Suggestions for breeding for a beginner?

Love all suggestions and feedback you’ve got so far. Kribs are reasonably easy, but fry take _forever_ to grow out. Bristlenose Plecos are easy, and they sell well to LFS. Guppies are easy to move and excellent beginner fish. Angelfish can be fun… but if you’re successful, you’ll need tons and tons of tank space. Rams and Apistos always sell well, but they’re very tricky to successfully spawn. Most stores will buy Yellow Labs if they’re a pure strain. As for selling at club auction, our experience has been pretty positive. Grow plants as well, and you’ll be in business!

I guess, to clarify, find something you genuinely love and can provide for, then give it what it needs. If you give fish what they need to be happy, cichlids in particular, they usually will .

To be clear, I'm not asking the club what they want to but. Rather, I'm asking for suggestions on what I should attempt.

I breed a variety of really cool, hard to find, fish. Know what? No one buys them unless they can get them ultra cheap at an auction. First in the club,, country, or world - people b6 and large won't pay anywhere near even wholesale value for hobbyist bred fish. This devalues the fish at local shops (why would I pay $20 each for wild caught cories when Fred down the road sells them for $5 a piece?) and makes it harder for those shops to survive.

It's a good thing I breed fishfor my own enjoyment and knew going in that I'd never make any money off it. I have one or two local shops that I sell to at below typical wholesale for store credit. Once you breed something, it seems to lose value to hobbyists.

Find something you enjoy that a local shop won't mind taking off your hands on occasion and see what happens. I started by donating excess to local shops and now they'll give me a little credit for things that sell well. Hobbyists will pay more for something shipping in a group buy with a web-sales giant who cut off wholesale to small shops and monopolized the market than they will for the locally bred grow outs they might have to drive an hour to get to.

Who cares what the club says they might buy? Odds are they still won't buy it from you. Just work with things that bring you joy and you'll never go wrong.

Got it - thanks. I'm not looking to cull a bunch and I don't have anything really to feed them to right now so that probably won't work. Like i said, not trying to make money - just want to try something new in the hobby.

I'm not exactly certain why rainbow cichlids are not more popular, because they are beautiful fish and very adaptable. I do know that once they start breeding you will have lots of babies and find difficulty selling them.

I assume the difficulty with rainbow is them being common? Kribs is an idea and they are pretty fish. I'm not married to cichlids and I was actually thinking bushy nosed plecos or another catfish could be fun and easy to get rid of. And easy is relative, I'm willing to put time/effort in.

There are quite a few cichlids that will breed for a beginner. I was going to suggest Pelvicachromis, but Patchin beat me to it. It can be tricky, however, to find any Pelvicachromis other than the common kribensis, Pelvicachromis pulcher. Rainbow cichlids (herotilapia multispinosa) are beautiful fish that are easy to breed. Apistogramma are beautiful fish, but they haven't been very easy for me to breed.

Here's the bad news: almost any cichlid that is relatively easy to breed will be difficult to sell to a fish store or to aquarium club members. The Pelvicachromis kribensis is rare enough that I think you would be able to sell them pretty easily. Rainbow cichlids, on the other hand, can be difficult to sell.

There are many lovely kribensis (Pelvicachromis) species available, many from specific locations. They would be terrific as a first breeding project.

Apistogramma triple red or multis shell dweller would be easy.