Hey everyone! I post regularly about business ideas and opportunities. I made a previous post like this and you all seemed to like it. You can check out more ideas like this here.

Finding SaaS Deals Takes Too Much Time

“I buy a lot of different SaaS (software-as-a-service) tools for various things. Sometimes it’s for personal use, sometimes it’s business-related. I often find an affiliate code, or some other deal I didn’t know about after I purchase the software. I always forget to hunt for deals before I make a purchase, and it costs me a lot of money.”
- SaaS Consumer

The Opportunity

Someone should create Honey for SaaS tools and digital products.
Honey is a chrome extension that searches for coupons and discount codes for physical products automatically right before you check out. Currently, Honey doesn’t work with any digital products.
To give you an idea of how successful this Honey is, it was purchased roughly one year ago by PayPal for $4B and they are doing over $100M in revenue each year.
The idea is to create a chrome extension that works in the background hunting for affiliate codes and other discounts at the checkout for software and digital products. I like this idea because the value proposition is so clear - save money on products you were already going to buy.
Note: I believe this business can print money, but more on that in the ‘Economics’ section down below.

Market Background & Opportunity Size

SaaS (software-as-a-service) tools and digital products have exploded in the last 10-15 years. Whether you know it or not, you, or your company, are paying for multiple SaaS tools and digital products.
In 2019, the average company spent $514,500 on SaaS tools, which is a 50% increase from 2018. Most companies invest in anywhere between 100-300 tools, depending on the size of the organization.
A few interesting facts:

• Companies are spending more on SaaS tools than they are on laptops
• The average employee uses 8 SaaS tools to do their job
• Every 2 years, companies switch roughly 50% of their SaaS tools to different providers

These tools and products aren’t limited to business use cases. On average, Americans are spending somewhere between $60-120/month on digital subscriptions (or about $720-1440 each year).
Note: If you want to dig more into these numbers, most of the stats came from here.

Pain Points

While there are many pain points related to SaaS tools and digital products, we’re going to focus on the problem detailed above. There are pain points for both users and SaaS companies.
Users

• Finding deals on digital products is time-consuming and you often forget to do it. This results in you spending more money on the same tool or product.
• Currently, there are no good solutions to help automate finding and applying coupons to SaaS tools and digital products.

SaaS Companies

• Acquiring new users is a huge challenge for most SaaS companies. Offering them access to a targeted customer base in exchange for discounts is a great value proposition.

Current Solutions

Appsumo

• Appsumo is by far one of the most popular sites to get deals on software. They partner with software companies that want to offer heavily discounted prices in exchange for access to their estimated 800,000 users. They do roughly $30M in revenue/year. That said, they don’t use any software to help you find deals on products you’re looking to buy, you have to search their database.

F6S

• F6S is a site that helps founders succeed. While they do many things, one of their features is a deals platform where founders can get access to discounts on software. All the deals are business tools and you have to search their database to get the deal.

Dealify

• Dealify is a Chrome Extension that notifies you whenever a new lifetime deal becomes available. However, they currently don’t help you find deals on the software you’re already looking at buying

Note: The two biggest players, Honey and Rakuten don’t currently offer discounts on most software. But, nothing is stopping them from moving into this space and becoming competitors.
Additionally, I found a guy who’s working on this problem currently, Shaun MacLellan. He’s a super nice guy, reach out to him if you’re interested in this opportunity.

How Do The Economics Work?

How Honey Makes Money?
This idea becomes one that I think can print money when you look at the business model used.
The gist of it is this: every time you make a purchase using Honey, they get a commission paid by the retailer. This is similar to how bloggers, YouTubers, or newsletters use affiliate links to get commissions when they refer customers to a product/website.
One nuance here is that many believe (although it’s not confirmed) that Honey actually steals commissions from other affiliates. By offering codes right at the point of purchase, it is likely Honey receives all the commission on the purchase. You can read more about this here.
Does This Work For Software?
The commission offered by SaaS companies is 2-3x the commission offered on physical goods. If you’re able to emulate Honey’s business model, this could easily be a business that prints money.

How to Execute

• Populate Your Extension With Deals: After doing some research, there are dozens of platforms that offer deals that you could use to populate your extension. Additionally, here’s a link to ~150 software affiliate programs you could sign up for to immediately start making money.
• Find Your Early Adopters: This extension isn’t for everyone. I’d start by going after the individuals who already use Appsumo or other solutions. This will likely be indie makers, startup founders, or digital marketers. There are dozens of online communities where these people hangout that you could use to capture your first 1,000 users.
• Build a Smoke Test): This idea is perfect for running a smoke test - it’s got a simple value proposition and the product is easy to understand. I’d drive traffic to a well-designed landing page and capture emails before building out the tech. This will help you test both channel and market risk.
• Build Partnerships: Once you’ve got some initial traction, I’d focus on building partnerships with SaaS tools and digital products. The best way to make your extension sticky is by always having the best deals for your user. Appsumo has done this well, so steal a page out of their playbook.

Challenges

• Low Purchase Frequency: Unlike physical goods, SaaS tools and digital products are bought at a much lower frequency. This is bad for two reasons: 1) If your business model is getting commissions on each purchase, you make less money, 2) It may be harder to convince people to download the extension if they feel like they’ll use it often enough.
• Incumbent Threat: As mentioned above, Honey and Rakuten don’t currently offer discounts on SaaS tools and other digital products. That said, there is a real threat of them adding these products to their offerings. If they did that, competing with them would be challenging.
• Creating + Managing Partnerships: Most physical goods are purchased through online retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Fashion Nova, ect… These retailers already have affiliate programs set up, which makes things easy. While some SaaS companies have affiliate programs, there are a lot that don’t. To dominate the space, you’ll need to do some leg work to convince these companies to work with you.

Thanks for reading! Please reach out with any questions

Much of the content in this sub is centered around prospective entrepreneurs or businesses in the very early stages. So, I thought it might be helpful to share some hard numbers for what a mature business (10+ years) can look like. We're going to get into some detail here, breaking down revenue & expenses into dozens of categories.
(Note: I won't be sharing the name/info for my company publicly, but I'm happy to provide verification to the mods as needed. I don't want this information to be linked to my identity. I'm doing this purely for illustrative purposes!)
To generally describe the business, we produce and sell software. Not SaaS, just regular ol' consumer software. It's an LLC w/ S-corp tax status, solely owned by me. We have one employee (me) but a fluctuating number of independent contractors who work anywhere from 5 hours to 30 hours a week. Some are on regular contracts, others work on an as-needed basis.
With that in mind, let's jump in!
Total Revenue in 2020: $2,037,300
We grew 19% from 2019. Pretty good stuff. We didn't release as many new products as we normally do, due to some internal production delays, but we had one fairly stellar release... and then COVID happened. Since our software could broadly be categorized as relating to hobbies, and hobby industries saw a surge, we benefited also.
(FWIW, we have grown every year since inception, but 19% is a bit above average!)
COST OF GOODS SOLD
In our case, we categorize some expenses as COGS if they are directly tied to the actual sale of the products. You'd think these expenses would be non-existent for software, and they are often low, but our case is a bit different. We have three subcategories here...
COGS - Content Delivery: $16,190
This is basically bandwidth/transfer costs that come from people downloading our stuff. Some of our products are a bit beefy, gigabyte-wise, so this ain't cheap.
COGS - Licensing : $62,720
For some products that use 3rd party tech, we have to pay a license fee per product sold. If we don't pay this, we can't sell these products. Hence, COGS.
COGS - Royalties: $252,650
Some products involve royalty arrangements with companies or individuals that have contributed to development in some way. It could be that they own certain copyrights or trademarks, or their compensation package simply included royalties. In any case, not every product has royalties attached - maybe 15% of them do - but it's our biggest COGS expense.
DEVELOPMENT COSTS
Now we get to the strictly defined category of development costs. For tax purposes, R&D can yield additional tax credits, so we have to be careful with what we put here. Generally this includes any contract programming work, UI design, audio, graphic design, or anything else directly tied to creating NEW products.
Broadly speaking then, our development costs were:
Development - Art, UI, Audio: $151,385
Development - Programming: $103,500
Development - Writing: $13,500
Development - Localization: $2,940
Given that we have about 13 projects currently in the works, I think these costs are pretty reasonable!
ADVERTISING & MARKETING
Critical to our growth in 2019 and especially 2020 was increased ad spend, especially on Facebook, which performed really well for us. We dabbled in YouTube but didn't get great results there. But part of our ad/marketing costs are also the fees we pay to agencies/freelancers for handling things like Facebook ads, email automations via Mailchimp, email design, etc. So it's not just ads!
Advertising & Marketing - Ad Spend: $146,160
This was our raw spend that went JUST to Facebook or Google, and nowhere else. We saw a roughly 3-4x ROAS here, inclusive of agency fees.
Advertising & Marketing - Agencies & Freelancers: $65,570
To get more specific here, we contract our Facebook ad management, email management, conversion rate optimization, and some copywriting. Generally all worth it, although as mentioned we tried and dropped YT services.
Advertising & Marketing - Video Production: $11,670
I used to produce all our video content myself, but nowadays I split this work up with other editors/creators. This includes things like promo videos, FB videos, product walkthroughs, etc.
AFFILIATE COMMISSIONS - $17,890
Affiliates are not a huge part of our marketing strategy, but we have a few partners that we trust. They get a 20% commission on referrals. This is how much that cost us.
AMORTIZATION & DEPRECIATION - $17,460
Yawn. We're still writing off some capital purchases from previous years.
BANK & SERVICE FEES - $44,490
These are fees we pay our payment processors for handling transactions. Previously we used PayPal & Stripe; we now use PayPal & Braintree.
CHARITABLE DONATIONS - $2,200
The business itself made some donations to charity. Normally, I make donations from my own bank account, but there were a few times where I felt like it was better coming from my business.
CUSTOMER SERVICE & SALES - $23,560
We started the year with one tech support person, and ended with two tech people plus a salesperson. MOST of this expense is tech support, though. The salesperson has developed some great relationships but as of yet has not earned a commission.
TRAVEL & MEALS - $3,260
In the early months of 2020 we were still doing a little bit of travel. Obviously nothing after that...
PAYROLL EXPENSES
This high level category includes my salary, payroll taxes, and fees paid to our payroll processor. The line items are:
Payroll Fees - $724 Owner Salary - $210,000 Payroll Taxes - $13,570
PROFESSIONAL FEES - $9,890
This category includes accounting, bookkeeping, and legal. We had more legal expenses than usual this year as we register some new trademarks and deal with some trademark infringement issues.
SOFTWARE, HARDWARE, SUPPLIES - $24,220
Not really worth getting into the specific subcategories here, but this includes things like software subscriptions for Adobe products or MS office, one-time licenses, computer equipment, office supplies (including furniture), and other hardware.
UTILITIES - $2,590
Phone & gigabit internet. Simple.
WEB SERVICES - $34,770
The line between a web service and a software subscription is a little mushy, but I define a "web service" as something that relates to our website/store, while software subscriptions are things run on OUR computer(s). So this includes ongoing services like web hosting, Slack, Mailchimp, WooCommerce plugin licenses, website monitoring, domain registrar... etc.
WEB DEVELOPMENT - $10,070
Contrasted with "web services", these expenses were fees paid to developers for things like one-time optimizations, new features, redesigned pages, and other one-time jobs.
TOTAL EXPENSES - $1,258,800
This number is a little higher than the numbers I listed above, but that's because there were a bunch of miscellaneous expenses not worth discussing. (And it IS a little scary to see a number like this when you're working for yourself!)
NET INCOME - $787,650
(Again this might be a little off compared to the above, but it includes some misc. income like credit card rewards and dividends.)
Compared to last year, our net income as a % of gross is a little lower, but that's because we spent more money on new product development and content delivery than previously. The results of that should pay off big time this year as we begin rolling out new stuff on an almost monthly basis.
Anyway, there you have it. A look at our books. Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope this was interesting!

Hey everyone! I post regularly about business ideas and opportunities. I made a previous post like this and you all seemed to like it. You can check out more ideas like this here.

Finding SaaS Deals Takes Too Much Time

“I buy a lot of different SaaS (software-as-a-service) tools for various things. Sometimes it’s for personal use, sometimes it’s business-related. I often find an affiliate code, or some other deal I didn’t know about after I purchase the software. I always forget to hunt for deals before I make a purchase, and it costs me a lot of money.”
- SaaS Consumer

The Opportunity

Someone should create Honey for SaaS tools and digital products.
Honey is a chrome extension that searches for coupons and discount codes for physical products automatically right before you check out. Currently, Honey doesn’t work with any digital products.
To give you an idea of how successful this Honey is, it was purchased roughly one year ago by PayPal for $4B and they are doing over $100M in revenue each year.
The idea is to create a chrome extension that works in the background hunting for affiliate codes and other discounts at the checkout for software and digital products. I like this idea because the value proposition is so clear - save money on products you were already going to buy.
Note: I believe this business can print money, but more on that in the ‘Economics’ section down below.

Market Background & Opportunity Size

SaaS (software-as-a-service) tools and digital products have exploded in the last 10-15 years. Whether you know it or not, you, or your company, are paying for multiple SaaS tools and digital products.
In 2019, the average company spent $514,500 on SaaS tools, which is a 50% increase from 2018. Most companies invest in anywhere between 100-300 tools, depending on the size of the organization.
A few interesting facts:

• Companies are spending more on SaaS tools than they are on laptops
• The average employee uses 8 SaaS tools to do their job
• Every 2 years, companies switch roughly 50% of their SaaS tools to different providers

These tools and products aren’t limited to business use cases. On average, Americans are spending somewhere between $60-120/month on digital subscriptions (or about $720-1440 each year).
Note: If you want to dig more into these numbers, most of the stats came from here.

Pain Points

While there are many pain points related to SaaS tools and digital products, we’re going to focus on the problem detailed above. There are pain points for both users and SaaS companies.
Users

• Finding deals on digital products is time-consuming and you often forget to do it. This results in you spending more money on the same tool or product.
• Currently, there are no good solutions to help automate finding and applying coupons to SaaS tools and digital products.

SaaS Companies

• Acquiring new users is a huge challenge for most SaaS companies. Offering them access to a targeted customer base in exchange for discounts is a great value proposition.

Current Solutions

Appsumo

• Appsumo is by far one of the most popular sites to get deals on software. They partner with software companies that want to offer heavily discounted prices in exchange for access to their estimated 800,000 users. They do roughly $30M in revenue/year. That said, they don’t use any software to help you find deals on products you’re looking to buy, you have to search their database.

F6S

• F6S is a site that helps founders succeed. While they do many things, one of their features is a deals platform where founders can get access to discounts on software. All the deals are business tools and you have to search their database to get the deal.

Dealify

• Dealify is a Chrome Extension that notifies you whenever a new lifetime deal becomes available. However, they currently don’t help you find deals on the software you’re already looking at buying

Note: The two biggest players, Honey and Rakuten don’t currently offer discounts on most software. But, nothing is stopping them from moving into this space and becoming competitors.
Additionally, I found a guy who’s working on this problem currently, Shaun MacLellan. He’s a super nice guy, reach out to him if you’re interested in this opportunity.

How Do The Economics Work?

How Honey Makes Money?
This idea becomes one that I think can print money when you look at the business model used.
The gist of it is this: every time you make a purchase using Honey, they get a commission paid by the retailer. This is similar to how bloggers, YouTubers, or newsletters use affiliate links to get commissions when they refer customers to a product/website.
One nuance here is that many believe (although it’s not confirmed) that Honey actually steals commissions from other affiliates. By offering codes right at the point of purchase, it is likely Honey receives all the commission on the purchase. You can read more about this here.
Does This Work For Software?
The commission offered by SaaS companies is 2-3x the commission offered on physical goods. If you’re able to emulate Honey’s business model, this could easily be a business that prints money.

How to Execute

• Populate Your Extension With Deals: After doing some research, there are dozens of platforms that offer deals that you could use to populate your extension. Additionally, here’s a link to ~150 software affiliate programs you could sign up for to immediately start making money.
• Find Your Early Adopters: This extension isn’t for everyone. I’d start by going after the individuals who already use Appsumo or other solutions. This will likely be indie makers, startup founders, or digital marketers. There are dozens of online communities where these people hangout that you could use to capture your first 1,000 users.
• Build a Smoke Test): This idea is perfect for running a smoke test - it’s got a simple value proposition and the product is easy to understand. I’d drive traffic to a well-designed landing page and capture emails before building out the tech. This will help you test both channel and market risk.
• Build Partnerships: Once you’ve got some initial traction, I’d focus on building partnerships with SaaS tools and digital products. The best way to make your extension sticky is by always having the best deals for your user. Appsumo has done this well, so steal a page out of their playbook.

Challenges

• Low Purchase Frequency: Unlike physical goods, SaaS tools and digital products are bought at a much lower frequency. This is bad for two reasons: 1) If your business model is getting commissions on each purchase, you make less money, 2) It may be harder to convince people to download the extension if they feel like they’ll use it often enough.
• Incumbent Threat: As mentioned above, Honey and Rakuten don’t currently offer discounts on SaaS tools and other digital products. That said, there is a real threat of them adding these products to their offerings. If they did that, competing with them would be challenging.
• Creating + Managing Partnerships: Most physical goods are purchased through online retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Fashion Nova, ect… These retailers already have affiliate programs set up, which makes things easy. While some SaaS companies have affiliate programs, there are a lot that don’t. To dominate the space, you’ll need to do some leg work to convince these companies to work with you.

Thanks for reading! Please reach out with any questions

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• Communications Coordinator ^\)^link\) Pajama Program · New York, US non-tech, tech, sales-marketing, design
  
• Senior Product Designer ^\)^link\) Storable · TX design, tx-ks-mo-co-nc-pa-il-in, remote-friendly, full-time
  
• Early Childhood Regional Coordinator ^\)^link\) NY Early Childhood Professional Development Institute · $65,000 - $70,000 · New York, US non-tech
  
• Sr Software Engineer ^\)^link\) Inventables · Chicago, IL design, full-time, usa-only
  
• Social Media Intern ^\)^link\) Sam Chiodo Ltd · $12 - $14 an hour · Remote sales-marketing, non-tech, social-media
  
• Webflow Developer / Designer ^\)^link\) Serial Box · USA Only design, part_time
  
• Executive Director ^\)^link\) YS Kim Foundation · New York, US non-tech, tech, engineering, sales-marketing
  
• UX Developer (Frontend/Design) ^\)^link\) Sleeknote · Aarhus, Denmark engineering, full-time, programming, front-end, anywhere-100-remote-only
  
• Director of Product Security ^\)^link\) Auth0 · USA Only tech, product, full_time
  
• Community Manager ^\)^link\) SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) · $90,000 - $110,000 · District of Columbia, US non-tech, sales-marketing
  
• Senior Software Engineer (Distributed Systems) ^\)^link\) Cisco Meraki · USA engineering, devops, java, ruby, python, scala, golang
  
• Associate, Grassroots Expansion ^\)^link\) RESULTS Educational Fund · $43,000 - $49,000 · District of Columbia, US non-tech
  
• Marketing and Affiliate Manager ^\)^link\) Made Trade · Oregon, US sales-marketing
  
• Director of Partnerships & External Affairs ^\)^link\) Women Moving Millions, Inc. · New York, US non-tech, sales-marketing
  
• Mid/Senior .NET Developer ^\)^link\) Mygrant Glass · Hayward, California, United States engineering, full-time, programming, anywhere-100-remote-only
  
• Marketing/Communications Contractor ^\)^link\) The InteRoots Initiative · Colorado, US tech, non-tech, sales-marketing
  
• Senior Developer Tech Lead (London, UK) ^\)^link\) Flourish engineering, tech-lead, dev, exec, senior, digital-nomad
  
• Senior Software Engineer, Patient Engagement ^\)^link\) TrialScope · Jersey City, New Jersey, United States engineering, full-time, programming, anywhere-100-remote-only
  
• Payroll Associate ^\)^link\) ExED · California, US non-tech, tech
  
• Administrative Coordinator - LGBTQ Scholarship Fund ^\)^link\) Point Foundation · CA, US non-tech, engineering
  
• Project Coordinator ^\)^link\) Rural Support Partners · $40,000 - $40,000 · North Carolina, US non-tech, tech, sales-marketing, engineering
  
• Coalition Coordinator -- CUNY Rising Alliance ^\)^link\) NY Communities for Change · $60,000 · NY, US tech, non-tech, sales-marketing
  
• Support Engineer ^\)^link\) Buildkite · Melbourne, Australia sales-marketing, full-time, customer-support, anywhere-100-remote-only
  
• Director of Product Management ^\)^link\) MyTime · USA Only tech, product, full_time
  
• Senior Product Manager ^\)^link\) Healthify · USA Only tech, product, full_time
  
• Copywriter - Part-time/Freelance/Remote (U.S based) ^\)^link\) MTP, Inc · $25 - $50 an hour · Los Angeles sales-marketing, non-tech, copywriting
  
• Nutrition Education Program Coordinator ^\)^link\) Vetri Community Partnership · $38,000 - $38,000 · Pennsylvania, US non-tech
  
• Policy Director Job Announcement - Remote (USA) ^\)^link\) Grassroots Global Justice · $70,000 - $73,000 · District of Columbia, US non-tech, sales-marketing
  
• Marketing & Development Coordinator - LGBTQ Scholarship Fund ^\)^link\) Point Foundation · California, US engineering, sales-marketing, tech
  
• Customer Support Specialist ^\)^link\) Made Trade · Oregon, US non-tech
  
• Program ManageTeacher Coach for Middle and High School STEM Program Part-Time Position ^\)^link\) Mouse · New York, US non-tech
  
• Planning & Reporting Coordinator ^\)^link\) Internet Society · Virginia, US non-tech, tech, sales-marketing
  
• Accounting Associate ^\)^link\) ExED · CA, US non-tech
  
• Product Implementation Engineer, Financials Product Team ^\)^link\) Kuali · Kuali engineering, full-time, devops-and-sysadmin, anywhere-100-remote-only
  
• Product Analyst ^\)^link\) StreetSolutions · USA Only tech, product, full_time
  

Hello friends! These are the open remote positions I've found that were published today. See you tomorrow! Bleep blop 🤖

Source
Note: other employees' answers were occasionally included, but are by no means complete.

Questions	Answers
PC Part Picker. Where do I start. First of all, thank you so much for all of the help you guys have given me. If not for your team and your website I might not have built the PC I have now. I am very grateful to you guys for making such straightforward software with so many options. You guys are on top of everything, and I’d just like to thank you for all that you’ve done for the PC building community. That being said, onto the questions! 1. What are your favorite PC Parts? What’s your ideal/dream PC part list? 2. I’ve been having this problem recently because things are out of stock. When I make a parts list I often have to go into the page for the part to determine the actual cost for the part when it comes back in stock from the major retailers. When displaying the price, could you also add in parentheses something like: Price: $265 (Lowest: $200)	Thanks for the kind words! I'll defer to Alex/Ryan on their favorite parts. For me I'd just like to get hold of a 3080 one day but I'm not in a rush. I'm still happily running this build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/c99djX
	On the stock / pricing issue, we might be able to look into something like that, but I can't make any guarantees.
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Downmented: It's a bad time to be GPU shopping when the founde owner of PCPP can't even score a 30 series GPU BDsBiggest: This was my thought, how does he not have one?	I honestly don't really need one and there are people who play way more intensive stuff than I do. I'm ok to wait.
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On that note, what do you play?!!	I still really enjoy Minecraft of all things. My oldest son started playing Skyblock and so that became a bit of a time sink. Used to play a decent bit of Civ and other Sid Meier stuff a long time ago. I'm just not that much of a gamer though. I'm legitimately terrible at FPS games, so I don't really enjoy them all that much. Minecraft lets me just piddle around and experiment with different creations, architectures, etc. And it's something I can play with my kids which is great until they trash my island.
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As a fellow Minecraft buff, what are your thoughts on the best CPU for Minecraft at the moment? I know it depends more on CPU performance than GPU, at least in Java edition.	I'll have to defer to the other guys on staff or the community because I honestly don't know. I'm playing on an i5-6600k/980 ti which has been more than enough.
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Thanks for the response! How long have you had that build for?	Roughly four years. I need to upgrade the GPU though because where I work in my house it's getting cold and ThoughtA is outpacing me on Folding at Home.
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Do you have a rebuild planned for when the 3080 is back? Or just upgrading the current rig?	It'll probably be a new build, but I'm not sure what it'll be. If 3080s come back in stock where I can get one, then I may start with that and plan the rest around it. Especially if it's something with a particular aesthetic or color scheme that I want to match.
Thank you for your site and all the countless hassle it saved me from. What do you guys and gals think is a thing our community could help you with ? Is there something like a roadmap for pcpp and what are you personally most excited about ? How should people give feedback to you and the other team members? Which channels are you preferring ? On which channels can I send my monthly thank you very much for your service messages ?	Re: what buildapc can help with - this community has helped us so much over the years that I have no asks whatsoever. Just thanks. Thanks for letting us be a part of the community.
	We don't have an official roadmap - I run the dev timeline like a software engineer who is terrible at time estimates. Things I promised eight years ago are still undone while other stuff jumps ahead. I'm most excited for benchmarking. I love performance analysis, and what we're building should be super cool. Lots, lots, lots of data, all in tightly controlled environments. The hard part is how to present relevant bits without overwhelming people with data.
	For feedback, feel free to ping us on our site forums, our contact page, or on our discord channel. Discord is probably the least formal if it's something small, though I'm not on discord all that often these days (Ryan and Alex are though).
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Ah, "agile" development.	Nope! None of that. No agile practices here thanks. Just software development structured along my capricious demands...
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IMHO, "we don't have a project management philosophy" is the best project management philosophy. As long as progress is being made and people are happy, management theory would just get in the way.	For a while I was working on a codebase of several million lines of C++ in an org with 100+ other really smart engineers. I participated in an effort to modularize part of it, and I failed pretty badly. One of the most important things I learned was from an old Windows NT dev presentation that talked about Conway's Law. That really reshaped how I viewed architecture, teams, responsibilities, and communication patterns.
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Did you consider licensing/sharing benchmarks from other hardware review sites, rather than developing a (presumably not-profit-generating) benchmarking competency? Alternatively, if you do want to generate benchmarks, have you considered monetizing them via a blog?	We're planning on benching at a scale that most review sites don't do. Like an order of magnitude more pairings, runs, etc, with a bit more detail on each as well in terms of current consumption, temps, etc. All that all recorded on identical software setups for comparability. No one right now is doing that at the scale we want.
	It's definitely not a profit center, and that's ok for me. I love benchmarking. Before PCPP I was part of a team working on optimizing compiler stuff. I loved writing compiler optimizations and testing the performance changes. So that whole side of things - determinism, accurate measurements, etc, I just really enjoy it. So PCPP in a way helps fund my desire to do that work whether it is profitable or not.
	That being said, I do think it's a complementary feature set to add. While it may not monetize directly, I think the value it adds to the site will (hopefully) result in an incremental change in traffic/revenue.
So how does it feel to have a side project or yours become as popular in the computer world as google? You've become the only place I recommend newbies to go (other than reddit) for pc building help, and your site has become the most useful tool I've ever used outside of my daily IT work. You've created something not only powerfully useful, but well designed, smoothly operated, and pleasing to the eye. I don't really have much of question more just taking the opportunity to say thank you for creating a fantastic tool for the community. If a bigger company offers you millions to sell it I'd understand if you did, but please don't, I can't imagine the site being run any better than by it's original team!	Thanks for the kind words. I gave my mom a shirt. A couple years ago someone recognized the shirt in rural east Texas. Like, she lives 30 minutes from the nearest town of 5,000 people. That was pretty wild. My mom was pretty excited lol.
	I love having something that I helped build be a useful thing for people. That's immensely satisfying. (And it's a team effort, not just me by any stretch at all. The whole team helps every bit of what you see on the site).
	On the other hand, I don't want or like to be out front. I'd rather be behind the scenes working on something and not really be noticed. I think that gets reflected, probably negatively from a business-first standpoint, in how I run things. I don't really push branding hard, don't push social media (Twitter, Instagram, etc), because I personally don't want to be out front there. I can engage here on reddit because I feel like I'm a part of the community here rather than some corporate/redditor relationship. From a business standpoint, I think there's a lot of growth possibility that PCPP hasn't tapped into because I want to avoid various social anxieties and whatnot.
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Just know that if a company offers big bucks (and they probably will eventually) it is because they see an opportunity to leverage the base you built to make money and it most likely will be by selling the customers who trust you. They will probably do something like partner with large manufacturers or sellers and push their own products while if ignoring what is best for the people looking to create their own best build.	Yeah that makes sense. We've made some decisions that probably wouldn't last long - not running ads, not selling user data. So really there seems to be two options: either we run this out until it dies on its own and we get to keep our ideals/positions, or we run out of energy and sell. I don't want to sell. I don't plan to sell. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't days where I feel so tired and just want a break for a bit. It's trying to find the balance of doing a job I love maintaining principles I value and also not destroying myself physically/emotionally/etc in the process.
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Oh cool! If you don’t mind me asking, what area of East Texas? Did you grow up out here? I’m from out in Van, approx 30 min from Tyler. My close friends and I love PCPartPicker. I just used it to build my upgraded rig a couple of weeks ago.	Nice! I grew up in Tyler (edit: but my mom currently lives 30 minutes east of Center, TX - basically on Toledo Bend reservoir and the TX/LA border). My electronics teacher in high school (Mr. Ray) was from Van. He was formative for me in pursuing electronics seriously by introducing me to VICA and electronics competitions.
Benchmark integration timeline when 🍿	Probably mid-2021. We're almost done with a building renovation where they bumped our building service from a 400A service to a 1200A service. Added AC capacity. That 800A is going toward bench... it's going to be fun. This is what I'm talking about https://imgur.com/a/rffuVin. Can't wait to get this all up and running.
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I have a massive transformer that’s the size of a fridge I can’t seem to sell if you guys want it. It was meant for a Bitcoin farm but was never used. Cost $5000 I just want it gone it’s so heavy lol	LOL thanks but we're good. They actually delivered the 1200A from pole mounted transformers. MEP guys were surprised, but the power company said they could do it. Sure enough they did. Old vs new pre-hookup: https://imgur.com/a/ODQlACV
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Dude, you do AWS, dev, hiring, project direction, and building management? Your operation must be crazy efficient.	Oh no I offloaded all the building management stuff to Jack. He's handled almost all the renovation work, which has been an absolute life saver for me. I just come in and throw wrenches in things by adding last minute requests for extra conduit runs from here to there, replace those windows, change that paint color, etc. Jack handles all communication and followups with the GC, subs, etc.
	The other stuff I do do though. AWS (our infrastructure isn't that big really, a couple dozen EC2 instances, RDS, Redis, CloudSearch, Cloudfront, etc). Daniel handles the bits of Lambda that we use. I kinda enjoy the deployment / devops side of things, and I think it's important to have my fingers on the pulse of that whenever I'm designing new features. Helps me have a better feel for what kind of query impact different code or modeling decisions will have.
	The hiring isn't much - we've averaged about one person a year and that's usually someone in our existing network of relationships. And project direction is pretty small right now since we shut down our cycling site. Back down to just one website makes it a lot simpler. We talk about what we want to do as a group a lot, so (I think) everyone has a pretty decent picture of where we're headed despite timelines not being nailed down strict.
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What kind of benchmarks would you be running? Have you considered pulling data from places like passmark?	Anything we can run deterministically and automated and that has license terms that allow unfettered publication of result data. We won't be pulling data from anywhere, passmark included. All the data will be from runs we do in-house.
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May I ask why the focus on internal metrics vs just pulling them?	Mainly because we can control all the variables and make them consistent across all our result pairs. We have some absolutely phenomenal performance analysis engineering expertise in house.
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Unfettered publication of result data. Wow. Nice. As someone who likes playing with freely available datasets, I really appreciate this. Hard to learn data science without freely available data sets that regular people can have some level of subject matter expertise over to start to learn how to put data-driven stories together.	Sorry, what I meant was that the license terms of the benchmark software have to allow us to publish the benchmark results without restriction. There is a popular benchmarks out today that requires the benchmark results be vetted by them first before publication. We'd have to manually send over bench results if we weren't using their bench platform (we're not, we have our own). Then wait for them to approve, and then we could publish. That's not viable when we're testing at the scale we plan to - it'd need to be automated at least but they couldn't offer that. And for benchmarking prerelease hardware under embargo, it'd mean that we would have no ability to publish data right when the embargo lifted. We'd have to wait however long for their manual review.
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How will you be able to benchmark hard-to-get hardware? e.g. RTX 3090, Radeon 6800xt, and Ryzen 5000? Will the manufacturers send them to you? Or do you have to buy them?	I think it's a mixture of both. On new release hardware it's helpful to have bench data when embargoes lift. But I also want to have store-purchased hardware as the main part of our hardware pool, however long it takes to acquire that. We can flag the benchmarks that come from manufacturer review samples - that way people know the source and can factor in review sample binning.
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So once upon a time, I was gonna write a program that would pull benchmark and pricing data to build a list of best value parts, such that no part in the list had a better performing part at a lower price. A sort of definitive do-buy list to make it easier to pick parts. Once benchmarks are done, pcp would have all the infrastructure in place to make that happen in some form on the site, perhaps as a filter for picking parts or as a warning on the part/build pages?	Yep.
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sorry, I'm not sure what you're saying that to, I should have actually posed a proper question: Will you be implementing that?	That's our intent, yeah. It may take us a bit to get there though.
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There is...a lot... of metal shavings in that box. Ah I’m sure it’s fine it’s only 1200A.	Oh at that point it was still all being hooked up. It's cleaner for sure.
	Check this out - relative size difference between old and new...
	https://imgur.com/a/xQD1fEY. (That's one Barry for scale.)
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But how do we know how big Barry is if he's not holding a banana?	Barry is approximately the same height as one marinelli.
A lot of people seem to think that you only host sellers that provide you affiliate kickbacks. Is there any truth to that? Have you ever allowed or disallowed a seller on the basis of affiliate money? How do you decide whether to host a seller or not?	That's not true. We list several retailers without affiliate agreements. Affiliate relationships are often much much easier because they almost always already have price data access. That's the main thing we need.
	Our choice on hosting a retailer largely depends on whether we feel they are good for users or not. If a retailer is being abusive to users or doing highly manipulative stuff, we'll remove them even if they're profitable. We've done that several times in the past. If a retailer also has highly inaccurate pricing, we'll delist for that too.
Yaaatttttt: Not sure if you are allowed to reveal this but what retailers have you delisted in the past? LightningProd12: They delisted MicroCenter in the US because they had too many in-store only deals and no way to tell the difference on PCPP's end. And not everyone can go to one, if you live in the Northwest the closest one can be 800-1000 miles away. Edit: This is mostly false, look at the comments below.	ThoughtA: This isn't true at all. We want to have them on the site. We had some discussions with them, but they stopped responding.
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Oh ok, I remember suggesting it a few years back on the forums and getting told they were delisted. EDIT - Forum post link: https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/309304-request-add-microcenter-to-the-list-of-merchants I falsely remembered there being a reason but was told they were removed from the site.	We did actually list their in-store deals. I put in a decent bit of code for that so that they only showed up if you were within a configurable radius of one of their locations.
	It's a long story, but the gist of it is that we were waiting on some stuff that never came and things went silent. We reach out from periodically but nothing. It stinks - we'd be happy to list them.
	You never know what you reception you'll get from retailers. Some are beating down the door to get on board - that's awesome. Others we have to prove that we're worth their time - that's not unusual. A few will say they want to work together, we get 80% of the way there, and then... silence. Or the key person you were working with takes a job somewhere else. And then some retailers basically say not just no, but h*** no. I'll never forget that one. For some retailers there's a strong aversion to something we do, whether it be price comparison or something else. But just know that if there's a retailer that is reputable and treats customers well, we're more than happy to work with them and get them listed.
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Ohh ok, that sucks. On a side note, is there a story behind the "h*** no" retailer?	They're, eh, no longer in business. Honestly probably dodged a bullet there.
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Maybe this was asked already but still: are there any timeline/plan to add more countries to the country list? I am leaving in Austria and I have to use Germany to see the prices and availability of the parts. Moreover, I see German retailers and prices but not Austrian ones.	We're continually adding new countries and retailers. Adding a country is just a few lines of code on our end - we do that when we have a retailer to add in a country we don't currently support. So really it's a matter of finding and adding retailers. If you have any you'd like to see, send us a note on our contact page and we'll take a look at it. Jenny reaches out to the retailers to see if we can get them on board. It usually takes a while to get in contact and get good data access.
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I already raised this issue to him several years ago - because it was blatantly in the open for users in Germany. You would get amazon affiliate links as "lowest" price, even though there are several other stores that are cheaper... He got angry quickly and gave me the same bs excuse. The top sellers with the top user ratings were never listed as cheapest even though they were.	We list the buy box winner for Amazon. If you're saying we prune results for various marketplace sellers, well, you're wrong.
How's the team handling COVID? Is everyone working from home? What kind of challenges are arising?	I sent everyone home in March. We haven't met as a group since. It's been ok - we just meet on video conferencing when we need to. Jack and Barry are up at the office overseeing the renovation which should be done mid-January. I'll probably be up there from January to April to do the benchmark network cabling and office rewiring (from cat5 to 6a+fiber) because I kinda enjoy cable crimping and punch downs. :)
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The transition from cat5 to cat6 is worth?	Yeah. We're not running 5e, just 5. It's what was in there from when we bought it. So that's not where I'd like it to be for good 1Gb.
Any chance we'll ever see some more filtering options for SSDs? It would be really handy to have the following * Filter by the primary storage type SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC/Optane/etc * Filter by whether the drive has a DRAM cache or supports Host Memory Buffer (HMB)	I'd love to, but I think it'd cause a fissure I'm not sure how to fix. Right now we have SSDs and platter drives in the same category, but the specific filtering for each is different. To apply the really detailed SSD filters, I think they need to be their own category. Same with the HDD types. I don't know if splitting them up is the right path though, so I've been continually punting the issue down the road until we're forced to decide one way or the other.
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Tsk tsk, don’t accumulate technical debt there	Oh, no, it's quite the opposite really. Parametric part additions record the type and filter selections. Those added to a part list stay there forever - we never throw them away. So any filters we add never get removed even if we don't show them. Because of that, I try to be very deliberate in what we add and what we don't. Once I add a new part category or filter type, if I decide later it was a bad idea then it means I get to write lots of migration code. That's no fun.
Super excited for the an app version. Are you guys considering price tracking so that users can set alerts for when hardware drops to a desired price?	Yeah. We have that on the site already with email alerts. But the PWA provides them via browser push notifications (on platforms that support that). I have that all working in a beta test mode (for staff only) right now and it's feeling pretty solid.
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As a front-end engineer, what's your stack look like for the PWA?	Basically built on top of our existing responsive site (Python, Django). I didn't want to spend a lot of time migrating to another framework, so instead spent the time kind of standardizing our own API-ish setup and then handling the caching or offline modes for that as needed. We went responsive with PWA to avoid maintaining three separate codebases (web, iOS, Android), but it's looking like we may go native in the end anyway. This buys us some time at least.
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So not iOS?	Right. :(. I understand there are some workarounds to get push notifications through wallets and whatnot, but that feels pretty hackish to me. We might end up going native on iOS at some point to get good notification support there.
How hard is it keeping up with and adding new item releases (not only the new 3000 series graphics cards from nvidia but also possibly unknown stuff like network cards, etc)? Are there any items you decide not to add or do you try to list everything you can?	New GPUs are pretty easy. CPUs are ok, sometimes a pain depending on the chipset/bios situations. Motherboards are terrible, especially the last few years. Cataloging all the M.2 ports, their constraints (PCIe in this slot disables that SATA, etc) is a major pain.
	There's some stuff, particularly on cases, where there are compatibility constraints that are not economically viable to model. We know what the constraints are, but to model them all across 30k+ parts would make data entry so slow that we'd never finish.
	We try to hit the main product categories, but we'd love to expand that. It's really an issue of how time consuming and costly it is to do the data entry for it versus how often it's used.
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So Wikipedia seems to be crowd sourced, and works pretty well. Maybe some of the more laborious data entry parts could have a crowd source entry option, but be flagged as such when people bring up anything containing those results (a disclaimer)..	It's just not reliable enough. It has to be super accurate, and it's not something I'd ever feel comfortable outsourcing.
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Have you tried asking the manufacturers to get involved? You might just be big enough.	When new releases are coming out we sometimes get data ahead of time. Cases are pretty common. Motherboards are a lot harder, because of embargoes and even BIOSes and manuals not finished days before release. Some of the constraints we see are pretty one-off situations that make it hard to provide some sort of standardized input form for though.
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what if you let companies input their own data for their products.	I don't trust that to be accurate enough. We routinely find bad spec data even on manufacturer sites.
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I imagine that PCPP is large enough now to direct traffic to or away from various retailers in volumes they will care about. Like how Google went from small to large. Given that, probably PCPP should begin leaning on retailers to provide product data in an ingestable format, making data entry moot.	We work with retailers to provide the right data in feeds for sure. But the hard part is that not all retailers have the technical expertise on hand to do it (or for smaller retailers, the margin and profitability to pay for that expertise). The back-and-forth to get updated feed frequency, proper part numbers, stock status, etc - it's non-stop. Brent and Jenny bear the brunt of that.
I know you've been vocal about not opening up a merch store for personal profit, but would you ever consider a merch store where all proceeds go towards your well building charity?	We did this once. My accountant was like, "please don't."
	Basically if we buy a thousand shirts and give them away it's super easy - they just get marked as a marketing expense and we give them out however we see fit. But as soon as any of them are sold, you have to track inventory, cost basis, etc. It's a lot more tedious and last time it was maybe a couple shirts a week - enough to invoke packaging and transport overhead but not enough to be efficient. So we instead just give them away at various bapc milestones and donate from our affiliate income instead.
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Kinda funny reading this while wearing the hoodie! It’s easily the comfiest hoodie in my closet.	Oh, major props to Phil for that. He picked it out. I love mine too. We printed some smaller ones for kid sizes and my oldest son tries to sleep in his.
transam617: Philip, Thank you for 10 years of your indispensable help. Over that time, there were probably millions of visitors to your website who have had their PC building experience improved or made possible through the use of your wonderful tool. But specifically: Since 2014, our little corner of reddit (now 10K subs) cabalofthebuildsmiths, has been more effective, and has helped more people as a direct result of your website tool, than from any other tool we have available. We pride ourselves on giving builds to customers where they can reliably buy every part we pick, and be sure they will work as expected. This process takes research and a lot of effort, but the highly accurate, effective communication of pcpartpicker (for all the countries you cover) is the foundation of our process. Thank you for making the messy world of PC parts a little more bearable, thank you for making it all possible, and a big thanks from us, cabalofthebuildsmiths. transam617 kokolordas15 dmz_dragon danyulz bramblexd	Thanks for your kind words, and thanks for all the work you all do to help builders!
What happened to the youtube channel? Loved the build videos and interviews you had while it was still running.	We moved buildings a couple years ago, and decided to pause on them while we renovated the new space for filming and benchmarking. The renovation is finishing up likely mid-January - it took waaaay longer than we originally thought. If we had known it'd be that long we probably would have figured out some interim plan. So once that reno is done, we'll probably start ramping up content again. I'd guess mid-2021 or so.
[deleted]	My first computer was a an AMD K5-133. That was late 1996 I think and I was in college. My friend and I ordered our mobo+CPU off an ad on a magazine page. I bought his old case and an 80MB HDD off of him. Ran Windows 3.1. We played Warcraft 2 across a null modem cable - that was probably the most fun I've ever had with PC gaming. Floating point on that thing was terrible though. Playing a 64kbps MP3 chewed up like 60% of the CPU.
	My roommate introduced me to Quake 2, specifically Action Quake 2. Loved that game. I started running a website on the dorm network on it that got pretty popular. But queries on the db would tank my Q2 framerate so I put in code to disable queries while I was playing.
the below is a reply to the above
tiger direct?	No, it was some small place out of the northeast. I mean, that was pre-internet-shopping days. Wrote a check, hand wrote what we wanted on the order form, mailed it, and waited weeks. No phone calls, no email confirmations, nothing. My kids have no idea what that was like.
Fun fact, I got banned from PCPartPicker for adding a purple dildo from Amazon to my build.	Yeah that'll do it. User code of conduct / ToS and all.
the below is a reply to the above
Boooo. Thats kinda weird, especially for private/personal builds.	Most of the retailers we partner with have as a part of their terms that our site not contain NSFW material. I get some people think it's funny but it can get us shut down, and I'm really not ok with that.
I've used your site so many times and I even met some of the team in Austin outside Dreamhack. Thanks for all you do! Who has the most powerful computer on the staff and what are they running?	I think most powerful computer probably goes to manirelli right now.
Do you have any career opportunities at the company? I have a couple years of marketing experience, but I can’t find a job in these tough times. At least I’ve been learning python so I can get better at data management.	Unfortunately we're not hiring right now. :(
the below is a reply to the above
Mind if I ask where you typically post jobs when you are hiring? Greenhouse.io, LinkedIn, Indeed, all of the above?	Usually it's someone we have an established relationship with. We haven't ever posted a job listing to date.
Are you going to work on an official PCPartPicker API so people don't have to break ToS by scraping?	No. I'd prefer to offer sufficient service that people don't need to scrape.
	Most scrapers use up a lot of resources or don't even do cursory things like follow robots.txt crawl delay specs. It's really frustrating. I'd like to spend my time focusing on user benefitting features than blocking abusive crawlers.
gordonv: A cached CLI/SDK that draws from a CDN (not your web server) would be cool. You'd provide sufficient service, reduce processing cost, and get usage stats. The best way to defeat crawlers is to defeat their purpose. Make scraping look idiotic. Heck, mock scrapers in your HTML with an URL to your API. Add a little wit to that wisdom. Add AWS Cloudfront and now you have 200+ servers in the USA distributing your CLI with authentication to 3 million calls for $20 a month. Some leet stuff. Just noticed a sprinkle of posts calling for an app. If you spec CLI/SDK along with app development, killing 2 birds with 1 budget stone.	We're rolling out a PWA (hopefully) before the end of the year.
the below is a reply to the original question
invisi1407: Perhaps a better question is, why is there a need for scraping? Could that need be satisfied by new/improving features on PCPP? MLG_G0D: Because integrations with PCPartPicker would greatly benefit the PC building community. Constantly navigating to websites can get tiresome, especially on low spec machines. Automation is great. invisi1407: I understand, but exactly which integrations are people looking for? I get it, but I also understand why PCPP isn't interested in having a public, free API. MLG_G0D: I was thinking about integrating PCPP functions into a reddit/discord bot. invisi1407: Not unresonable, but you do understand how it takes away any earnings from advertisements and what have we on their website, yeah? It seems like they are a small company spending an enormous amount of time on the data they are presenting, so I don't think you'll ever see a free public API anyway. Perhaps a paid one, but I don't suppose many would be interested in that anyway. MLG_G0D: Seems reasonable. I'm just a massive fan of companies being open to their userbase, but I guess PCPartPicker hasnt quite grown to the point where thats economically feasible.	There's more to the picture. On pricing data: We're not the source of pricing data as that comes from the retailers. We have various agreements in place where they give us that data to display on our site or to market their products in ways they allow us to. We don't have permission to then hand that data to a third party to do whatever they want to. If we make it available to someone else via an API, we're breaching terms of our agreement, which in turn makes us lose our affiliate deal and price access. Boom, business is dead. Basically if you need that data, go to the source (the retailers) and negotiate with them.
	For product data: We've invested a lot of man years to build our data set, and some of that data helps us maintain a competitive advantage over copycat sites. Making it easier to retrieve that data isn't something I'm keen on. There are other sources of product data available that are more expansive than what we have anyway. I'd suggest pursuing that if you want to build your own hardware related site stuff.
	On API stuff for partlists and markdown: If you just want a discord bot, I'd be happy to chat through what it is you're looking for to see if that's something we could support officially on our end. We have our own discord server bot that uses an internal API to do partlist embeds.
	Last bit - publishing an API adds an additional thing for us to maintain. It's a maintenance and support burden. Even an unofficial API is. It becomes something that I have to test and not break any time I refactor code around it. We're a small company, and that's not really an area I want to allocate resources around if it's not a revenue generating thing.
Thanks a lot to you guys! With your site, I managed to make 3 separate lists, and now my dream of building a PC is coming true. Maybe you could add recommendations based on what the person has on their list, such as a cheaper but better graphics card, etc	I think recommendations are a possibility once we have our in-house benchmark data in place. But that'd be a ways down the road.
Thanks for your work, and since this is an AMA, simple question: Which is the best flavor of ice cream and why?	Amy's Ice Cream here in Austin. Belgian Chocolate. It's just wonderful but I haven't been there in almost a year now.
	manirelliPCPartPicker: I will second Amy's but I'm partial to the Mexican Vanilla flavor.
Wow. What a cool thing to see on Reddit. This is the first AMA I’ve ever replied in/commented on. I’m brand new to PC (3 year macbook user here, and besides a brief stint with a windows Hp laptop on which I played Rollercoaster tycoon and club penguin with “back in the day” I have never had need for the site. Until last month). I’m grateful the site exists, and it’s quite intriguing to me how you manage to create and maintain (emphasis on maintain) such an EXTENSIVE database of parts. I know it’s part of your life, however it astounds me to see these parts that seem so very minuscule, always appear. Have you considered, or maybe there already is and I simply am blind or don’t know about it. Have you considered adding any sort of personal or user based rating system regarding parts? Or a warning system for parts with known issues out of the box?	Our ratings are from users, but we only allow ratings/reviews from completed builds. That way we know that the review is from someone who actually built with it (versus say a 1 star review from someone mad they couldn't buy it).
	We do offer some warnings on known issues, but it's something we may expand in the future.

Whatup Entrepreneur!
4.5 years ago, my best friend and I made this post on nootropics about a gum we had been working on, and to our surprise, we had an incredible amount of feedback and encouragement. Although we had ZERO business experience (I painted murals and worked in music and Ryan worked in data at Hulu), that support from Reddit helped us fund our Indiegogo, and we had to figure out how to business really quickly. Thankfully, our advisors, Entrepreneur, and our more business savvy friends helped us through all the mistakes we made along the way, and here we are now, running a cashflow positive functional gum and mint company with a small but amazing twelve person team.
Since it all started, we've been in Forbes 30 Under 30, TIME, Buzzfeed, Dr. Oz, Fast Company, and a bunch of other places, but more recently we hung out with T-Pain, appeared on Shark Tank, got Joe Rogan as a fan, and found our way on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine next to Guy Fieri. Anyways, ask me anything!
Also I figured I'll use this to link to some resources for everyone as well. I'll be updating it as the day goes on so hopefully it becomes a much more comprehensive Appendix of sorts.
EDIT: Hm I made another post so it can all be in one easy to catch spot but I guess it got removed. I'm going to continue to add to this list below for some new tools instead.

• Internal Tools
  
  • E-commerce
    • Shopify is our e-commerce platform.
    • GSuite is our most used tool. Sheets, Docs, Drive, and Slides are beyond valuable...and free!
    • Speaking of slides - Google Slides templates offers free, beautiful templates
    • Google Data Studios for all your data needs
    • Facebook Messenger chatbot - free on your site and integrates with everything
    • Hotjar for tracking website User Experience
    • Google Optimize for website optimization
    • Instapage for quick and intuitive landing page development
  • Valuable Shopify apps
    • Recharge is our subscription platform
    • Gorgias to manage customer service tickets
    • Enquire Post Purchase Surveys for better marketing attribution
    • Stamped.io for review aggregation (cheap, has SEO, flexible)
    • Smile.io as our loyalty and rewards program tracker
    • Privy for onsite email capturing
  • Marketing
    • Emotive is our SMS marketing platform (mention us if you use them!)
    • Mailchimp was initially our Email Service Provider (ESP) - we use Retention Science now
    • Hubspot for our CRM to manage wholesale outreach
    • Buffer for social media management
    • Email Guesser and MixMax to create automated PR outreach flows through your own gmail
    • MajesticSEO to see who links to your competitors so you can outreach to those websites and ask for links
  • Management
    • Basecamp for project management (mostly due to the pricing)
    • Slack for our internal communication platform
    • Airtable for visual spreadsheet/databasing
    • LastPass for teawmwide password management
    • Calendly to schedule meetings more easily
    • Miro for visual, company-wide organization
    • Quickbooks for accounting
    • GTIN for barcode and product management
  • Other
    • ULine has the cheapest option for bulk, unbranded boxes and packing tape Thanks u/abkap for point this out other alternatives that are significantly better
    • Packlane allows you to do low MOQ custom branded boxes
    • Usertesting.com allows you to get realtime feedback on anything
    • Upwork for hiring freelancers of all sorts
    • 99designs allows you to pick multiple designs pitched to you
    • Fiverr for small one-off jobs (voiceovers, designs, art, etc.)
    • RICE Prioritization to intelligently keep yourself on track
    • RescueTime to help you just track where your time is going
    • Grammarly to fix all your grammar mistakes and sound put-together
• Automation
  
  • Zapier to create automation between web apps
    • Push daily e-commerce analytics to a Slack channel
    • Connecting social platforms via Buffer and A/B testing headlines
  • IFTTT for even more automation
    • Automatically send all inbound inquiries to an Airtable record
    • Send calendar reminders to Slack
  • Slackbot so anyone on our team can message slack and instantly get responses like this
• Other
  
  • Marketing
    • Facebook's entire marketing certification course (for free, by Facebook)
    • Google's entire marketing strategy course (for free, by Google)
  • Useful tools
    • 27 pre-written templates for every tough business email you have to write
    • Use Gmail to Send Email from Custom Domains for Free
    • 222 Zaps to Crush Your Current Process Automation
    • 18 Google Calendar Features to Make You More Productive
  • Crowdfunding
    • This Reddit Kickstarter post that helped us launch (maybe outdated but still a great read)
    • Lessons in launching a Kickstarter
    • How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week
  • Business
    • The Investopedia dictionary for learning your business lingo
    • What to Watch in a VC term sheet
    • How to Value Your Startup
    • The Hustle Newsletter (fun, daily business news updates to your inbox)
• Favorite Business Books (no affiliate links, just sharing)
  
  • High Output Management by Andrew Grove
  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel
  • Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
  • Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
  • Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday
  • Automate the Boring Stuff by Al Sweigart
  • Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
  • The Mom Test (recommended by u/Cognizen)
• Favorite Business Podcasts
  
  • How I Built This with Guy Raz
  • Planet Money
  • The Indicator from Planet Money
  • 99 Percent Invisible (Not a business but absolutely love)
  • Making Sense with Sam Harris (Also not a business but fantastic)
• Other tips
  
  • Build a company that represents you and what you want to build. You'll be doing this 12 hours a day (if not more). If you don't love it, you'll burn out.
  • Get your sleep. Productivity is a combination of making the right decisions alongside hard work. Find that balance and march forth. It also helps with maintaining your perseverance and resiliency...something you'll need a lot of.
  • Find ways of consciously connecting with people in your vertical. You'll realize how supportive we (entrepreneurs) all are of each other!
  • Don't trust people who want equity without any contribution (or low contribution). This goes for incubators and accelerators as well.
  • Your health and your employee's health should always be priority. Without a properly functioning body and mind, nothing will get done...or at least not well.
  • Good | Cheap | Fast - choose two :)
• Other other stuff
  
  • Our website - https://getneuro.com
  • A pic of us!
  • My then-roommate (now COO) doing our daily order processing from the apartment
  • Our friend Sam helping us make boxes on the weekend
  • Ryan and I winning the LA Start Up Competition

Hope this helps everyone. I'll keep updating it as more things come to mind.
Now go work hard, always be learning, love your friends and family, take care of your body, and go make something amazing.

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In my hometown of Sombermorey, everything south of Alchemy Street is zoned as the Industrial District. These days, most of the extant manufacturing facilities are owned by a local tech company called Thorne Tech Enterprises, but they’re heavily automated and only employ a couple of hundred people at most. Local tourism, recreation, financial services, and Avalon College account for most of my city’s modern economy, but the abandoned factories remind us of the days when most people earned their bread by smelting iron or spinning textiles.
One of these derelict factories looms high above the rest, both physically and in our local folklore, and that’s the Fawn & Raubritter Foundry. Thaddeus Fawn was a local industrialist, whereas the mysterious Herr Raubritter was allegedly a Prussian investor. Raubritter was largely absent, though many workers testified that he visited more frequently than should have been possible for someone living abroad in those days.
As a result of this arrangement, the day-to-day operations of the Foundry were almost entirely left to Fawn. This was very unfortunate for the downtrodden workers, since Fawn embodied every hateful stereotype of a 19th-century industrialist. His employees were nothing more than cogs in his machine, meant to yield the greatest output for the least cost. He primarily took in the least skilled and most desperate, and yet somehow cajoled them to create some of the finest metal products of the day.
Men, women and children would work sixteen-hour days, six days a week, often for as little as fifty cents a day. Workplace injuries and deaths were common, with some statistics showing that up to a third of the men who worked there were either killed or permanently maimed on the job. I couldn’t find any statistics for the women or children, but I doubt they fared much better.
Everyone slept on filthy, threadbare cots in cramped dormitories, and were fed a meager allotment of bread and gruel. Any other expenses, damages, or just lost productivity were deducted from their wages with interest, and many workers soon found themselves working just to pay off their ever-increasing debt to Fawn and never saw a penny for themselves.
But of all these abuses and horrors, the worst were undoubtedly the Foundry’s overseers. Their brutal and merciless discipline made sure that everyone under their charge were too terrified to ever dream of retaliating or slacking off.
The strange thing about Fawn’s overseers was that none of them were local men, and no one had any idea where they came from. They were all tall, hulking brutes who wore strange helmets that obscured their features, and they eschewed the light as much as their duties would allow. They were only occasionally seen outside the Foundry, and always on business. When they spoke, it was in a deep, bestial voice that barely sounded human and lacked any sort of regional accent that could be used to identify their origins. Most curious of all, all the Foundry workers attested that the overseers’ eyes seemed to have a dull amber glow that mirrored the incandescent light of the molten metal.
But even though the Foundry was dependent on the ruthlessness of its overseers to function, it was also ironically the cause of its downfall.
The Foundry met its end when one night, over a hundred years ago, there was a riot. Accounts vary, but most say that at least one of the overseers had been caught sexually assaulting a young girl. The man who caught them had been so enraged, and the overseer so compromised, that the worker successfully managed to run a fire poker through his skull, killing him almost immediately. A pair of nearby overseers began beating the man to death, but by then the commotion had attracted the attention of the other workers, and within minutes it was a full-blown uprising.
A fire was started that gutted the interior of the Foundry, and Thaddeus Fawn was burned to death. Officially, Raubritter wasn’t in town at the time, but many of the workers say that they saw him glaring down at them from the administrative offices as they destroyed his Foundry. As for the overseers, they all just vanished as mysteriously as they had arrived.
Thaddeus’s share of the Foundry passed to his son Theodore, but as he was a medical student at the time with no interest in rebuilding or running a factory, he sold his share to our local real estate and financial magnate, Seneca Chamberlin. Chamberlin never re-opened the Foundry though, despite the high demand for its products, and no one ever saw Raubritter again.
Some speculate that Chamberlin bought Raubritter’s share as well, but that only makes his failure to reopen or repurpose the Foundry all the more baffling. Its doors and windows were shuttered, but to this day people still claim to occasionally hear people and machinery inside or glimpse flickering light through the wooden slats.
The current owner of the Fawn & Raubritter Foundry is named Seneca Chamberlin as well, and if you believe the stories about him, he’s the same guy as the first Chamberlin. He has declined to make any convincing public statement about why he’s holding on to an officially defunct factory and sizable plot of land that’s providing him with nothing but property taxes. And as for the sounds and the lights people say they’ve witnessed? Chamberlin insists that’s just the angry ghosts of all those poor exploited workers continuing their Sisyphean labour for all eternity.
Most people are convinced he must be doing something illicit there, but the cops insist that the place is clean. I wasn't willing to take their word for it, though. If there was any chance that the Fawn & Raubritter Foundry was operational and exploiting captive workers like Willy Wonka, then that was enough for me to investigate on my own.
I knew that possibly picking a fight with someone as powerful as Chamberlin was risky though, so I didn’t go in unprepared. I armed myself with a hunting knife and a bat/flashlight combo, and I wore a bullet and slash-resistant vest under my leather jacket.
I was a bit concerned about what I would say if the cops caught me with all that stuff, but as soon as I rode my motorbike into the Industrial District that evening, I felt immediately vindicated in my decision. The profusion of abandoned buildings combined with the low number of active businesses and the complete absence of homes meant it was a hotbed for criminals, addicts, and vagrants. The majority of the streetlamps didn’t even work, and I was terrified that every figure I saw huddling in the shadows would come running out screaming and brandishing a weapon.
Fortunately, no one hassled me that night. I’d like to think that I was successfully projecting enough of a badass biker chick persona to make anyone think twice about messing with me, but it may have just been dumb luck.
I cruised around the Foundry for about half an hour, scoping it out as best I could. It was enclosed by a cheap plywood fence that had numerous breaches in its perimeter, so getting onto the property wasn’t a problem.
It was so much worse in there than being on the road, though. There were no functioning lights at all, and I was going so slowly that if someone did charge me from the shadows, they likely could have caught me before I even had a chance to speed away. Thankfully, the lot appeared to be abandoned, filled with nothing but gravel, overgrown grass, and piles of debris.
There were a few different buildings on the lot, the biggest one of course being the Foundry itself. It was long and narrow, maybe forty or fifty-feet tall with a steep roof and made from dark, colourless bricks. Most of the windows were near the top, and they had all been boarded up from the inside. The front door was the first potential point of entry that I checked out, and it was sealed with a padlock and chains. For the hell of it, I gave the lock a gentle tug to see how sturdy it was.
It unlocked effortlessly, and the chains slipped out from between the door handles almost like slithering snakes, allowing me free entry to the Foundry.
I was awestruck by how lucky I was, but convinced myself that’s all it was; luck. The last person hadn’t locked up properly, and that was it. I very cautiously pulled the door open, listening for any signs of activity from within the Foundry. I waited for over a minute, and heard nothing but silence. I took that as a sign that it was safe to proceed and stepped into a small, dark vestibule of some kind.
As soon as the doors closed behind me, lights flickered on and a security shutter descended from the ceiling, trapping me inside.
“No!” I screamed, flying into a panic and pounding on the metal slats as hard as I could. I even unsheathed my bat and took a few swings at it, but it barely even made a dent. “Oh no. Oh no.”
Behind me, I could hear furnaces being fired up, machinery clanking and turbines whirring.
The Foundry was coming back to life.
“Please, not to be hitting the door, yes?” a crackling voice said in an insincerely kind tone. I frantically looked around the room for the source of the voice, my eyes eventually falling on an antiquated P.A. speaker in the corner. “Are you here about the job application?”
I squinted in confusion at the old squawk box as I pondered what it had just said. I had come to investigate the urban legends surrounding the Foundry, and it seemed that they were true. The Foundry was still operational, and it was hiring.
I quickly mulled over my options, and decided the best way to get the most information was to play along.
“Ah, yes. Yes, I am,” I replied reticently, slowly sheathing my bat. “So sorry about the door. I’m a touch claustrophobic, and I just panicked when it closed like that.”
“Is alright,” the voice said apathetically. There was a sudden whizzing sound, and a rolled-up piece of age-browned paper was deposited into the vestibule by a pneumatic tube. “Please read and fill out the application promptly, then place it back in the tube when you are ready to proceed to the interview.”
"Th…thank you," I mumbled, tentatively plucking the ancient-looking scroll from out of the tube. I gingerly unfurled it, scared it might disintegrate in my hands. In the header, it said ‘The Fawn & Raubritter Foundry – Alchemical Metallurgy & Humour Refinery’ in big, calligraphic letters.
“Alchemy?” I muttered incredulously to myself. “Ow!”
The damn thing had given me a paper cut, leaving a streak of blood along the top. Mystified, I watched as the parchment soaked the blood up like a sponge in a matter of seconds. I swear, the paper seemed to get a little bit younger from that taste of blood, and the black font took on a noticeably red tinge. There was still blood on my finger, so I tried wiping it on the application to see if it happened again. It didn’t, so I shook it off as seeing things from a combination of the creepy surroundings and dim lighting.
I tried not to consider the possibility that the paper was just full.
Not wanting to keep whoever was on the other end of the P.A. system waiting, I sat down at an old roll top desk and grabbed what I initially mistook as a fountain pen. When I tried to write with it though, it was clear that it wasn’t depositing ink but extracting a dark red substance from the paper itself, a substance that I could only assume was my blood. If I tried to make a mark with it on anything else, nothing happened. There weren’t any other writing implements at hand though, so I pressed on.
The first thing the application asked for was my ‘True Name’, and when I tried to write down a random alias, the blood was reabsorbed into the paper in seconds. I finally decided ‘fuck it’ and wrote down ‘Ella’. That time, the blood remained as indelible as if I had carved it into stone.
That was pretty freaky, and it was enough to put me off writing in my full name. Some of the other questions weren’t too weird; age, sex, and physical abilities, for example, but it also asked about my relationship status, fertility, and even if I was a virgin. It asked for my ‘Blood Status’, which to me sounded like something from Harry Potter, but I just assumed it was a weird way of saying blood type and wrote ‘B-’. Then it got really weird, asking about various occult affiliations and inborn or acquired preternatural abilities, and I just put a big ‘X’ beside all of them.
Just as unsettling was what it didn’t ask for; my address, phone, e-mail, whether I had a criminal record or was legally able to work in the country. That’s all stuff I had thought would’ve been standard. It also didn’t ask what sort of position I was looking for or what hours I would be able to work.
After that was an incomprehensible wall of text, filled with esoteric words I didn’t recognize. I got the vague impression it was describing the company and swearing me to secrecy in order to be granted the privilege of an interview.
Since the only way out was forward, I checked yes.
I rolled the scroll back up and stuck it back in the pneumatic tube. Without pressing anything, it was immediately whisked out of my sight.
“Yes, thank you most kindly, young lady,” the voice said again. “Please make your way across the factory floor towards the lift at the far end, and we will conduct the interview in my office.”
The vestibule doors slowly and noisily sputtered open as though moved by rusty gears, revealing the cavernous industrial powerhouse that was the Foundry. I gazed upon it, awestruck and dumfounded, before finally mumbling “It’s… it’s bigger on the inside.”
I didn’t know how it was possible, but the ceiling was far higher than fifty feet, and if I had to guess I’d say the inside was at least a couple hundred meters long. Tarnished crucibles swung through the air on heavy and rust-covered chains, deftly weaving between blast furnaces and assembly lines, pouring molten metal into moulds.
The furnaces and the assembly lines were both attended to by workers who, even though they looked like they were in a state of near-total starvation, performed their duties with mechanical efficiency and without any hint of exhaustion. Coal was shovelled, castings quenched and blasted, and supplies moved from point to point with no sign of weariness, inexperience, or disgruntlement.
Some of them were naked, but most still had at least some remnant of tattered rags on them. It was like they had been working in the same set of clothes they had started with, and they had never been repaired or replaced for years and years. If they had any hair, it was only thin and patchy, and as devoid of pigment as their pallid skin and milky eyes. Many of them had bronze braces riveted into their limbs, torso, or neck, and I could only assume that those braces were all that were still holding them together.
I saw that anyone with a sedentary job either didn’t have any legs, or if they did, they were mangled and atrophied to the point of uselessness. Workers without arms were yoked to carts that they pulled like mules. There were even a few quadruple amputees that were harnessed to the backs of able-bodied but blinded men, and appeared to be issuing them instructions.
Desperate to look at anything other than those horribly abused bodies, I looked up towards the windows. From the outside, the windows had been boarded up. Looking out though, the windows were unbarred and the sky was perfectly visibly. The sky was swirling with sickly yellow clouds, that pelted the windows with brown, likely acidic, rain. Wherever the inside of the Foundry was, it wasn’t in Sombermorey.
Finally, I looked towards the very far end of the factory floor, and at the very top was a large window to an administrative office, placed so that those behind it could survey the entirety of production from a single location. I could make out a silhouette of a man standing in that window, and despite how very far away he was, I clearly saw him gesture for me to come to him.
With a feeling of dread swelling in my stomach, I swallowed nervously and made my way to his office.
None of the workers gave any sign that they noticed me. They didn’t give any sign that they noticed each other except when their tasks required it. I was vigilant for them, since I doubted they would stop for me if I got in their way.
Just as the voice on the P.A. had said, I found a lift at the far end of the factory floor, right under the office. As soon as I stepped upon it, it began to rise, and within seconds I found myself standing in an ostentatiously old-fashioned office. Stained-glass lamps appeared to be the only electrical appliances in the room. Next to a roaring fire-place, sitting in a claw-footed, high-backed chair was a man in a cravat, top-hat, and three-piece suit.
He was as hairless and as pale as his workers, and though he didn’t look to be starving there was still a sharp leanness to his features that suggested a primal, predatory hunger. Despite the dim lighting of the room he was wearing opaque, hexagonal spectacles that prevented us from making direct eye contact.
He rolled up a piece of paper he had been reading, presumably my application, and grinned a wide grin at me. All of his teeth were baby teeth, but he had enough of them to fill an adult-sized mouth – fifty at the least.
“You are Ella, yes?” he asked in an unplaceable though vaguely European accent. It almost sounded fake, but I think it was actually just one that was so old nobody speaks like that anymore.
I nodded meekly, unable to bring myself to speak.
“You walked the factory floor, yes?” he asked, his grin growing even wider. Again, I just nodded. “Is good. Is how I weed out non-serious applicants. Please, sit. Not to worry about social distancing, no. I am… exempt, yes?”
He picked up a hand mirror and exhaled upon it, holding it up so that I could see no breath had condensed on it.
My right leg was twitching with the urge to bolt, and I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming, but I did as he said. Whatever this thing was, I couldn’t fight or run from it. All I could do was play along.
“Allow me to be introducing myself, yes? I am Herr Drogo Raubritter, and I am the co-owner of this marvelous Alchemical Foundry and Refinery,” he boasted proudly. As he spoke, he poured some heavier-than-air black vapour from a crystal decanter into a gilded tumbler, as though it were a fine liqueur. “Tell me, how did you come to hear about my operation?”
“Ah… through friends,” I mumbled.
“Might I be having their names, please? We have a very generous referral program here,” he said with a sinister smirk.
“I… I think they’d rather remain anonymous, for the time being,” I replied, nervously clearing my throat. Raubritter gave a slow, begrudging nod.
“And do you know what it is we do here, Miss Ella?” he asked.
“Well, I understand the metallurgy and refinery parts, but I’m a little unclear about what you mean by ‘alchemy’,” I replied, wondering if he might be at all inclined to tell me what the hell was going on in this place.
“Alchemy, yes! Alchemy is the heart of this business, Miss Ella,” he said, his voice full of pride and enthusiasm at the very mention of the word. “It is the first science, the purest science, the greatest science! It is through alchemy that we distill substances down to their foremost essence, eliminating any undesirable contaminants. Here we distill and purify not only the metal in our crucibles but the very blood in our veins!”
“Your… blood?” I asked timidly, my voice barely a whisper.
“Yes! It is… unorthodox, I admit, but I’m sure you’ll agree that the results speak for themselves,” he bragged. “My blood, for example, has been distilled to only that which is essential to my work as an industrialist and scientist, purified not only of physical ailments but also less tangible defects that may distract from my efficiency.
“The same is true of the workers you saw. The working class exists to work, and any desires they may have to do otherwise is contrary to productivity, yes? An unproductive worker is not a happy worker, and unhappy workers are… liabilities. So, after a certain incident where the unhappiness of my workforce came to a boil, thanks mainly to the incompetence of my deservedly late partner, I decided a new business model was needed.
“I needed happy, productive workers, and my workers needed productivity to be happy. So, I realized I could no longer hoard the benefits of my research to myself, and instead implemented it as my first and only employee benefit.
“Now, my workers have no desire but to work. They eat, sleep, even breed only when it serves the higher purpose of work. They have nothing to distract them from their productivity, and thus are utterly fulfilled and content. Their bodies are also physically augmented as necessary to withstand such an unnaturally relentless workload, as I’m sure you noticed.”
“You mean, those people down there, the way they were, you did that to them as a job perk?” I asked, gazing upon him with a new found revulsion.
“I did, and it’s proven to be the smartest investment I ever made,” he nodded. “It is through the distilling and concentration of the blood’s desired qualities and the removal of nearly all its imperfections that I have created a workforce of such unparalleled efficiency that, were my methods not trade secrets, they would revolutionize the world. Of course, the world is no concern of mine outside of my own business dealings.”
He stopped talking, and I just starred in shocked silence. If I understood everything he just told me, he was claiming to have achieved transhumanity through medieval means, and used those same methods to permanently enslave his workforce.
“You’re… you’re going to alter my blood so that I’m one of those… things, down there?” I whispered, unable to stop tears from rolling down my cheeks. He quizzically cocked his head at me.
“Only if you agree, my dear,” he assured me.
“Why would I, would anyone, agree to that?” I asked, utterly baffled.
“Why work for me when you can work for someone else, you mean?” he asked. That wasn’t exactly what I meant, obviously, but I didn’t object since it seemed the closest his warped mind could come to understanding. “As working class, you must work or starve, yes? I make no pretensions otherwise. But, whereas other employers either care nothing for your happiness or try to make you happy with extrinsic methods, I will intrinsically change you so that you will always be happy as my employee. You are not capable of true happiness because you have so many conflicting desires inside of you, and satisfying some means denying others. I can purge you of all conflicting desires, leaving you with only one; the desire to work.
“I assure you, that’s a desire that will never go unfilled so long as you work for me. The happiness of my workforce has been the key to my success for the past century. I can transmute even the most desperate and common of plebeians into assets I can use, assets that produce the finest works of smithery for nothing more than gruel in their stomachs and transmogrified blood in their veins.
“And you, Ella, your payment will be something that you likely never would have found anywhere else; fulfillment, contentment, happiness. At least, but the definitions you will accept after your first ‘orientation’. The job security is wonderful as well. I will ensure you’ll last as long as you’re profitable to maintain. For so little maintenance, that could very well be forever if you’re lucky, yes? You could live forever, Ella, live forever in bliss, so long as you’re willing to live down there.”
He paused again, awaiting my response.
“But… you won’t take me if I’m not willing? I can refuse? I can leave?” I asked softly, unsure if he was toying with me.
"Yes, you may leave," he nodded, letting out a small sigh of resignation. “The process is far less cost-effective if you resist it, and I have no shortage of willing applicants. Times are quite desperate out there, it seems. Your blood didn't smell quite desperate enough, but that could change, yes? I'll keep your application on file, and you can come back at any time. Maybe later, you'll be starving, or you'll be sick and dying, or you’ll just be depressed. And then, maybe working for me won't seem so bad, yes?"
He snapped his fingers, and from the shadows emerged a large man dressed in what looked like a 19th-century police uniform and some sort of three-horned hoplite helmet. Underneath the brazen mask of the helmet, I could only discern two faintly glowing amber eyes, and I knew at once that he could only be one of the old overseers. Raubritter’s alchemically enhanced workforce likely didn’t require as much oversight as it used to, but apparently the overseers weren’t completely obsolete either.
“Kindly be escorting Miss Ella back outside, yes?” he ordered. The overseer nodded, but he apparently didn’t hear the word ‘kindly’ as he pulled me up roughly by the arm and started dragging me towards the lift.
“Wait! One more question,” I pleaded. “Where is this place?”
I pointed at the window, and at the greenish-yellow clouds in the sky, hoping Raubritter understood what I was asking.
He smiled, and finally picked up the tumbler of heavy black vapour he had poured for himself.
“Where dreams come true; my dreams, at least,” he taunted, simultaneously drinking and inhaling the contents of his glass. “Off you go now. Auf wiedersehen.”
The overseer grabbed me by the scruff of my jacket like a kitten and hauled me downstairs, across the factory floor, and tossed me back outside like I was a sack of garbage. Scrambling back to my feat, I leapt onto my motorcycle and sped all the way back home, crying the entire time.
At least now I knew where Alchemy Street had gotten its name.
I had gone to the Foundry because I thought something illegal, maybe even monstrous, was going on there, but I never dreamed something so impossible and otherworldly was hiding behind those brick walls. I never dreamed that there’d be so many people trapped inside, maybe even beyond saving. For all I know, Raubritter’s alchemy can never be undone.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to revisit the Foundry during daylight hours, and there wasn’t the slightest sign of anything amiss. This time, the doors didn’t unlock for me, and there was no sign or sounds of industry coming from within. Wherever the inside of the Foundry is, it’s not inside the Foundry, at least not most of the time.
If there’s nothing I can do to help those people, then all I can do is warn others. That’s why I’m posting this now. If you’re ever in Harrowick County, and you see that the Fawn & Raubritter Foundry is hiring; please, for your own sake, don’t inquire within.