title_body: Stake pool operation: estimated effort in time?
upvoted_answer: Your question has no direct answer.
  Its hard or not impossible to estimate the time spent on marketing, from my side its a full time job.
  I spend all day on twitter and reddit, these are my favourite social media.
  To setup a pool you can check Cardano Forum and ask mr. Alex post about CNTOOLS.
  if you understand something about Linux OS its easy for you, if not, you'll need to learn and some DevOps is required for basic firewall configuration for example.
  There's no direct answer to that, if you are already experienced on linux I would not expect more than 1 hour to setup a block producer and two relay.
  Check here for CNTOOLS setup tutorial, I'd recommend this because it saved me a lot of time.
  https://forum.cardano.org/t/how-to-set-up-a-pool-in-a-few-minutes-and-register-using-cntools/48767
  good luck