So my Dad said to me “so you reckon I should order an initial stock of ten?”. I said “it’s the 21st century. You don’t need to hold stock”. We were talking about a new way of monetizing his Greypath brand, because I had just turned my first dollar of profit from selling Churchill Club t-shirts.

The best thing was that after an initial setup that took around 2 hours, I then had to do nothing. Very Tim Ferris, Four hour work week ! So here’s what I did.

1. I setup an account at http://www.redbubble.com and downloaded their t-shirt template.

2. I opened up paint.net which I downloaded for free from www.getpaint.net and created a couple of templates.

3. I uploaded my t-shirt templates, and configured and priced the t-shirts.

4. I then used the automatically generated t-shirt images at red bubble for advertising in our newsletter and web site, and hyperlinked this to the red bubble sales platform.

5. I received notification from red bubble a couple of days later that my first t-shirt had sold and $8 was winging my way.

Now $8 may not seem like much, but it’s a start and I don’t have any extra work to do. Red bubble handles the sale, manufacture and delivery. I have a number of designs up, and will add a couple more as digital images cost us nothing but design time.

I’m pretty excited about this concept and thinking about how I can do the same thing with http://www.lulu.com that will generate books for us. Unfortunately my father has issues with this as he just can’t come to grips with the concept of bespoke manufacturing for low priced goods.

By the way, I wrote this article sitting in a deck chair at a camp site in Warrnambool, using and iPad and a wireless hot zone. Starting to get excited about the mobility technology can bring.