Realization

I have come to a realization about Bumper Sticker Rant. I can either pay for everything out of my own pocket, and do it all as a hobby. Like I have been doing...

Or I can make it into a money making venture, for minimal work over what I had already been doing.

This realization came to me as I was looking at out of pocket expenses for the rant. So far I've invested something like $10 (plus a camera that is small enough for me to keep in my purse), that's for the domain and I'm throwing in a few dollars since the community page is now residing under my domain on a hosted server.

I'm already tinkering with the idea of expanding the BSR store though. I have already picked up another cafepress extension... bsrant, and in a couple of days I'm going to expand that into a premium store which will focus on bumper stickers.

for now I'll try it out for a month. Tack on another $7 to those expenses. But the potential for more money coming than going out will increase with that.

I guess my biggest qualm is that when I set up the rant I wanted a community feel to it. It'll have been a year in may, and at the time I had this absurd though of pluggin all the money right back into it. But I now realize that I can't really make it into a community without branding it, and branding it will be increasingly hard without doing something to get the name out there. And the easiest way to get the name out there is to go this route.

I still plan to plug some money back into it, but I think I need to get over these qualms and just do it. I just need to realize that if I'm successful in this, really successful, I may end up making more money than I can plug back into it. And if I'm only mildly successful than at least it will pay for itself now.