From time to time I work on odd projects that are mostly related to passive income. Here's what I'm working on these days:
Bird Doctor
Bird Doctor is the first Cafe Press shop I started, 3 years ago. What started as a hobby and creative outlet with the hopes of making a few bucks on the side is now making me more than a few bucks and is still a lot of fun. The shop has gone through several reinventions and at the moment of this writing is focused mostly on Christian and Geek culture. The name comes from a nick name given to me when I was a teenager (I used to raise parrots). It didn't stick.
Rock My Face Off
After Bird Doctor began to have better than expected success, a representative from Cafe Press suggested that I take my Jesus Rocks My Face Off shirt and carry the theme over everything imaginable, creating a long tail. I've begun to do that with this Cafe Press shop. It's been moderately successful so far. Adding products and themes is slow, but I'm in no hurry. At one point I bought a domain for this shop but noticed it was not doing much for my sales so in the interest of lowering overhead I let the domain expire and get snatched up by someone else. In hindsight, I think paying $10/year to keep it around would have been the right choice. Oh well, lesson learned.
StopForwarding.Us
StopForwarding.Us is a website that allows people who get a lot of forwarded spam (FWDs) to politely and anonymously request that the sender stop sending that type of email. It also acts as a resource for those curious about email etiquette and management. The site features a web application that sends the request to the spammer with built in protection to keep people from abusing the feature. The site also has a relevant blog and is monetized via Google Adsense and
a Cafe Press shop.
GetGeekStrong.com
GetGeekStrong.com is my blog. I originally started the blog to encourage myself to get and stay in the gym. I've expanded it to all areas of lifestyle design that is important to me. This includes faith, family, health, business and creative pursuits among others. If anybody else reads it, that is great. I mostly blog there so that I can keep track of things that I see, read, or think that are important to me. Of course, readers also have the option to support me through a small amount of advertising and an Amazon Associate account (for when I blog books).
Vending
A while back, Hannah and I bought a handful of vending machines to try our luck at the game. The idea is that I would drive the route and Hannah could stay at home and place machines over the phone. It didn't quite work out that way (I ended up hiring a locater service) but we got the machines placed and they are doing well. I don't know how big I'll let the route get, but I plan on expanding.
Failures
Not all of my projects have seen success. Every entrepreneural journey that I embark on comes with a certain amount of risk. I am comfortable with this fact and would not be content playing it safe all the time. I'd also be doing myself and others a disservice if I pretended like failure never happened instead of learning from it.
DrinkShirt.com
A friend of mine and myself once cooked up an idea for a website that would allow you to fill out a form that in a nutshell asked you what your drink of choice was from a major coffee chain. Once the form was submited, a design was created on the fly, customized to your order and specifications (it was a cup with barista markings). You could then purchase your design on shirts, mugs, stickers, mousepads and all sorts of other stuff. I decided to pursue the project and
produced a site and web application that would fulfill the goal of the site. I spent a good sum of money on the project and got a lot of web traffic from promotion I did. Unfortunately the site depended on the Cafe Press API which was still in beta at the time. API development slowed and eventually ceased but not before a version that broke my site was released.
I tried to get the attention of Cafe Press but it was fruitless. I also tried populating the site with other coffee related merch but the market has been so saturated that it did not help. In the end, I took a risk and it bit me in the but. It's all cool, though. I learned a few lessons, had a great time doing it and wrote everything off as a loss at the end of the year. Fun times.
Somedays
Some of the ideas that I have are a bit lofty, require more capital than I have or for one reason or another have a hard time getting off the launch pad.
Tattooed Church
Someday I want to produce a documentary/website/coffee table book about church goers and their tattoos. I like tattoos a lot. I like the way they look, feel, sound and smell (go into a shop and you'll know what I mean). I also love the Church and religious art. The project is called Tattooed Church and other than
a domain, nothing else has happened. Stay tuned.
DearJes.us
I had an idea about
a web site where people could ask "Jesus" questions and they would get a reply that was scripturally based. The site is pretty much built, it just needs some brains to answer the questions. If you're interested in using the site to promote your church or a sermon series, let me know. We can work something out.