Most profitable reefing side gig?

[Formulator]

I’m sure everyone has pondered ways to make a little money in this hobby… I have the luxury of space in the unfinished area of my basement and some expendable income for start up costs. I have a good handle on biology and chemistry laboratory techniques and pretty good at husbandry. What are the most profitable side projects?

Fish breeding?
Coral propagation?
Nudibranch?
Phyto/pod culture?
Something else?

 

[WalkerLovesTheOcean]

I would say fish breeding and coral fragging. Start out with rare but not too expensive corals, and if you find success in that get some nice expensive corals, grow them out, then frag and sell. Same thing with fish except don't frag them

 

[doctormark]

Shutting down your tank

 

[Formulator]

What fish are most profitable that can be bred captively? I have a pair of breeding clowns that lay a clutch every couple weeks, but I’ve never considered raising the fry because clowns are so cheap.

 

[WalkerLovesTheOcean]

What fish are most profitable that can be bred captively? I have a pair of breeding clowns that lay a clutch every couple weeks, but I’ve never considered raising the fry because clowns are so cheap.

I am not too sure about that, but really any of the expensive fish would be profitable, obviously. Clowns can be expensive, yes not the basic ones, but designer clowns can be insanely expensive.

 

[braaap]

Shutting down your tank

This guy nailed it.

/endthread

 

[Reefer Matt]

I’m sure everyone has pondered ways to make a little money in this hobby… I have the luxury of space in the unfinished area of my basement and some expendable income for start up costs. I have a good handle on biology and chemistry laboratory techniques and pretty good at husbandry. What are the most profitable side projects?

Fish breeding?
Coral propagation?
Nudibranch?
Phyto/pod culture?
Something else?

If you turn it into a business, any of it can be profitable. It depends on how much time you have to do it. For the average hobbyist, selling coral usually breaks them even at best, or put into more debt at worst. But some also do pretty good. I suggest that if anyone wants to start a livestock business, make sure to enjoy having a lot of them to care for. Not all of them sell, and you may have them for a while.

I have a side reefing business, but only sell at one frag swap. It is enough for me to pay for equipment upgrades. The majority of my maintenance costs are covered from working at my day job. I have yet to meet anyone that got rich from reefing though.

 

[GARRIGA]

Over populated landscape. Always has. Tough business to get into. Social media presence. Shows to attend. Text messages needing responses. Reality what was hot yesterday not today. Needing multiple space of what you thought because need to constantly chase the latest.

Been in the pet hobby since the early 90s. Started by selling skimmers. Myself and my customer having no clue how to make one run and knowing less what exactly they did. Thought about the maintenance path. Then I started wholesaling and retailing reptiles. All part time. Ended up abandoning everything because time was limited and my day job demanded too much of it plus my social life. Later started breeding designer boas where a following easier to manage then trying to sell to the general public and even then was easier wholesaling as didn’t have the time to be on social media or answering texts. Now I’m trying to vacate it and just get several tanks and populate them with what I want vs the latest and greatest trek. I’ll frag as a gardener will do and swap with the LFS for supplies or something new I must have.

You see the prices and bulbs go off like a model in front of a poparatzy. Not realizing all it takes to just recover costs and forgetting time spent never calculated.

My mindset on this. Easier to make profits if one excludes their time and just does it because they want to grow frags and enjoy the time talking to others at shows. That’s kind of what I do now as I sell my remaining animals. Going to shows less of a hassle when you think of it as leisure and not work. Because it’s a lot of work and for something that require setting up tanks with water and transporting stock in water I have to think it’s considerably more than what it takes for me to show up at a reptile show. Stopped answering texts long ago. Mostly tire kickers wanting pics. Those are so annoying.

 

[shcrimps]

What fish are most profitable that can be bred captively? I have a pair of breeding clowns that lay a clutch every couple weeks, but I’ve never considered raising the fry because clowns are so cheap.

DaJMasta

Bassooning, multispectral visualization, measurement, and sort of whatever else seems interesting.

youtube.com

this guy has some good stuff to watch if you end up getting into breeding fish
@DaJMasta

 

[VintageReefer]

I have put a lot of thought into this

I will dm you

 

[DIYreefer]

My mindset on this. Easier to make profits if one excludes their time and just does it because they want to grow frags

This is pretty much where I'm at. I sell a decent amount of frags and the money I make doing so funds my hobby 100%. I don't consider the countless hours I spend doing tank maintenance, taking pictures of corals, packing/shipping orders, etc. "work" because I still approach all of it with a hobbyist mindset. I enjoy all of it.

 

[DanyL]

This is pretty much where I'm at. I sell a decent amount of frags and the money I make doing so funds my hobby 100%. I don't consider the countless hours I spend doing tank maintenance, taking pictures of corals, packing/shipping orders, etc. "work" because I still approach all of it with a hobbyist mindset. I enjoy all of it.

That’s exactly my own approach to this.
I never grow out colonies with the mindset of profiting off them, but I do have a large enough system where I can and need to frag regularly enough solely for maintenance, which ends up in me having a constant flow of frags on hand.

My frag tank also doubles as a dynamic show tank (I do make a lot of colony sized frags so it works for me), on one hand it gives me a buffer between fragging and selling, on the other - it gives me an opportunity to experiment with different looks, lighting spectrums, flow, coral positions and chemistry which I can than later on employ on my main system safely. This again plays into the personal enjoyment of the hobby, rather than “work for profit” kind of thing for me.

A frag tank or show tank? Why not do both