Spec me a business idea / change of work.

Sgarrista
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Joined
9 Aug 2013
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10,734
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Bromsgrove
As some of you know over the last 12-24 months I have been slowly winding down my main line of work in specialized db admin and general web stack development.

Long story short is I set my business up doing this straight out of A-levels and have been doing it for 16 years.

While very well paying, the work has over the last few years been completely unrewarding and borderline depressing to work on, there has been no personal growth or fulfillment and as such ive been passing on that work to others as of late, and only taking on jobs which give me much more personal enjoyment and reward, such as working on the forums here at ocuk.


At the start of this year I had truly had enough, and sold on the support contracts I no longer wished to be involved in and kept the ones of interest to me.


However, I am looking to start a new business idea/venture that can offer that personal development and enjoyment again. The issue is the ideas I have either require huge capital investment (into the millions), technology which is not yet ready for adoption or are too philanthropic in nature to be a viable business model at this point in time.

So, im reaching out to the hive mind of ocuk, throw some ideas at me. I am honestly just looking for something that sparks my interest and has large potential.

On a whole I dont want to end up back into coding/programming type work. Though would be happy to do so to interface for whatever the business model may be.

Some such ideas:

1) I have designed a prototype immersion cooling setup suitable for home use. - A potentially hugely rewarding project, but also one that at this stage would be massively expensive for the average consumer, it would be extremely limited in scope given the general downturn in the PC market / cost of living issues right now.

2) Locally generated renewable power using emerging tech that can then be used to offset peoples bills in the area where it gets built. Potentially start off as a start up utility company. - An area I have zero expertise in however.

3) Car storage. Silly as it sounds but a lot of people need reliable secure storage for their high end vehicles. Or even things like secure parking from airports, just look at how many horror stories you hear of - Downside needs a big secure, ideally indoors, storage facility, very expensive ongoing costs to rent such a unit until a substantial client base is built up.

4) Buy to lets. Something I am already involved in, but due to the huge capital outlay is a longer term project as it would not take long to drain my own funds too quickly. Possibly look at doing a management service instead or similar where people can crowdfund into BTL shareholding.

5) Become an MP, I know my local MP is not standing next election and this is basically a guaranteed seat if I wanted to represent the tories in Bromsgrove. However I just dont think I could do any good off the back of it. Id be too constrained by party politics and not have enough influence in the local area to actually make positive changes. Plus, traveling to London and back on a regular basis, no thanks :D

6) An art project idea I had, involving carbon fibre and cnc. No idea if it would appeal to people, limited scope / expense? This would probably be a side-hustle for fun if anything.

7) ??? Something else.


So over to you ocuk, what crazy ideas do you have?
 
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I think you're at midlife crisis, and also COVID blues. Which I think is understandable and completely expected. I can relate having fallen into a IT career without much direction. Realizing lately I'm no longer interested in what I work at, and want to do something new more satisfying.So with that in mind.

Buying interesting cars doing them up and selling them on

Rather than btl, buy a fixer upper in somewhere unusual. Fix it up and sell it on, or rent.
 
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Oh I'm ALL for crazy ideas.

If you really want to do ****. You should experiment. You want to test the market and your ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible. Whether it's spin up a website ($10 domain, $5 Wordpress, free template), create content on it, see what the market is like. If it isn't working and you are confident you gave it a good test, move on.

Put it this way... I experiment A LOT!

Tuesday I accidently won a provisional contract to clean the exterior of 30 residential properties, on a yearly contract basis, for a commercial company who manages them... I do not do that for a living. At all. But around here they have nothing but cubes of white render now and they get dirty quickly. I thought, hmmm maybe there is something there? So I just tested the market and low and behold, looks like there is. So now I have to setup a company and get people to do it for me :cry: :cry: :cry: but that one contract is c. 27,500 EUR a year.

You can join my discord if you like this sort of stuff. I set it up purely for people looking to start things, make money, experiment and all that jazz. Drop me a trust message and I can give you the deets.
 
Thought about doing some sort of tuition for noobs wanting to get into what you do?

I did it once for a client, wouldnt do it again. What I found from speaking to others doing the low level db engineering is that people either have an eye for it, or they dont, its not something you can "teach". A few companies have tried to make automated tools to do what we do but they just dont work as part of it comes down to intuition and experience.

I think you're at midlife crisis, and also COVID blues. Which I think is understandable and completely expected. I can relate having fallen into a IT career without much direction. Realizing lately I'm no longer interested in what I work at, and want to do something new more satisfying.

I wouldnt call it a midlife crisis :D

Database work is extremely dull, but previously I was happy to suck it up because of the perks (a lot of money). I just want to do something more interesting.
 
Good luck with your business, don't give up! Not all the people can be business owners as it takes lots of courage and patience in order to achieve some results.
Those who thinks it is going to be easy and in two months you can generate a decent income, don't know much about it. It took me many trials to build a successful marketing company which mostly operates on microsoft teams calling and is 100% online. Many times i felt like i can't do it anymore and very happy i didn't give up back then.
 
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As an update have a few things in the works.

1) The case option is being explored/refined at the moment, working out some of the issues and bugs I identified when I initially came up with the idea.
2) Have been in discussions with a venture fund to look into a crypto business, cant say more than that at this point.
3) Put an offer in on a property to add to my BTL collection.

But as above, I am still open to suggestions and pitches.
 
Can't overly help on the other ones but with regards to the immersion technology - I'm not sure it has a massive amount of legs long term especially if you think the cost is going to be relatively obscene in the first place.

There's been attempts at commercially available "super" cooling products in the past - Vapochill and Prometeia (the latter was actually imported by an ex-OcUK forum member as the UK agent) which in general were relatively easy to use for the end user but cost around £600 - both of those products ended up disappearing and Prometeia went down the toilet - Asetek mostly just license out their water based products instead to other vendors which in reality probably makes far more money for them.

I think there's definitely a space for immersion cooling but again there's already numerous manufacturers entered the server market and I've no doubt that this will eventually filter down as it becomes more mainstream and cost becomes lower - Gigabyte already have off the shelf servers and immersion solutions here for example: https://www.gigabyte.com/Press/News/2032 - I guess if you could make something and patent it then maybe but that comes with high costs in itself which would then need to be added to the price of the product plus there's a ream of other issues to consider - what if something happens to a customers PC because they've not followed an instruction correctly or if a part goes faulty for an unrelated reason, the warranty be voided and then will it turn into a peeing contest between you and the manufacturer to see who may pick up the tab (obviously you can go down the route of "when you use this product your warranty will be voided") but even so....there's always that 1 customer who will threaten to go to court unless you fix it etc. etc...
 
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I've a mate that Flips houses and the profit from every other one goes to a BTL. He's at the stage now where he does about 3 days a week if he wants too. He's just spent the last 6 months in a camper van touring Europe with the family.
 
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