Autism, mental health, and conveying a business plan to parents, advice plz

Communities Blog
21

How about before anything concrete, check the places for where you would Sell a PC.
Check what is being sold for how much, then source links to the components for less.

If you can consistently find online deals that make prpffits, then it’s possible.
If the market is already below build costs (and profit) then not financially worth it?

Like, a bunch of computers on FB Marketplace might be OEM pre-builts with integrated graphics, minimal ram, and minimal PSU?

Unless you live in an affluent placed, where simply applying some subtle RGB can make a simple system look impressive, and sell for a profit?

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I hate being told NO, even when nicely packaged.

So re the business plan: value of providing expertise/spending time helping everyone elses bespoke business (ie. MSP) is greater than value you’d be providing in building PCs for those businesses (they can get a prebuilt off a factory line from HP or Dell or Lenovo and call it a day).

To become an expert you need time, to be able to sell expertise you need some form of reputation or you need to undercut the competition by enough for someone to be willing to risk what they need for their business on you.

I’d maybe try and come up with 3-5 similar products, rough sketches (e.g. setting up PCI compliant wifi, offering a service plan on older and cheaper hardware, email, backups). … and figure out solutions, total addressible market in the area you want to service, figure out pricing.

Don’t assume you’ll get the jobs because you’re better or cheaper than anyone else.

Don’t assume long term contracts, make some drafts that makes it easy for future customers to use your services and where if they want to break the contract and pull out, both your losses are minimized - no big irrecoverable investments.

Assume you’ll get 1/1000 jobs in your total addressible market in the first 6 months in the beginning, and build from there.

Use that to come up with cash flow projections over time.

Additionally, see what other stupid jobs you can get and hold (flipping burgers, or door dash and whatever), that are compatible with this one, so you have something to fall back onto, if your own business crashes and burns (it happens more often than success happens).

Don’t get into debt that’s bigger than 2 months of your “flipping burgers” income e.g. don’t rent fancy space or buy a new car or even a second hand fancy car, SUV or whatever, get something cheap and safe that gets you from a-b.

BTW all of these are your business plan to present to your folks, essentially you’re taking a risk and you’re presenting you’ve done your diligence and research and have though about alternatives, mitigations, plan b. People you know will then judge whether to invest in your plan (even if it sounds perfect), based on their understand of your own ability to stick to plans, and will do their own risk mitigation.

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23

Kind of similar idea I’ve had. Cheap used computers for older people who only needs an office suite, a web browser, and youtube. Either install Chrome OS Flex or Linux. Don’t give them root password. This would take you doing some support but with a bit of luck that’s possible to do remotely.

There’s tons and tons of used “thin clients” that can do 8-16GB ram and 250GB disk as sata or msata. Add a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you’re ready to go. The downside is most of the support would be “I can’t fins this file” or “my son’s Netflix login don’t work for me any longer”.

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Good idea @MattiP . I work for K-12 schools and we GIVE, yes give, away a ton of hardware and computers to whomever will take them so we don’t waste labor disposing of them. Many still work just fine. We remove the hard drives, but SSD drives can be bought for $10.

To add perspective we have about 40 HP laptops we just got rid of that had i5-7500 and 8 gig memory. I’m sure those could be fixed up and sold all day for $50-150.

I understand that building custom PC’s is fun, but people generally don’t want to pay what you are worth compared to buying a pre-built. You need another angle to sell such as service and infrastructure (network and cabling).

Good luck!

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25

Please DM me @Limeasaurus_Rex , I’d like to see if I could talk to your school, and see if I can pay them shipping for a pallet of computers during their next disposal cycle. That sounds very viable to me.

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Buuuut… the main business can be old people/reuse business and school hardware, and the side business can can be building custum PCs.

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@Limeasaurus_Rex how often do you have batches of hardware like those 40 laptops … and by your mention of K-12 I am assuming you’re US based? … whereabouts roughly?

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@MattiP I was unclear. That part was meant for the OP. I agree with you 100%.

@risk we have about 600 staff devices (with a 5-year refresh cycle) and we are on the smaller side of school districts in our area (Northwest Arkansas).

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On that note… Be aware your gas guzzling lawn mower / scooter will soon become obsolete, as gas infrastructure becomes more and more scarce due to electrified fleets. In five years you will probably need to travel tens of miles instead of one or two to refuel, in ten years that distance triples and in fifteen years that trip means going to Africa to find a gas pump. As infrastructure is completely dismantled, you’ll be forced to buy a can at your hardware store for 10x the cost per gallon.

One thing you can do here now is specialize in gas->battery mower conversion. If it costs half as much as a new mower, you’ve got yourself a solid batch of customers. This require research though.

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you clearly do not live anywhere near farm country. there is a single charging ‘station’ here. and no it is not a facility, it is seriously just 1 charging hook up. there are a grand total of 3 fully electric vehicles in a 3 hour radius from my house. the average age of the vehicles on the road and in use here just finally got above the year 2000. it is not uncommon to see a 30 year old 2 stroke ATV running around on the weekends.

it always amazes me how few people have any idea where their food comes from and how it gets to their grocery store. i would be SHOCKED if these areas even mention legislation for electric lawn care devices in the next 40 years.

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Its changing faster than you might think. All my yard tools are now electric, my 46" zero turn mower, string trimmer, leaf blower, and chainsaw.

I have a single battery type and can swap them between devices letting me drive along and pull a battery out of my mower pop it into my string trimmer and go to town.

50Ah gets me about 2 acres of mowing, hills do reduce that as does grass type and moisture, but my mower cost the same as a ICE mower and costs a fraction of ICE in maintenance and fuel.

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Notice that keyword here. Is.

If I told you in 2009 that no one would have a Nokia phone by 2015, would you have agreed with me, or would you have called me an utter lunatic out of touch with reality? Especially as everyone you knew owned a Nokia phone?

The electrictrification is like that only ten times worse. Electric tools are already cheaper to buy, operate and maintain, not to mention they tend to have a longer lifespan on average. Same thing with the cars, except they aren’t that cheap yet. Electric tractors are more and more popping up, solar panels are below $500 per installed kW so you can get a 15 kW system under $10k now. This is where we are now.

EVs are taking off and becoming cheap and affordable. What do you think will happen to gas stations once 20 percent of the US fleet becomes electric? At a conversion rate of 5% a year, that is only four years away.

Not even if the most die-hard petrol loving republican (or democrat) stage a successful coup tomorrow and ban all EVs plus all wind and solar power, not even then can you turn around the transition. At best, you can delay it and cause a civil war over it, but you can’t prevent it and trying to do so will just cost you much more than it is worth.

By 2040, at least 99.9999% of all ICE machines will have been replaced by electric ones. They will do so for purely selfish and economic reasons. That is the prognosis. So… Go with the times, or quit the game. Your choice. I don’t really care either way. :slight_smile:

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people do not realize how slowly progression happens in some places. saying we have ‘fast reliable internet’ here is not even accurate. also ‘laws and regulations’ for things like what can be used on public roads and emissions standards do NOT take place here AT ALL. wanna guess why?

look, the country needs US, but California, Florida, New York, you guys could all drop off into the ocean tomorrow and i doubt it would make front page news in our news paper.

seems like you do, you typed a lot for not caring.

34

Point me in a direction please, I desperately want this and all my quotes were for 30-60k to do a 15kw

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Because the infrastructure is still around to support that. What will you do when the infrastructure to support your machinery is withdrawn?

You see, petrol will go bad over time. It’s not like the movies where cars work on 15 year old fuel. You might get ignition but the modern combustion engines of today have a highly sensitive fuel intake. If the mix is wrong, your fuel efficiency go haywire and may even lead to a busted engine.

Sure, you could have one of those wündercars from the 60s that never break down. Those will still work. Then, problem number 2: Where will you get the petrol from? If you need to invest $20k for petrol infrastructure just to keep your machines going, and that’s just the infrastructure, then you need to pay someone to ship the petrol to you. Pipelines will no longer be active so you need to truck it. At some point, the refinery will not get enough customers to keep itself afloat, so you need to get petrol from another refinery.

You can do it, sure, but at this point it’s like staying on Windows XP just because. Doesn’t really make sense to do it, no new programs are coming out for it, you’re still stuck on an ancient Firefox that slows sites down to a crawl, it doesn’t support newer hardware like Ryzen CPUs.

That is the reason why you will rapidly see the electrification of the countryside. Because it hurts too much not to do it. In fact, it makes more sense in rural areas, not less sense.

I type 300 WPM, so meh, doesn’t take much to formulate my thoughts on paper. With obvious essay diarrea as a consequence. :smiley:

Hmm, could’ve been with tax incentives or northern rebates, but here in Europe you can get a 15 kW installed for around $15k, I just assumed the states would be slightly cheaper having access to cheaper labor and parts. Perhaps I was mistaken then!

In Australia, the costs seems to be even below that - ~$12k AUD:

If it’s too expensive in your area, start small and expand. Solar allows you to build a little at a time :slight_smile:

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yeah the wind and solar crowd are nutjobs for their particular tech. I mean it’s great, but it’ not without it’s own downfalls. Nuclear power is the only real way forward, that can generate our power needs easily and on a global scale, with LESS pollution than any other other. And yes, I am well aware that I will be immediately attacked for having this idea. Just like the gas guy up a little in this thread, I’m not ‘progressive’ enough or whatever. So silly how unidirectional that seems to be these days. Oh and to answer that person weritgon, about fuel and shelf life, you can either buy propane, to fuel your car if you’re lazy, or if you’re slightly more intelligent and don’t mind DIY, there’s always woodgas, both are readily known and available conversions directly for gasoline engines. Also this is WAY off topic. I don’t mind discussing this, but tag me in a specific thread, and let’s launch out text volleys there, HAVE AT YE!

37

your entire post makes me believe you have a fundamental misconception of how some things function, but this line in particular really drives that point home.

it simply will not be any time soon when a electric truck can haul cows to and from feedlots in the middle of no where to the middle of no where. there is barely FUEL infrastructure in some of these places and you think power line infrastructure is going to sprout up and replace all of this stuff in the next 17 years? or you think battery tech will magically improve so much in that amount of time that an 80,000lbs truck can run all day long in 110 degree heat or 20 degree cold like a diesel engine can?

you is confused.

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Zedicus, do you mind making a tread for this? I has ideas. Also as stated to the wertigon fellah, this is off topic.

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sorry about that, i was only responding to my point. if someone makes a new topic for that i will follow along, either way my comments on farm country USA stop here.

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oh no, I live in farm country, and I feel your pain, but this isn’t the reason I created this thread. hang on a sec. I tagged you and wertigon in a new thread. I’m very interested in the future of this country (the USA I assume?) since I don’t know where y’all reside IRL.