By Jackson West

YOU'RE FULL OF ideas, but short on capital and prone to blowing the money you should be saving on a round of PBRs for your friends. Just because you have a day job, a dog, and a significant other doesn't mean you're too busy to chase your dream of coming up with the most ironic T-shirt ever. So put down your bong – with a little time and some promotional moxie, you can capitalize on your most inspired high-deas.

This isn't about getting rich quick, but who knows, someday you might be able to quit your "real" job mulling mint for all those mojitos. Instead, it's about how to hawk funny T-shirts, publish a book, or become a media maven with minimal financial risk. Local news and culture blog SFist (my other gig) has been around for a year, and in June logged its first million-page-view month. While it's never made any of the contributors money, it has paid for some plane tickets, a staff karaoke night, beer, and lots and lots of "Super Fister" T-shirts.

CafePress, based in San Leandro, makes Sfist's own T-shirt currency possible with its inexpensive print-on-demand services. It will let you set up a shop of all your shwag for free on its Web site, and it offers generous bulk discounts on orders as small as 15 T-shirts – even in a range of sizes. You can also put whatever graphics you create on mugs, mouse pads, tote bags, trucker hats – even a little outfit for Fifi. The company handles the production, billing, and shipping for you.

Of course, CafePress makes stickers too. As any hipster knows, stickers are the promotional tool of choice for the indie version of Horatio Alger, Mr. Self-Starter himself. The medium is the message, as some dude with a cameo in Annie Hall once said. Basically that translates to this: The publicity benefits of a well-placed sticker in a dive bar bathroom, or of a beautiful person in a baby T with your logo on it, can't be quantified. If you go home with some hot bisexual you met at the Phone Booth who turns out to be wearing an SFist thong, you may just end up a reader.

Another local success story, aside from the popular SFist site, is JPG Magazine, started by local blog celebs Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ. They are impassioned evangelists for the online medium, appearing regularly at conferences around the country and working day jobs at two of the coolest startups on the scene – Derek at Technorati, a search engine for blogs, and Heather at Flickr, a photo-sharing site that doubles as a social network for shutterbugs (Flickr was actually salvaged from an effort to create a multiplayer online game and was eventually sold to Yahoo for around $30 million). But the urge to have something to hold in their hands prompted them to create a magazine that featured some of the best photography found in the blogosphere.

Starting a magazine, especially a full-color glossy, is incredibly expensive and risky. So what made JPG possible? Lulu, an on-demand printing service based in North Carolina. Instead of placing an order for hundreds or thousands of copies to be printed at once by a traditional offset printer, you can simply design a document, save it as an Adobe PDF, upload it via any standard Web browser, and then direct people to the Lulu site, where copies are printed when purchased. Like CafePress, they'll handle the messy details of billing and shipping.

Old-school zinesters, rejoice – no more late nights and big bills at Kinko's! Publishing your indie fish wrap is now as convenient as ordering your indie records online. Storing boxes of back issues at your mom's house? Handling personal checks, more than a few of which will bounce? Holding envelope-stuffing parties that will leave your tongue feeling like sandpaper? Screw that! With services like Lulu there's no inventory, back issues are archived digitally and can be ordered at any time, payment is confirmed before the product is shipped, and you get the advantages of bulk commercial shipping, like expedited processing and lower prices.

When I called Derek and asked him how much damage he and Heather did to their credit cards to start JPG, he said, "All we really had to spend was our time." The disadvantage to Lulu, he pointed out, is that the quality isn't as high as with traditional magazine printing, and it costs their customers $20 for each issue. Maybe that's more than you want to spend, but for the JPG team the choice came down to shelling out or not doing it at all. "After ten years of making Web sites, it's so nice to get a box in the mail," Derek explains.

An incredible community of photographers has come together online in the past few years thanks to digital photography, broadband, and cheap storage, and JPG was the first magazine to represent them and their work in print. So even though the $20 price tag is a bit spendy, JPG is one of the top 10 sellers for Lulu, a list that includes a number of other books by California authors. The privately held company publishes more than 23,000 books, from how-tos to comix, and is adding more than 100 new titles a day on average. The business as a whole is growing at a rate of 10 percent a month, according to Lulu's Stephen Fraser.

One of Derek and Heather's goals was not to lose money while at the same time providing a free copy of the magazine to each of the contributors. With two to three dozen photographers featured in each issue, costs needed to be kept to a minimum. They used all the free and cheap tools they could – G-mail to communicate with their contributors, inexpensive Web hosting for the Web site, and donated labor to build a custom submission tool to handle all the large image files. That friend from the Art Institute who crashed on your couch for two months? The Web developer who met her new boyfriend through you? Time to call in those favors.

It's not just writers, designers, and photographers who are starting to take advantage of all these new tools, either. People are producing some fantastic audio and video content with little more than a microphone, a digital camera, and a laptop, and distributing it over the Web as well. Local videologger Josh Wolf got recognition in a recent Time magazine interview for the new video site he and his friends are creating, the Rise Up Network. Evan Williams cofounded Pyra Labs here in San Francisco in 1999. While the software they were given venture capital to develop never caught on, they did create a little tool called Blogger that Google eventually nabbed. Williams's new project, Odeo, aspires to become a one-stop shop for finding, downloading, and creating audio content. Users need only a Web browser to participate.

Even if you're not as ambitious or well funded as Williams, an important lesson in starting your own bedroom operation is that, just like inventory, a business's infrastructure is part of its overhead. And Williams is a good go-to guy about such matters: The original product that Pyra developed was an online project and contact manager, and he's written on his own blog (www.evhead.com) that he puts a priority on business tools available online, which allow his company to manage things like scheduling, payroll, and invoicing from nearly any computer in the world with a Web browser and an Internet connection. If your entire business infrastructure involves a computer, a telephone, a domain name, a Web host, and some inexpensive software, then your monthly overhead amounts to beer and pizza money. In other words, you have little to lose.

An important lesson for any would-be businessperson, according to Derek, is to "go with what you already know, and work with the community you're already in." That's what Jen Chung and Jake Dobkin did when they started Gothamist, a city blog for New York, in 2003. "We started the site because we love New York and wanted to share that with other people," Dobkin said. Now they publish 13 city blogs around the world, including SFist here in San Francisco. I signed on as editor because they assumed all the financial risks.

At the beginning, they invested less than $250 a month in the site – an amount two people can easily spend over a weekend in Manhattan. A year and a half later, they were first approached about selling an ad, and they still sell ads primarily through incoming offers and online services such as BlogAds and Google Adsense. Eventually, they were earning enough to cover all their costs and could begin investing their earnings in expansion. Within three years, they've expanded as far as Shanghai and Paris and no longer have to invest their own money.

One thing they didn't spend lots of money on was promotion and advertising, often the most expensive line item in a business's budget. The audience grew primarily by word-of-mouth. While knowing how to craft a good press release and engaging the media is always a good idea, you don't need a huge marketing department to cultivate an audience.

Madison Avenue sends out roving teams of cool hunters and pays cultural anthropologists handsomely to consult on ad campaigns. But you already know how to speak to your community in a way that's relevant and doesn't alienate them. So go get your message out, even if that message is "T-shirts for sale. Get your funny T-shirts." Shout that online, and people can hear you around the world. Start playing with all the free and cheap tools you can get your hands on, and think of new ways to use them, whether it's to move merchandise or carve a niche in the media. What have you got to lose?

Resources

www.lulu.com On-demand printing

www.cafepress.com One-off manufacturing

www.wordpress.org Free, open-source blog software

www.typepad.com Blog software and hosting

www.flickr.com Photo community

www.godaddy.com Domain registration and Web hosting

www.blogads.com Online advertising

www.google.com/adsense Online advertising

www.adbrite.com Online advertising

www.audioblog.com Podcast and videolog production tool

www.odeo.com Podcast and videolog production tool (in development)