Comment by luke_s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luke_s | Hacker News Reader

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I run a e-commerce website, selling tools for grafting produced by a company my wifes family own:

http://www.grafting-tool.com/magento/index.php/

I started by buying a few samples to sell on e-bay to see if there was a market. So I guess you could say I started making money right away. The problem with trying to replicate my business, is finding the right product to sell. I was lucky that I saw they had this item, and I figured that there would be a market online for it. Trying to find a new product to sell and establishing links with the manufacturer would take some time. You would also need to contend with issues of minimum order size.

I guess you could call it a partial success. Currently its bringing in about $300 per month. I want to increase my revenue, but it hard to know what to focus on. The other problem is it has somewhat of a high overhead - we need to spend time shipping products, etc.

For my new side projects, I'm thinking of doing something digital, that can be handled entirely online.

I have tried selling photos to a stock photo service. I spent many hours tagging photos, waiting for them to work through the approval process, etc. After many months of letting my photos sit, I have yet to sell one.

Next I am looking at writing some Smartphone apps. We will see how that goes ...

There was an Eastern European dude that used to submit his monthly sales reports to HN. He made quite a bit of money from stock photography. The catch ? Most of his stock photos were not still life, but people in different life settings - this must be the kind that sells the best. I'm sure it helped that his young blond girlfriend was a frequent subject :)

Yeah, I read his posts - its what inspired me to have give it a try. That and somebody who posted on HN, saying they had a passive income stream from selling their holiday photos as stock.

'Staged' photos of people in various situations do sell better. People are always looking for photos that illustrate different abstract concepts, such as "income protection" or "brown nosing with the boss".

In my case though, I was looking to make some money of the photos I already had, which apparently were not that suited for stock. I don't doubt that if I invested time taking photos that were betters suited, I could make a little money. But from my early experience it would seem that too much effort was required for too little pay off.

To throw out some totally made up numbers, it was like; for every hour of effort invested in my grafting tool site, I could increase my monthly income by $2. For every hour invested in stock I could increase my monthly income by $0.10 . It quickly became obvious where I should spend my time :-)

I would guess that for anybody who can code, the numbers would likely prove similar. Therefore I would not recommend stock photography to the HN crowd.

I've been on that site a few times looking for grafting tools for a permaculture hobby project. Does your wife's family have any mechanized grafting (for bench grafting) or expanded product line? Nice Magento work, by the way!

Wow, it’s a small world! I've tried to convince them to make bench grafters, but unfortunately they feel the market is too small and won’t pay for their R&D costs. They are more interested in making tools where they can get an order of 1 million pieces, to sell at Wallmart.

I work in the tree fruit and small fruit industry. I'd like to carry this conversation further--would you send me your email--mine's in my profile.

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