not looking that simple to me. The fees aren’t bad, but now I’m looking at learning another software package.

My credentials are Electrical, but I’ve done a fair amount of mechanical work. Industrial machinery is pretty much a broad field. When I was in business I networked with my customers, for example I did a lot of work for a large hydraulic firm, and when I needed Hydraulic power for a job, I went t their fluidpower engineers for help. It was a great relationship.
Sorry I didn’t get to call yesterday, was feeling bad, I’ll try tonight.
Scott

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@Scott_Marshall yeah most of the ‘do it yourself’ website builders are drag and drop. Which whilst easier than coding, presents it’s own learning curve.

I’m not completely dismissing your idea @Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y it’s just a fair amount of work. It’s not the size of gumtree/ebay you need to accommodate it’s the functionality. :wink:

My (limited) experience has been helping those that have been burnt by cheap OS devs. Usually you’ll be dealing with a intermediary that has little coding/project management experience but can speak, read, write English reasonably. They’ll palm your project off to a team of local devs whose experience will be usually limited too (hence why it’s so cheap).

At best you end up with some usable code, at worse you lose your investment and end up having to hire a local dev to start the project again!

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@Scott_Marshall Personally I wouldn’t consider Wix websites as “world class” but rather “just functional”.

There are a few places out there that allow you to create a site/store for free (such as http://storenvy.com or http://bigcartel.com) with reasonable ease (e.g. just input your product details, put pictures, price, etc.). They all have default theme/layouts which are quite decent, but you can modify these (if you want to/know how). The only issues with these kind of places as per se are some limitations that they put on the functionality (e.g. bigcartel allows max of 5 products before u have to pay a fee; storenvy limits product photos to a max of 5 per item). However, that being said, Storenvy has it’s own built-in marketplace, kind of like etsy, where your products can show up for people to search (amongst other peoples products too). This is good to some degree as it can increase awareness of your products.

Take a look at http://eternur.storenvy.com, that’s one that I worked on for my partner & I to sell random craft related things. So you can get pretty decent functionality out of it.

@I_Laser You’re probably right that the work involved will be quite high & the functionality is almost similar to ebay/gumtree. Although gumtree is more like a forum (just a slightly different layout) in the way it functions. I’m wondering if there are any pre-existing solutions that would be kind of like plug & play website components for setting up a shop that allows multiple sellers. I’ve got too many projects as is though, so I should probably stick to finishing them first haha.

From what you say about the offshore coders, sounds like it is indeed best to not waste your time or money on it.