Chronicle of black_son_of_gray's failures

[black_son_of_gray]

It's been a while since I've posted, and there are a lot of new developments in my life, so I figured I'd start a journal to document things.

I'm calling it a chronicle of failures for a specific reason. It has nothing to do with the cynical pessimism/sarcasm I feel like I see everywhere now, and no, I'm not depressed or despairing or negative about life generally. Quite the opposite actually.

I want this journal to catalogue my various attempts to do/learn things with a sub-goal of being honest about the stumbles along the way. Because having hiccups in a process, or screwing something up a little bit, or having to course-correct is, y'know learning, and kinda valuable to normalize and provide as an example for others.

So here we are, a journal about the messiness (and subsequent triumphs) of learning.

[mathiverse]

Sweet! Looking forward to your posts, black_son_of_gray! Welcome back.

[black_son_of_gray]

And now for a life update, including some of the topics that'll probably be perennial interests.

We've settled into a house, and I'm pretty stoked. Walkscore 96, Bikescore 80, Transit Score 68.
We have a car, but a goal of mine is to drive it as little as reasonably possible. Currently I bike and walk for essentially everything, probably drive at a rate of a couple hundred miles a year.

The climate is pretty wonderful (thanks, coastal California!). Very high plant hardiness zone, very low HVAC demands (none used in last 6 months).
We have an amazing garden (established by previous owner) with well over 100 species. It is mostly inedible (very pretty though!), so a big challenge for me going forward is to keep it from all dying off/transitioning part of it to more of a vegetable garden.

I've started a vermiculture bin (red wigglers). Expensive lesson learned: it is probably much cheaper to buy a couple thousand worms through the mail (yes, they ship them) than to source it from garden shops. Oops. My goal is to have worms eat as much of my food scraps and paper/cardboard waste as we generate. That is a long way off, it seems, and I don't even know if it is practical. It's going to take quite a few more doublings and who knows how many bins... we eat a lot of produce.

I've recently completed building a solar oven, and I've spent the last week testing/studying its performance. So far so good (it's been sunny), but it'll be really interesting to see how it performs in the low-sun season and with overcast skies (quite common here). I'll be more than happy if, over the course of a year, I can use it to cook 20% of meals. We'll see.

I've put together a little workshop and have been busy making items for the house: workbench for the workshop, the solar oven, 4 sets of shelves (small ones, not bookcases), various kitchen drawer insets/organizers, a side table, a plant stand, probably some wall-hanging shelves next(?). The list is endless.

Lastly, I plan on starting a business in the next few months, selling hobby-craft items from my workshop online. Very excited about this because I'm really interested in seeing what the small business / entrepreneur experience is like in America. It also scratches an itch, I really enjoy making things with my hands, and I have a (perhaps unusual) fascination with optimizing production workflow and batch-processing. I can scale this time-wise up or down depending on my interest or stamina. For the last year or so I've been consistently tinkering in the workshop for about four hours a day and really enjoying it, so that seems like a good sign. I've run through the math, and it should be profitable (although probably not very, somewhat similar to minimum wage, ~$15/hr). Again, we'll see.

There's probably more I'm forgetting, and I'll dive into these topics for deep-dives as time allows. Until then...

[jacob]

My goal is to have worms eat as much of my food scraps and paper/cardboard waste as we generate. That is a long way off, it seems, and I don't even know if it is practical. It's going to take quite a few more doublings and who knows how many bins... we eat a lot of produce.

Our bin consumes our entire output. It's about 2x2x2 cuft and 1/2-2/3 full at all times. I'd say takes a couple of years to get to that stage. I think my best piece of advice is to feed it plenty of cardboard and not start harvesting the compost until "the undigested additions" make up less than 10% of the bin.

[black_son_of_gray]

@jacob, thanks for the numbers, that's... less space than I expected! My bin's about 1.5 sqft base (about 1ft high) and I have another empty one ready to go once I get enough doublings to split them, so it looks like I'm almost set. Regarding the cardboard, there are a lot of "rules of thumb" online about how the worms can eat X% of their body weight per day, but few mention that you're probably going to need at least equal volumes of "carbon" (e.g. paper, cardboard, etc.) for them to munch on. Would you say that the vermicompost generated provides all of the fertilizer your garden needs, or do you supplement? Sorry if you've answered this before, I'm curious because I've got about 8 4'x8' raised beds in the garden which if I recall might be on par with what you've got?

[jacob]

Would you say that the vermicompost generated provides all of the fertilizer your garden needs, ...

Not by a long shot. Perhaps it's because we're not harvesting too much and ants(!) and bacteria(?) carry much of it off. I only turn it over once a season, which is way less than I did as an enthusiastic beginner. Worms are most productive in an ideal balance between green and brown. Err too much on the green (nitrogen) side, at it gets wet, sour, and the worms may try to escape. Too much on the brown (carbon) side, and it just runs slower. We err on the brown side.

[black_son_of_gray]

Lessons learned about solar ovens (i.e. box type) so far:

• There is very much a trilemma-like situation going on, and it is inescapable. Which means there is no best design, just designs better tuned to a desired variable at the expense of other features. That being said, it's a wonderfully simple and understandable set of constraints. At the core, it's just energy in/energy out. Every tradeoff relates back to this.
  
  Energy in is just the amount of sunlight you can collect. All you can do here is collect more or less light, either by making the oven window bigger or using reflectors or making sure that the light that hits the oven/reflectors is actually useful (i.e. less reflection- so blacker surfaces; and less refraction- so avoiding shallow angles)
  
  Energy out is just how insulated the oven is, with the additional consideration of "what is the temperature gradient between the oven and the outside?" If the oven can sustain a 120F degree gradient inside vs. outside, it matters a great deal whether you are in Phoenix on a hot summer day (say 120F outside, so oven = 240F) or if you are in Santa Fe in the winter (say 40F, so oven = 160F). The first one is plenty, the second one is dangerous for meat, beans, etc.
• So some tradoffs:
  Compact size means finicky folding reflectors (to increase energy in), or else lower temperature (because small collecting area/low insulation)
  High temperature means bulky and probably lots of reflectors and probably also a requirement to turn it to face the sun more frequently
  Larger size interior means either huge reflectors or lower temperatures.
  You get the point. There simply isn't a design that "has it all"
• If the oven is reasonably well insulated, most of the heat loss will be through the window (either glass or plastic). Double glazing is much better, but more expensive/harder to build/repair, and slightly lowers effective transmission into the oven.
• You could, like me, just build the oven with whatever round-number dimensions sound good to you. You could also, however, save yourself some frustration and think about what size glass sheets you can buy precut off the rack at a big box store.
• Related: None of the local glass shops returned my calls. Unsurprisingly. I did have an interesting conversation with one lady about how I need special oven-window tempered glass than they are pretty sure I can't get made for me. It would probably cost more than just buying a commercial solar oven too.
• When cutting glass, scoring the glass then snapping it over a small dowel along the score line was way better and less expensive than the purpose-built running pliers I purchased specifically to avoid what happened.
• I didn't think much about the cooking process itself before using my oven, and the various resources online don't really talk about it that much. This should give you a good idea of what to expect and how to use it: a solar oven is pretty much just a crock-pot powered by the sun. It's REALLY similar. The moisture has nowhere to go. It's not a dry heat at all. So, just about anything you'd make in a crock-pot you can make in a solar oven, assuming your oven can stay hot long enough to heat the food through for a looong time. That's more of a thermal mass thing than an oven thing. My oven interior gets to boiling temps in maybe 20 minutes, but a quart of liquid is going to take hours to get there.
• Speaking of crock pots, the low setting on those is typically ~180F or so. You don't actually need a 350F solar oven to effectively cook food, although it will certainly help to cook it faster. Anything that'll get to ~200F for long enough should work.
• Discovery while doing some back-of-envelope math. My oven is approximately 2.5x as powerful as an Easy-Bake oven, which is to say I get maybe 250W depending on day/season. I don't know if that is impressive or shameful, but it's an interesting comparison. So 4-8 hours in the sun is something like 1-2kWh. What's that, like 30-40 cents USD equivalent roughly? To get a sense of the payback period relative to just using a regular oven, to see if this whole endeavor makes anything like financial sense, I just checked to see if there are EnergyGuide labels for ovens to get a sense of yearly operational costs, and... there are no EnergyGuide labels for ovens. A cursory Googling suggests electric ovens run on average at around 3kW (so 30x the Easy-Bake), with a typical cooked dinner coming in at about the same 30-40 cents USD. Which is to say it's about the same amount of energy (duh), but the solar one is free (at least, the operating cost) and non-polluting and doesn't require a grid hookup, but the electric one can be used... y'know at night and on cloudy days and can dial in exactly the temp you want. I'd guess that the payback period on my oven is somewhere around a year of use, although one of the nice things is, if I don't like my oven (which is just wood, glass, cardboard (as insulation) and screws) I can just disassemble it and reuse essentially all the components as raw materials very easily. Stuck with almost no waste.
• If, like me, you are creep out by the thought of your food marinating for hours in a steamy broth of VOCs emanating from the black paint you used for the interior of the oven, the solution I came up with was to use black milk paint. Should be utterly non-toxic and is very flat. Also, milk paint generally is awesome - durable, easy to mix, stores as dry powder basically forever if dry, and non-toxic.

[AxelHeyst]

Nice writeup! I'm going to be building a solar oven soon so this is great.

I've used https://www.onedayglass.com/order-online/ for custom dimension dual-glazing units when I built my own windows. A 20"x20" sheet of pyroceram is 193$ (!!), same size sheet of standard tempered glass is $55, which is more than I expected. I assume what you got is normal tempered glass?

[white belt]

If you're going down the off-grid cooking rabbit hole, you may be interested in some of my solar cooker experimentation in my journal: viewtopic.php?p=254934#p254934

My basic idea was to build everything around using a thermal cooker. This isn’t an original idea since thermal cookers are common on sailing vessels and I drew a lot of inspiration from Low Tech magazine’s series on cooking: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/07 ... oking.html

Centering your usage around the thermal cooker will make your cooking more efficient, regardless of energy source. You can use any method to heat the contents to a boil initially (rocket stove, gas stove, induction burner) then you simply place the heated inner pot inside the thermal cooker and wait for everything to cook. Food will stay warm in it for a very long time and never overcook. A haybox is a simple version of a thermal cooker. More sophisticated versions use foam or vacuum insulation. I bought a used Thermos ShuttleChef on ebay that works extremely well.

In theory, there are advantages to combining something like a parabolic solar oven with a thermal cooker. A parabolic oven cooks food very fast, similar to a stovetop or grill. So paired with a thermal cooker, you don’t need all day sun, just a small window of time to bring the inner pot of a thermal cooker to a boil. In practice, things are a bit trickier because the inner pot is reflective metal and a solar cooker works best on matte black materials. I don’t know of a non-toxic paint that can withstand temperatures of 1000F at the center of a spot beam. An easy workaround could be to use a haybox variant and a cast-iron dutch oven, but this won't be as efficient as the more high tech variants.

Nevertheless, I’m certain I could fry things with my solar cooker setup with the correctly sized cast iron pan. The pan I used in my original test (size 8 or ~11 inch diameter) was way too big for the 24 inch mirror I have, so next I’m going to try a much smaller 6.5 inch cast iron pan that many people use for camping. I've been meaning to continue the experiment but haven't gotten around to it.

[black_son_of_gray]

I assume what you got is normal tempered glass?

I ended up just buying a single pane big box store piece and cutting it to size. Not tempered or heat treated. I did this because: 1) less expensive, 2) easier to fix/replace, 3) convenience (less hassle than special ordering), 4) even if it breaks, I can reuse the smaller pieces for other projects (can't with tempered), and 5) the design of my oven has me never touching the glass (the whole frame with the glass moves together) so I'm less worried about safety issues.

From what I've read online, how one glazes is also a land of tradeoffs. Thinner glass provides less insulation (bad) and is less strong (bad), but because the whole pane heat up relatively evenly, it tends to do better with the temperature component (good). That is to say, thicker glass has the hot oven side and the relatively cooler outer side, and that can cause stresses and failures.

I chose to take the gamble that the weaker, thinner, cheaper glass will be 'good enough' in my setup, but only time will tell.

[black_son_of_gray]

If you're going down the off-grid cooking rabbit hole, you may be interested in some of my solar cooker experimentation in my journal: viewtopic.php?p=254934#p254934

Neat! Any updates since this post?

More sophisticated versions use foam or vacuum insulation. I bought a used Thermos ShuttleChef on ebay that works extremely well.

Every time I pass by one of those large vacuum buckets in the stores, there's always a flicker to buy it and try it. One of these days, perhaps much sooner now...

I don’t know of a non-toxic paint that can withstand temperatures of 1000F at the center of a spot beam.

Indeed, I did a fair amount of Internet surfing to try to get at the physical properties of paints. The various oven/appliance "high heat" paints that come in a spray can are apparently geared towards applications like the outside of charcoal grills, etc., and the can directions say they need to be "fired" (that is, the oven needs to get to something like 400+deg in order for the paint to properly cure). My oven can't do that, so I was out of luck on that, but it might be right for you. I couldn't find the temperature ranges for milk paint at all, but figured that even if it broke down in high heat, there's simply nothing in it that could be dangerous (educated guess based on chemistrybiology education, not a tested fact). (Edited to add: milk paint does well on wood/porous things, but doesn't on nonporous, so that's a big strike against.)

Your comment also just has me thinking of ceramics, either black clay or a black glaze. That should definitely handle 1000F. Something like a Korean dolsot or jjigae pot.

[white belt]

Neat! Any updates since this post?

I still have the whole kit in a portable carrying bag designed for bicycle wheels, but I haven't set it up recently. I will test it some more at some point soon, especially if I order a small cast iron skillet.

I also have a small dual purpose camping stove/grill that runs off propane. This seemed like a pretty useful cooking implement to use for camping/grilling/tailgating that doubles as a backup in case of a power outage since my current rental has an electric stove.

You can also look into getting a small backpacking rocket stove that just burns twigs.

[black_son_of_gray]

So I officially run a business now.

This is the gist of it: I make things in my workshop, mostly out of wood, and I sell them online.

The upcoming year, 2023, will be a real learning experience.

• Will I be able to gain a foothold in a highly saturated market? I am starting out at the smallest mote of dust in the solar system.
• Will I make any money at all? I have three tiers of success: 1) Can I get my initial investment back (~$1-2k)? 2) Can the business pay my living expenses ($10-20k)? 3) Can I accumulate/save money with the business, over and above my expenses (~$20k+). These seem like modest goals, but I am hand-making my products (because I want to, but see last point in list) in one of the highest cost-of-living areas of the US, while competing with everyone else in the world. (Yes, I know that on some level this is idiotic, but this is a journal about my failures...)
• Success may (or, likely will) take years. Do I have enough patience?
• Whether anyone would want to buy what I sell is largely a matter of taste/style. Do I have a sense of style that people care for?
• Can I competently run the business side of affairs?
• Will customer interactions be delightful? miserable?
• Will the realities of business operations in the modern world test my values? (I know that is vague, but an example would be something like "If I want to minimize plastic waste, but shipping with plastic packaging is better for my margins, do I cave if it makes more money?")

These questions are all very exciting to me because they can only be answered by doing. I can convince myself that I know the answers from the safety of my couch, but I can only really know by running the test. And this in some ways feels like the biggest challenge I've ever given myself. I have to wear all the hats, have all the accountability, am the only provider of structure moving forward. I cannot be successful by only diving inward - I have to put myself out there and interact with a world I can't control and which may even be hostile.

During 2023, I hope to regularly update this journal with whatever answers I find.

EREers that run/have run small businesses - any advice?
EREers that have never considered running a small business/self-directed side-hussle or immediately dismissed the idea - why not?

[jacob]

This is the gist of it: I make things in my workshop, mostly out of wood, and I sell them online.

What are you making if you don't mind?

Back when I first got into woodworking and attempted to get into "finer woodworking", I noticed how there was a MUCH larger than expected crowd of former postdocs, academics, professionals, ... making artsy things out of wood. It may have something to do with Crawford's shop class soul craft sentiments? There's an itch that isn't tickled by writing papers about things.

[mountainFrugal]

EREers that run/have run small businesses - any advice?

Exciting! I am actually going to be doing something similar at the start of the year selling zines and prints. My traditional painter friend and I meet once a week to talk about exactly these things for a few hours while sketching. I have a start-up background and the ideas are the same. He is a bit ahead having done the making art full time for over a year now. If you are making things by hand for a crowded market, it is your products + your story that are going to sell things. Your "story" is all the marketing that you will have to do around you and your product. This just takes time and showing lots of people what you are up to. All the social media stuff is noise compared to having someones email that you can (not in a spammy way) have a newsletter or equivalent to keep in touch over time.The next best thing is getting feedback. When you get some feedback, even negative feedback, that is confirmation that you are onto something. If someone gives you feedback for something to improve, then that means there is general interest. Lets say you had 10 items already made what are your next steps to talk to 10 customers? Even if this is un-scalable in the long run or you do not even know who your customers are, talking to customers is where good businesses are made. It is also important to ask, "Will you pay me money for this" or equivalent when talking to potential customers.

I will finish up my business plan sketchnotes soon and post.

[ertyu]

I am hand-making my products in one of the highest cost-of-living areas of the US, while competing with everyone else in the world.

This one stood out to me. I think this is actually a strength, not a weakness. HCOL areas are full of affluent people who might purchase a well-crafted item. Being able to live VLCOL in a HCOL area means that you can deliver quality product at low transportation cost. You can also charge reasonable prices and run your business with a sense of integrity rather than from the sense of desperation and greed that give a bad vibe to so many small business owners and cause their businesses to fail.

In general, HCOL areas are a boon for low earners who can live extremely frugally. Most low earners in HCOL areas can't make it not because they earn little, in fact they may often make more in absolute terms than an equivalent position in a LCOL area, but because so much of what they make is eaten up by things like housing and take-out which are through the roof in HCOL areas. Often, a low earner would have an insane commute just because the only housing they can afford is far. That you can live on 20k in a HCOL area is actually a huge boon both for you and for your business.

Congratulations on getting started, and fingers crossed for success!

[black_son_of_gray]

@jacob

Currently what I'm making would fall in the "jewelry" category (hence, high market saturation). It's an area that, before a few years ago, I would have never thought I'd be interested in.

I have read Shop Class As Soul Craft, and remember parts of it resonating, but to be honest I didn't really carry much away from it (at least, I don't think I did). I also have observed a bit of that academics-getting-into-fine-woodworking in my own life with colleagues. My sense is that most end up focusing on fancy joinery and furniture making.

For what it's worth, I have little interest in making furniture and/or hand-cutting inlaid dovetails (not that there is anything wrong with that). It's never really been a big draw to me. Business-wise, wood furniture seems to me like such a weird market to sell into. 90% of stuff is flat-packed Ikea-style ultracheap particle board based stuff. Questionable durability, but gets the job done, stylishly enough, for an impressively low cost. There is no way to compete with it and value your own labor (which is going to be most of the cost). Then there is the <10% that's actually well made, but usually - to my taste, anyway - way overdone. That is, too 'fancy' in its design/aesthetic, made out of unnecessarily exotic/endangered hardwoods, etc. I suppose the reason is that the only way to execute that is with skilled labor. So it's $$$ because skilled labor. (Cabinet-making, I understand a bit more, because off-the-shelf so often won't work for a given kitchen, but as a one man enterprise? Meh. I only want to make so many boxes and frames.) My preference, which I imagine plenty of people would want to buy but no one wants to sell, is relatively cheap and 'classic' designs, but made with common woods, solid joinery, and reasonable "craftsmanship" (e.g. a 10 or 20 thou gap or occasional tool mark is totally fine). And I don't want to keep making that same thing over and over just because it hits the sweet spot of easy/fast-to-built and high-market-demand that makes the whole operation feasible.

Case in point, I have made some small furniture, because I needed it, and using simple mortise-and-tenon joinery on a pair of clear, vertical grain doug fir 4x4s I miraculously managed to pull out of the stack at a certain orange big box store. The two of small shelves I made are much nicer,
sturdier, and even cheaper than the garbage sold on Amazon. Cost:~$10 each. But if I valued my labor? $200 each, and no one would buy them. If a furniture maker made them? $700 each, but they'd be made of spalted ambrosia maple, have flashy joinery and ebony inlay. Ok, maybe $1000 each.

But from what I remember of the woodworking experiences you've shared, you already know all that.

TL;DR: I don't want to make river tables or cutting boards, but I'll happily make my own furniture every once in a while.

My motivation for the business is mostly a mix of the following:

• I have really well developed fine tactile skills, and I really enjoy using those skills. It was one of core skills I used daily for ~15 years as a scientist. Think "microsurgery" or something along those lines. Not everyone can physically do it, and it sends me straight into a very pleasant flow state. I guess that is kinda Soul Crafty?? But I already had that in Academia.
• I want to develop and refine my aesthetic sense.
• I really enjoy designing things, sketching them out, creating a work-flow, etc.
• Smaller items like jewelry provide me with a much faster project turnover rate. I wanted to see if having projects started-to-completed on a ~1-2 week timescale is better for me than, say, the 1-5 year timescale of science, or the 2 week-3 month timescale of bespoke furniture making, etc.
• It, to my mind at least, provides a value to others*, while generating very little environmental damage or waste - indeed, much of my source material is scrap, cutoffs, trimmings, etc. This was important to me. This was one of the factors behind leaving the lab... it is inordinately resource intensive. Being the owner of the business means I get to dictate exactly where I draw those lines.
• And then there are all the business-related and personal challenges listed previously, that I genuinely want to answer for myself.

*This has been a minor revolution in my thinking over recent years: an embarrassingly slow 'grokking' of the kinds of things that people/society actually find value in and what different types of jobs actually provide that value. For far too long, I didn't truly appreciate how much meaning various art forms really provide to people... heck, even for myself!

@mountainFrugal

Printmaking! I have some adjacent familiarity with that (my SO has dabbled) and I very well may try that out in the future too.

(It does seem outrageous that a print book that takes years to write and has 300 pages may cost ~$10, but a single greeting card can and often does cost $5. Not saying greeting cards are for every printmaker, but that margin comparison never fails to blow my mind.)

Indeed, marketing and selling are going to be huge learning experiences for me!

@ertyu

I completely agree about the HCOL aspect. It's a blessing and a curse, and I haven't quite figured out what to do with that. To start, I am selling online only. Once I get established, I'll dip my toes into street fairs, art markets, and local shops.

Part of the problem is that I want the scale of online but the price point of local HCOL.

Certainly in the California Bay Area, I could agressively price in person and things would still sell well. But that price point just won't work online. And it would feel weird to try to sell the same item to someone in person for 2-3x what it is online. If they look up my site, they'll see they got ripped off...

There's the ethics of it, and there's the potential blowback of negative reviews.

[jacob]

*This has been a minor revolution in my thinking over recent years: an embarrassingly slow 'grokking' of the kinds of things that people/society actually find value in and what different types of jobs actually provide that value. For far too long, I didn't truly appreciate how much meaning various art forms really provide to people... heck, even for myself!

I remember looking at etsy and being flabbergasted by the difference in price and value insofar "value = objective effort or difficulty". Shellac a slice of reclaimed wood, screw some off the rack metal legs on it, and call it a "zen table", and it sells by the dozen for $600. (I knew a finance type who bought that kind of stuff.) Meanwhile, a hand polished case made with handcut mitered dovetails that would take 40-60 hours to make would basically go unsold ... because it didn't look as "nice" as the box jointed case slathered in poly for five bucks less.

That experience + my previous watchmaking + my bike repair basically led me to conclude that good marketing is far more "valuable" in the uninformed marketplace than good technique. Funny though, diving deep into woodworking there were a few mountain gurus (the actual woodworking zen gurus) that those in the know would seek out to commission to make a chair. They'd take lots of measurements/questions about the client and then spend weeks making the perfect chair offering it on a take it or leave basis. That's stratosphere level though.

[Ego]

Part of the problem is that I want the scale of online but the price point of local HCOL.

I've recently been successful by gaming the algorithmic system. I assume you are selling on Etsy or Ebay. If you pay an extra % of the closing cost to promote a listing they will pay to put a link to your item in the sponsored bar across the top of the Google search page. It has been working very well for me.

Let's say you were weaving cloth scarves. Find a famous photo or painting of a woman with a scarf and then enter all the data about the photo/painting in your listing.



For instance, weave a replica of the scarf worn by the famous Afghan girl. List it on ebay at a very high price, accept offers and promote the listing with a high promotion fee (say 10-15% of closing). Create the title with all the important details of the photo (photographer, Natgo....) Use the description to say a little about the scarf but also copy/paste parts of the wikipedia entry about the photo.

For wood bead jewelry, find an iconic photo of someone wearing beaded jewelry, create replicas and then let the photo lure the customers to you.

For in person sales, it is often hard to get into the best markets and fairs. A good way to go about it is to find a current vendor who is not using their entire space and ask them if they would be willing to split the cost with you so that you can give it a try with one small card table. That way you can avoid going through the state seller's license process until you are sure.

Good luck!

[black_son_of_gray]

Shellac a slice of reclaimed wood, screw some off the rack metal legs on it, and call it a "zen table", and it sells by the dozen for $600. (I knew a finance type who bought that kind of stuff.)

FWIW, I don't actually hate the idea. IKEA sells the legs of their furniture, which are great deals if you like the look. A great way to make exactly the furniture you want for almost nothing (~$50-60 for 4 legs if you get the wood for free). No joinery required. Craigslist resale of maybe $100-200 when you don't want it any more. Maybe a lot more if it is finished nicely and/or an exotic or trendy slab.

As a business, doing it over and over... not my cup of tea. But a downed tree + Alaska mill could easily earn someone a one-time payoff ~$10k with not all that much effort or skill. Apparently, if you put a Youtube video up of you slabbing the log, you'll get 100k+ views too! Develop a relationship with a local arborist...

That experience + my previous watchmaking + my bike repair basically led me to conclude that good marketing is far more "valuable" in the uninformed marketplace than good technique. Funny though, diving deep into woodworking there were a few mountain gurus (the actual woodworking zen gurus) that those in the know would seek out to commission to make a chair. They'd take lots of measurements/questions about the client and then spend weeks making the perfect chair offering it on a take it or leave basis. That's stratosphere level though.

And are you referring to Brian Boggs as a zen guru? He's way the hell up on the mountain in my book.

It's interesting how there is an inflection point, rarely achieved, where the script is flipped and the business gets to choose how much business they want to do, and whom they want to do it with.

Now that I think about it, though, maybe the "good marketing" is much of the value provided to the customer, particularly in an era of information/option overload where most solutions are already "good enough" in a physical sense. The inherent value of a product itself is usually trivially easy to obtain for most goods, and therefore not scarce. A wooden box that only needs to hold a watch or some papers doesn't need really any kind of mechanical strength (butt joints fine), but if its going to be touched or seen regularly, it sure as hell better feel nice and look pretty. Some people, maybe even most people, think a stripe of glitter in some resin looks prettier than intarsia. Advertising the glitter box in the most relevant setting to the customer provides the "value" of "showing exactly how this box will enhance your life." The structural integrity of the box just isn't in the mind of the customer: they've never had one break, or they think that all boxes will just eventually break no matter how they were made. What is in their mind is how the box with exist within their lifestyle (or what they aspire for their future lifestyle).

Perhaps this is why @ego is killing it with his marketing - instant emotional or memory-related context for what he's selling. Quality be damned, if it reminds you of something you like or think is important, you'll give it consideration.

For in person sales, it is often hard to get into the best markets and fairs.

Yeah, I'm seeing that it's often several hundred dollars and sometimes an application(!) to get a spot at some of them. Every time I make the rounds of a market, I feel a little bad for some the small vendors who have clearly worked super hard to put it all together, but it seems quite obvious they aren't going to make their expenses back for the day. They're just sitting there all alone at their table while swarms of people walk by. Talk about a slice of humble pie.