E-business, not so usual – Colorado locals juggle their own Web businesses while working elsewhere

Some might call them long shots. Some might call them risk-takers.

Regardless, they are entrepreneurs of a different sort.

By Matt Branaugh, Camera Business Writer

They’re folks who live in the Boulder area and work normal jobs, but chase the American dream of running their own business on the side.

No, they’re not suckers for television commercials touting Internet terminals as the road to wealth-filled, self employment. Instead, they pour hours outside regular jobs running their own e-commerce Web sites.

They’ve found markets for anything from shark hats to African safaris, swimsuits to pint glasses. They’re finding ways to generate some revenue, too.

"We’re doing business how it used to be done — and it’s online," says Brian Young, a 26-year-old who moonlights at Louisville-based Raindance Communications Inc. while hawking brewery memorabilia on his 7-month-old PintShop.com. "It’s been profitable since day one."

Some, like Young, have visions of eventually making the sites their full-time jobs, maybe even recognizing a windfall someday from their hard-earned creations. Some, like Lance Bieber, don’t mind if their sites remain side gigs.

Bieber, a broker associate with Prudential Boulder Realtors, sells a quirky product: Baseball hats featuring doubled bills for mouths, fierce eyes painted on the front and a shark fin on top that’s shaped like Santa Claus’ hat.

Meet Santa Jaws.

"It certainly is an unusual novelty product," he says. "It’s not out there to save the world, but to put a smile on your face."

Selling millions of hats, a la the Pet Rock fad, wouldn’t be bad either, he says. But if not, just cracking people up is "all I ever need."

While the well-publicized fallout of dot-coms dominated headlines since 2000, there’s still signs that the Internet attracts spending dollars. Forrester Research Inc.’s Carrie Johnson, for instance, reported third quarter e-commerce sales grew to $26 billion, up 51 percent from a year ago.

Driving those sales weren’t the mainstays like books or electronics, but some unconventional new categories, she writes, including sporting goods, clothes and home goods.

And that may be a significant lesson one draws from the seven local sites: that the unconventional, if well developed, can pull a following.

But innovation sometimes requires hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. Bieber, for example, estimates he spent $20,000 getting his site going and inventory ready. By contrast, people like Chuck Coyle and his TheProsStuff.com, an online used cycling gear shop, experienced minimal financial costs.

All use an outside firm for Web hosting. But most, like Kathy Hall, Robin Paschall, Young and Coyle, design their own sites and regularly update them.

All use either PayPal or some type of credit card or check processing to make sure transactions transpire without a hitch. Hall got burnt a few times by fraudulent credit cards overseas, so she ceased shipping outside U.S. borders. In the meantime, her swimsuit sales in the states have grown to one to two a day.

Several identified the United States Postal Service as their primary source for shipping products.

How do people find them? Most use some type of link trades with other sites and industry magazine advertisements. A few pay for search engine exposure — Hall, for instance, pays Google 20 cents a click. And word-of-mouth is a strong ally.

Coyle, a professional cyclist, said his site averaged 45 visits a day when it started in March. Now, he’s getting 240 hits a day, which he mostly attributes to links he trades with industry sites, as well as people just talking.

For Paschall’s ZaraTravel.com, nearly half of her business comes from outside the country, although she uses ads in Men’s Journal and Outside magazines, as well as Google pay-per-clicks, too.

Where it’s all going — for their own sites, as well as e-commerce in general — is anyone’s guess. All agree the Internet will remain a formidable part of business in the future.

For the creators behind two upcoming local sites — MountainGoods.com and CatchMusic.net — that’s encouraging news.

Rayleigh Rask and his wife, Cheryl Ford, along with a team of four others, hope their coming music service shows a clean-cut way of doing future e-commerce. Initially, the site will help local musicians distribute their music online while disseminating tour dates and biographical information, ensuring fans find hard-to-get music while helping artists get exposure — and proceeds for their work.

Jeff Browning, 34, says he sees the work of his local peers as an indication of the "testing of the waters" the e-commerce industry will prefer in years to come. People and companies want to observe a site’s performance before exerting significant amounts of time and energy.

Such a test may prove to be worth it, though, and he’s hoping his MountainGoods.com makes the grade so that it becomes "my full-time gig," he says. "It’s my retirement project."

Contact Matt Branaugh at (303) 473-1363 or [email protected].

http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/tech_plus/article/0,1713,BDC_2463_2464776,00.html