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Comment by kiru_io | Hacker News Reader

This is such a cool idea! You could potentially sell this or contact some watchmakers!

This is a labor of love, there’s no way the 15+ hours would be worth it commercially.I think it’s cool and if you start looking at things like this as a business idea they get unfun really fast.

There is currently no competition, so he gets to set the price.

Except that above a certain price, demand falls to zero.

The question is whether there is any overlap at all where the price would be high enough to motivate supply (worth it to him) but low enough that there's still demand (worth buying). Also factoring in the cost of marketing, since potential buyers don't just automatically find you.

There are a huge number of business ideas where there is no overlap at all. Finding an overlap even without competition is hard enough. (Then add competition and it gets even harder, of course.)

I'd wager OP will get some DMs from people willing to pay $1k+ for this sort of thing. Watch people can be very spendy, especially for something unique like this.

Nothing of the sort has happened yet.

That's a shame, might just have to circulate in front of the right people.

I don’t think I’d pay $1000 but a couple hundred would be reasonable to me. This is so cool!

The problem is if this takes 20 or so hours for someone who is highly skilled and could likely make a much safer easier income doing something else, so even $2000 would be $100 an hour which if OP’s hanging out on HN there’s a good chance they could just straight up make that amount in a day job.

Let’s go really pie in the sky, maybe some billionaire sees this (surely there’s some hanging out on hacker news) imagine them giving OP a $30,000 pocket watch owned by Ulysses S Grant or something and asking them to take that one of a kind art piece and encase it in resin. What would the pay rate be for such a project? The sky’s the limit, really.

Hand made pieces that only an expert could assemble are extremely expensive.

Rich watch people can be spendy because it's fashion and, for mechanical watches, the idea of timeless functionality at the highest levels of craftsmanship.

This is exceptionally cool to me. But it's not something you get to subtly show off in public, it's going to (hopefully) involve a cheap watch, and therefore the "timeless functionality" appeal is gone.

Make a couple of them using Rolexes in a cube shape, and somebody would pay lots to have them as "fuzzy dice" to hang from the rear view mirror of their high end car.

But seriously, it doesn't have to be displayed with subtlety. Somebody offer OP $10K for this so you can use it as a paperweight on your desk.

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