Side Business
Custom PC Builds
Buying parts, building PCs with a friend most weekends for a year, and selling them with a manual in the box.
Overview
A friend and I started buying PC parts and building them together, mostly on weekends. It started as something to do. It turned into a small business: spec the build to what a buyer wanted and could spend, assemble it, test it, load Windows, write up a short manual, and hand it over.
We kept it going for about a year. Not literally every weekend, but close to one build a month, sometimes more.
Two finished builds in the same white case, spec’d differently for two different buyers.
How it worked
Spec to the budget. Every build started with what the buyer actually wanted out of it and what they were willing to spend. That decided the GPU first, then everything else got balanced around it.
Build and cable manage. We assembled every machine ourselves and took the cable routing seriously. Custom sleeved cables, everything tucked behind the tray, nothing hanging in front of a fan. It matters for airflow, and it is the first thing a buyer notices when they look through the glass.
Test before it leaves. Nothing went out without being run first. We loaded Windows, put the machine under load, and made sure it was stable and cool before we called it done.
Hand it over with a manual. Most buyers had never owned a desktop they could open. We wrote a short guide for each one covering the basics: what is inside it, how to keep it clean, and what to do if something stops working.
Trying different setups
Part of the fun was not building the same machine twice. We swapped air coolers for all in one liquid coolers, tried different case layouts and airflow paths, and mixed component brands to see what actually held up and what just looked good in photos. Each build taught us something the last one did not.
The business side
The part that made it a business rather than a hobby was watching the margin. We got better at timing parts purchases, catching sales, and knowing which components were worth paying up for and which ones a buyer would never notice. Every build we tried to do it a little cheaper without making it a worse machine.
It is the most direct version of a lesson that shows up everywhere in engineering: the design is only half of it. What you pay for the parts and how long it takes you to put them together decides whether the thing is actually worth building.