Turn Your Fandom Into Cash

If you are a geek at heart, embrace your passion with a creative fandom business.

If you are a true fan geek, you may want to harness your passion and create your own business, whether as a part-time gig or a full-time career. Unlike many new business owners, you’ll start with the competitive advantage of understanding what your potential customers like before you become a “geektrepreneur.”

Creating a company, especially one that you based on a superhero, character or a make-believe world that someone else created, takes “Jedi-like discipline.” You must work through issues of funding, intellectual property (IP) rights and marketing.

If you are a fan of an obscure horror genre, for example, you might not find many customers for such a small niche. But that’s why you carry out thorough research and build mock-ups. Before you spend money on inventory, you’ll want to create samples, post photographs on social media, and ask your friends and fellow fans if your samples appeal to them.

Before you create, say, superhero T-shirts, research whether that hero’s image is another company’s intellectual property.

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