I think the biggest thing is not to try to become a huge breeder overnight. That's a surefire way to burn yourself out. In other words, don't go from the 3 you have now and put a second mortgage on your house to buy 50 more snakes without first trying it on a small scale.
My advice would be to use what you've got and see how it goes. Pins are a dominant morph so anything you breed a pin to would produce about 50% pins. Let's say you have an average size clutch and all goes right and you get a couple of pins out of your normal/pin pairing. Right there you're looking at a sale price of between $600 and $1000 for the two of them depending on the sexes, patterns, and everything else that goes into making each snake an individual (like if it has an exceptionally clean appareance or something), plus whatever you get for your normals that would be produced from the same pairing.
Since your pin is a male, you could even invest in another normal female to essentially double your number of pins produced at very little additional cost to what you already have.
Since you don't have that many snakes, you should be able to pull a profit from that type of breeding. It's when you invest in big high-end expensive stuff that your overhead becomes pretty large. It's no guarantee, but you might see some turnaround after only a year (assuming your snakes are already at breeding age) rather than waiting the 3-4 years somebody else mentioned. If you do turn a profit, you can use that to invest in other morphs, cages, racks, and everything else you might need to scale your breeding projects up in the future.
With balls, you're in a good position to "try it out" more than you would be with some of the larger pythons or some colubrids because of the number of eggs they lay. You can have a small-time breeding project like the one I mentioned above and not have to invest a lot into racks and all of that. Even if you get that second female, since they're first time breeders, you'll probably end up with fewer than a dozen eggs total (and that's not taking into account any that are slugs or that don't survive). With that, you can pretty easily use individual tubs or something like that to house them in without having to spend money on a rack.
Reply With Quote