[ozim]

There is no shame and no business there.

We just read a story of someone who didn’t want to pay market price and went DIY.

There are companies doing bowling alley equipment and you can pay them for maintenance.

Is there a single one of those on F500 list? No and people are running those companies and what OP did … he didn’t want to pay market price.

Well yeah those companies are overpriced if you are software engineer who can wire up and program couple of ESPs have own bowling alley and have free time.

[mrb]

Don't dismiss the OP so abruptly. IMHO he is convincingly making the case that there is likely a business opportunity for something between a $120k off-the-shelf system and $1.6k in DIY hardware.

[tonyedgecombe]

It's just lack of competitive pressure. I bet if you investigate you will find there are only a couple of suppliers that have the bowling alley market sewn up between them.

[nativeit]

You’d die on the back of unreliable operation and relatively high maintenance. A DIY system built off of cheap ESP32s is never going to be reliable enough. The system as described above is the sort of thing I would happily operate for myself, but would never attempt to sell as a product. Anyone who’s tried to hold together a few dozen ESP32-powered IoT devices will likely attest—they’re very impressive for their cost, but hardly reliable on the scale of years.

[Scoundreller]

> but hardly reliable on the scale of years.

I’ve had similar experiences with “enterprise”-grade hardware.

But sometimes the “price” isn’t just the hardware, but also having someone on-call 24/7 to support and possibly fly-out to investigate within X hours.

[section33]

Oh totally. I actually thought about exactly that. I'm basically thinking "this -will- fail at some point, so when it does, I want to be able to replace a failed unit very rapidly."

I'm tinkering with an auto-provisioning function that tells a given ESP what node type it's connected to and configures itself from there.

[kfse]

Work out how many bowling alleys there are and how many of them are in the market for an upgrade or a fresh install, trying to get to be the king of that hill is a lot of work and risk for not really life changing rewards compared with what a self-avowed SRE could make just pulling paychecks

[qdotme]

Well, the reality of those types of businesses is that once set they do become a relatively low maintenance (and for some, very low 'urgent' maintenance) passive income.

It's really easy to pull $300k/y as an SRE (but that does amount to about $100/hr equivalent in SMB, assuming realistic >40h workweeks and the tax advantages in SMB, even less if you have to pay for services you enjoy and can't find time for due to FTE - nannies or even changing your own oil).

It is extremely hard to keep that $100/hr and a sliding scale - one week you work 50h, the other 30h, then you take a month or three off at $5h/week.

Mine (and I don't regret these) is running midsize PV plants. Slightly bigger than residential (hey, does OP want solar PV on the rooftop? I have a bowling alley as a client, they are a great match), but again not large enough to attract a scaled business.

I approximately put in 5h on each a year after the initial setup (around 100hr each), for $10k/y in profit from each.

[ozim]

There is not much to compete for. Competitive pressure doesn’t magically spawn out of thin air.