How to make money in the aquarium hobby?

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Lots of good advice and so on given, I have not read through everything but will give my thoughts as someone who mostly kept fish in his highschool years. Now at Uni I have scaled down significantly.

Making money outright from fish is difficult. You either have to breed something that is high in demand and high in value, which usually means difficult breeders or a lot of investment. Or you have to breed lots of cheap animals to break even. It's an economy of scale. I had small catfish worth $8 each but I did not have many and after some mistakes never got fry far in development before I had to sell them for uni.

Also, you have to spend money to make money. 4 shrimp are going to take forever to lift off, 40 shrimp and you'll be overrun in no time. I found having lots of extra plants is always handy for trading and so on. To create any setup worth putting the effort into to make money your capital investment will be fairly significant and will take a lot of time to manage. If it were easy anyone would do it. I make significantly more now working part time at Uni than I ever would have working with fish.

Shrimp are fairly easy and are always in demand so I would definitely try stick with that. Sponge filters are preferable as they don't suck in shrimp and give lots of grazing area. Good luck ;)
 
The advantage of the aquarium fish breeding business is that it is not difficult to organize it does not require significant investments. If desired, such activities can be carried out at home.
 
The advantage of the aquarium fish breeding business is that it is not difficult to organize it does not require significant investments. If desired, such activities can be carried out at home.
Id have to disagree, if you are looking at it as a business, it actually is not that easy to organize and does require significant investment. A "real" fish business, being able to make enough money solely from the fish breedin to keep a business afloat . If you are trying to run abreeding business, you'll have to pay rent/mortgage/prop tax on brick and mortar, run a website, marketing, the whole 9 yards. That's very different from having a couple of 55 gallons with some breeding fish and selling a few to some LFS's or people from facebook. I've done the latter for years but don't consider myself to have a business of it.
Something like "the wet spot" for example, I'm sure takes very significant $$ and expertise to set up and run.
Your statement would be true of the aquarium fish breeding hobby, but a business would be more involved than most of us carry out ourselves. The distinction would be that the setup and operation are supported by the actions of the business (at least in my mind).
 
I have been breeding and selling fish to pay for my hobby since about 2006. Back then I took a huge leap of faith, busted into an IRA and purchased a proven breeding group of 13 zebra plecos which came with five fry as well. I paid $3,500 for them. I was quite worried. Could I keep the adults alive? Would I be able to have them spawn for me? If they did, could I manage to raise the fry? I got lucky as heck as I had my first spawn in 2 weeks and the second dad went two weeks later.

I did not sell a single offspring until Feb of 2007 as I have a rule that the offspring must be at least 1.5 inches TL and at least six months old before I will sell them.

The first thing I wanted was to get that $3,500 investment back. After that is would all be gravy. And they kept spawning. They next paid me back for every penny I had spent in the hobby to that point. They paid for all my hobby costs after that. Thne they allowed me to get more B&W Hypancistrus with which to work.

Today I have two groups of zebras, two groups of L236 (the RB line cost me $175/fish as juvies). 173b which I no longer have and which cost $175 each. two groups of L173, one wild caught group of proven breeders which cost me $1,000/fish. The final group I bought were super white 236 and theys cost me about $9,500 for 13 fish which included my breeding group of L450 used as partial payment.

But I am not 16 nor even young. I am about to turn 74. It took me a lifetime to be able to spend this sort of money on fish.

I have never sold my fish to stores. Initially I was having LF bristlenose spawning. I did trade some at a high end LFS for other fish the store sold. But this was before the zebras. I sold my fish on sites like this one and by word of mouth. Social media was in it's infancy 15+ years ago. I also was a vendor at a few weekend events over the years which was more for PR than actual sales. I also allowed local pick-up if folks were able.

In 2020 I discovered one could make a good profit importing farmed plecos from Indonesia. But this made it all too much like a business. All of the fish I breed and sell are fish I wanted first of all for my tanks. it is important to work with fish that one likes and wants to keep because this means one will have to know a lot about such fish. It is really easy to cross the line between breeding fish as part of the hobby and doing so as a business.

The reason I moved from BN to zebras was simple. The BN would give me 100s of offspring that sold for well under 10$/fish. A zebra spawn is huge at 15 eggs. One zebra at 1.5 inches sold for $150 back then and I always had a waiting list. More money coming in for less work. Bear in mind that the biggest work is not so much in raising the fish but in catching bagging and shipping them. You pretty much have to guarantee live arrival/ So that risk is the sellers. If one buys fish to resell there is the risk of loss. Most sellers of fish for import do not refund for DOAs. They will give you credit on your next big order is about it. Fish stores typically mark up 200% to 300% to cover these risks.

When I used to vend I had to bring less expensive fish to the event because most folks do not shell out $100s for fish at such events. I would buy fish to resell. But the fish I got were ones I was willing to keep in my tanks if they did not all sell. Sometime I wanted such fish and would get extras for my tanks.

Consider this when you are thinking about home breeding for profit. My breeding zebras lived in a 30 breeder. over the first 4 years i too about 400 offspring out of that tank, They went on hiatus for several months twice in those years. But I grossed more money for a box of 5 zebras that I did from 150 BN. And the zebras took much less work. In the end I sold my last 70 BN for about $125 at CatCon in 2016. They went to an LFS,

I too 16 years to get my college degree in the 1960s/1970s. I was a psych major. I never worked in the field. But as part of my major I had to do reaserach. part of this involved doing the statistical analysis of the results. So I learned about standard deviation, bell curves correlation coefficients etc. Little did I know that in the 1980s I would end up in the investment field where we did major statistical analyses of portfolio holding and manager performance.

My advice to most foks is to find something that you love to do, Work at it and keep building your knowledge and expertise over time. Success is usually a mix of nook learning and then practical learning from there. If you want to be a success at breeding fish, you will need to knwo a bit about water chemistry, nutrition and general business practices. It is a lot easier to learn these things in school rather than by trial an error in the real world. Nobody rewards failure with a promotion and a raise.
 
Back in the mid 90s a guy i knew thought it would be an easy way to make money. He built a huge insulated and very expensive building in his back yard and set it up with tanks, filters, lighting and heating. The plan was to breed discus, angels and some more common fish such as fancy guppies and kribensis. He was going to use the profits to open an aquarium shop eventually.
It cost him so much to set up that it would take him years just to get his initial investment back, once the fish eventually started breeding he had all sorts of people coming to his house to buy them at all hours of the day and night then one of them robbed him of a lot of equipment one night. His wife was sick of being broke and dealing with all the drama and weirdo customers and she left, he then had the idea of selling of all of his stock and turning the building into a hydroponic marijuana grow house. This was very profitable until one of his customers got busted and informed on him. He got his door kicked down by the police one night and that was the last anyone saw or heard of him.

This is a very long winded way of saying its not as easy as you think and theres lots of unforseen things that can go wrong so maybe its best just to have breeding as a hobby to cover aquarium costs and some pocket money instead of trying to turn it into a full time job.
 
I started making money in the fish hobby when I was 15. I got a job at a local fish store at minimum wage and worked there after school and on weekends. It taught me a lot about the business side of the hobby. I was happy because I earned money and could get fish and supplies at an employee discount. The store owner was happy because I spent all my wages at his store, so he got my labour at a very reduced rate. So that is what I recommend you do if you are young (high school age). If you are older and have some disposable money (meaning you can pay your bills if you lose the money and are not taking on excessive debt), then I would consider breeding some "bread and butter fish" like angelfish or some other cichlids. This requires some time and a bit of investment. Check with your LFS's if you are not sure of your local market demand before you choose which fish to breed. Finally, if you want to make real money, become an expert on certain species of fish that are expensive and in demand. Organize group buys and do your own imports. Set up a website and use social media to develop a presence. Don't forget Youtube and Instagram. I speak from a lot of experience. My website is www.dragonfish.ca.
 
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I once tried to sell some silver dollars (that I didn't want)to the LFS, they didn't want them.
I gave them for free anyway

Breeding and selling online more effective
 
Of course, you can make money. You just have to occupy the right niche. For example, in my city, there are no more people who would buy, breed and resell fish. And for me, this niche was suitable, and there were no competitors.
 
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