Zach Weiner is good at high5s

1. Be funny (useful) or die

Webcomic artists can’t delude themselves like we can about our latest tech innovation. Millions of dollars are invested in little more than ideas, whereas finding success as an artist comes down to making a comic people want to read. Simple as that. They’re competing with every cute animal photo for attention.

Take Perry Bible Fellowship, by Nicholas Gurewitch, who hardly spends any time hustling his comic, yet it’s one of the most popular online. Don’t waste time networking or fundraising when you could be building stuff people want.

2. Never forget who pays your bills

Ever seen Randall Munroe or Zach Weiner at a book signing? I have. (We publish their books, which you can buy here!).

Randy & Zach, like many of your favorite webcomic artists, are relentless about making their fans happy. I’ve seen signings go well past midnight because no attendee was going leave without a personalized drawing, signature, and chat with the artist. You can’t take the time to respond to some feedback emails? Try meeting & greeting from a booth for consecutive days at Comic-Con.

3. Know yourself and own it

Describe xkcd as if you were explaining it to someone for the first time. OK, now Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Chances are, even though they’re both geeky webcomics, you had no trouble distinguishing the two brands. Zach’s lustrous ginger mane probably didn’t hurt, either. What does your brand represent and how would a fan describe it to a stranger? If you haven’t nailed this down yourself, how can one of your fans?

Once you’ve figured it out, make sure it oozes out of everything you do. Whether it’s the mouseover text or the big red button, do unique things to define you. I drew hundreds of custom reddit logos because it was 120x40px worth of reasons to check the site — to this day, people still tell me about them and now there are thousands of user-created logos crowning various subreddits.

Transparency is a big part of breadpig’s superhero repertoire – we’ve also published tutorials so you can learn exactly how we published xkcd: volume 0 & how we created magnetic LOLpoetry.

Why Hack Club?

We started Hack Club because we felt that geeks in New York did not have enough places to create and play without being hassled by smooth-talking recruiters for “the next new social media startup”. We wanted to create a refuge that could take in even those who had gone the professional route, a place where they could exchange their dress shirts for hoodies and throw back a couple of Bawlz while making crazy stuff. If this sounds like the sort of thing your city needs, maybe you should roll your own Hack Club! (Our first one went really well! See the pictures for yourself.)

Pick an Activity and/or Find a Sponsor

The first thing we did was search for a sponsor, someone who could give us something to play with and inspiration to make our event really great. Luckily, Alexis met some representatives from LEGO who were immediately interested, so we started working with them to figure out what kind of competition would be fun. Things that were ruled out: curling, skeet shooting, Jenga. Maybe next time, guys.

LEGO agreed to give us enough Mindstorm kits for people to play with, on the condition that we donate them to somewhere worthy afterward. This was a win/win for us and for them: they got two rounds of positive publicity out of one donation, and we got to have a fun event and make the world suck less afterward. I knew a great program in Jamaica that used Mindstorms to inspire kids, so the decision was easy.

We ended up having to grab a few miscellaneous supplies (scales, tape, markers, etc) that non-travelers could just grab from home. We also had to provide our own batteries for the LEGO bots. In total, our activity-related expenses were:

Jack’s World: $20.61
Batteries from Amazon: $152.40 (we had a ton leftover)

Venue and Time

Finding an appropriate venue was, for us, one of the toughest parts of putting Hack Club together. You need enough space to accommodate a good crowd of people and handle whatever activity you have in store, and you also need lots of outlets and internet access. There can’t be too much vulnerable/secret stuff around for people to accidentally see or destroy. The space should be easy to get to and relatively central (and, ideally, accessible to those with handicaps!), but mostly empty at night. A lot of hackerspaces fit this bill well, but they’re also relatively obvious locations–try startup offices, coworking spaces, restaurants, bookstores, whatever you can think of! Bonus features of a great space include coffee makers, tools, microwaves, fridges, etc.

While working out the venue, you should also be thinking about dates: you’ll need to do a little dance to find the best combination for you. When choosing dates, try to minimize major conflicts for your audience: major geek conferences, drinkups, and the like are stiff competition. We decided to make this Hack Club a 12 hour overnight affair, but there’s no reason yours has to be if you want to do a different activity. We will say, though, that pulling an all-nighter is a great way to make new friends.

Puzzle

Next, we had to create a puzzle that revealed the location of the event. Unfortunately, neither Alexis nor I have much in the way of puzzle-solving (let alone making!) chops, but we did have lots of friends who did. We’re sure you do too. If you really don’t, contact us (see below) and we can help you find one! When it came to the actual puzzle, you’re looking for something clever and fun but not headachingly sot; nothing that requires too much busywork. Err on the side of easier, because having no one attend because the puzzle was too hard would be major sad times! If it’s been a few days since putting the puzzle out there and no one is responding, consider putting up a few hints until you have about the right rate of signups.

Promotion

Once the puzzle is up, it’s time to promote the crap out of your event–to the right people. You’re trying to recruit geeks, right? So email local hackerspaces, contact relevant clubs at colleges, and flyer your local comic store. The more people know about your event, the more will attempt the puzzle, and the more will eventually show up. Be discerning about who gets a free pass or not: tech bloggers and journalists with the right audience who could help you get future sponsorships are great; business people who want to just show up and look for a “technical cofounder”, not so much.

If you’re trying to create promotional materials, here’s our logo: it’s made by the amazing Hadley Rouse and licensed CC-attribution, so use it for good!

Food

This is by no means a requirement, but a horde of people late at night need food and caffeine. If you’re broke, try looking for a food or drink sponsor who could hook you up (or at least give you a discount): for example, we were able to get our friend Pete from Omni Consumer Corporation to give us a case of caffeinated marshmallows. If all else fails, you could always just ask people to pitch in for a pizza and/or coffee run–just plan ahead to find out what places stay open late at night and can handle your volume. You could also ask people to have a snack potluck, where everyone brings their favorite party-sized snack and shares.

Since we got everything else for free, we decided to splurge on free pizza and coffee for everyone. Our budget for food and drinks for 40 people was as follows:

Pizza: $238.43 (we had a bit left over)
Fresh Direct (coffee/cocoa/snacks): $103.45 (bought too much coffee)

1. Produce book content
This is obviously a lot easier when, say, you’re just assembling previously released comics, but a lot of thought goes into the flow of a book. And in the case of xkcd, Randall had to redraw a number of the comics in high-resolution because the originals were lost in the infamous laptop theft of 2007.

BONUS! Do something different
We only had a couple conference calls to discuss the book. One of the longest discussions was about how we handle the famous xkcd hover text. There were some creative, albeit impractical, ideas; my favorite is still Jeremy’s magic-glasses version that would let a user built her own red&blue glasses to perceive the scrambled hover text beneath each comic. Randall suggested mimicking the tiny copyright text found in most newspaper comics, which jaded eyes usually skipped altogether – it was perfect.

But we all really wanted to add something special to this book – something geeky. It started with a unique page numbering system (credit Davean for the skew binary), but we at breadpig were really pushing for some kind of easter egg or puzzles in the book for people to decipher. Randall suggested something he’d seen in Dilbert books (I think) where Scott Adams wrote interesting annotations that added some nice flavor. He thought he could do the same and possibly also come up with a few puzzles.

Oh, he’s a sneaky one. Those ‘few puzzles’ he, Davean, and a few of their friends (sorry, I don’t know your names) worked on are an elaborate web of cyphers and enigmas. To my knowledge, in the 5 months since the book was released, no one not connected with the book has solved them all. The person who does will be King/Queen of the Internet that day, that’s for sure.

Just because the medium is ink on paper, doesn’t mean you can’t bring in elements of digital geekery. It only means an opportunity to surprise a reader with preconceived notions of what to expect in a book.

2. Digital layout
If you don’t know how to use Adobe InDesign, hire someone who can. I got a great recommendation from friend Zak Stone (YC 2005) to use the talents of LeeAnn Suen, who also happened to be a big xkcd fan. If you need to contract this work out, I highly recommend her. Not only did she do our first layout and update it when Randall did a near total redesign, she also was there for all the last minute “OMG?! HALP!” moments.

Extra tips from Marie: If you’re going to design the book yourself, leave generous margins for important content. If you’re going to do a fancy books with cross-over bleeds (images that go across a 2 page spread), please talk to your printer about how much space you need to leave in the gutter (the place where the book binds). Even experienced designers forget about gutter space, and you’ll end up having to make costly corrections in the proofing stage.

3. ISBN
Don’t forget that sexy number and SKU on every professional book so that robots can track it. Tip of the hat to Joe Peacock (who knows a thing or two about publishing and self-publishing) for recommending Bowker.com as a dead simple way to score an ISBN and barcode for $150 (update: based on some discussion at Hacker News, I’m looking for a better deal). Don’t judge them by their website, fight through it and score the precious vector art and slap it on the backcover. You’ll need to use this ISBN # a lot the rest of the way, it’s the identity of your book.

4. Finding a printer
Marie Mundaca was instrumental in all of these steps as a resource, but it was here that she really did breadpig a solid. She shopped around the various major printers (that is, the same printers who produce everything from Harry Potter to Malcolm Gladwell) and found the best rate for us — R.R. Donnelley. If you’ve ever produced your own mercy, this process isn’t very different. There are some things to know before you call:

• Quantity
• Paper stock
  If you don’t know anything about paper stock (and who does?) look at some books that are similar to yours and tell the printer. They want to help you out because, ultimately, they want your money.
• Cover paper stock
• Number of color pages (if you’re only doing a few colors pages, they have to be in sets of 8 and all clustered together, because they’ll get lonely otherwise).

5. Prototyping and approval
You’ll be able to order a few prototypes that they’ll run for you to approve. You’ll want to make sure the book itself feels and looks just the way you want it to. After this, we did all of our revisions digitally using the Insight online system our printer used. It’s a rather handy way to ‘see’ every page as it’ll be printed and approve remotely.

6. Ta-da!
Once you approve, production will begin and can take anywhere from a couple weeks to a month. They’ll likely ask you for a desired print date, so be ambitious. This will depend entirely on the printer as bigger ones may have longer turnaround times (so much for economies of scale) because you’re not going to be very high on their todo list.

Fun-fact: it’s actually the book binding and glue-drying that takes the longest.

Either way, make some space in your living room (or give a heads up to your distribution center — we love ours, PGW) and pour yourself a beer, or a tall glass of milk — you’ve created a book!

Epilogue
Sell, sell, sell! And make sure to come back here or tweet @breadpig to let us know how things turned out!

The economy may have been tanking, but despite that (or maybe because of it) people were looking to spend $19.99 on magnetic poetry in pidgin English. If you don’t know about LOLcats, take a moment to educate yourself, and perhaps you’ll see why people would want to adorn photos of pets or relatives with such captions. Yes, what had originated on 4chan was now going to cover dorm refrigerators nationwide.

Like most good ideas, this one came up over a few beers. I was getting a round with breadpig partner, S.I. Newhouse. Discussing new product ideas to complement our existing unholidaycards, he suggested the idea — if they could make magnetic poetry for The “F” Word, surely someone would want it for LOLspeak.

It was many months before we finally got the chance to track down a supplier (not knowing anything about the magnet business, I ordered a kit of traditional magnetic poetry and found their supplier with a Google search). From there, we aimed to be ready in time for the first ROFLCon. I’d been invited as a panelist and moderator — coincidentally, to moderate the LOLpanel. It seemed like the ideal place to announce and perhaps peddle our wares.

The conference arrived, and like most projects, we had hit some delays and only had a few kits ready. At that point, it just made the most sense to create tiny gift sampler bags with 10-15 magnets in each. We lugged a few hundred that we hand-packed up to Boston and distributed them widely throughout the con with an additional magnet instructing people that they’d be for sale soon. In fact, Scott Beale of LaughingSquid was the first to ever report on them.

It just so happened that Ben Huh, founder of icanhascheezburger was also at the conference – on that aforementioned LOLpanel in fact. A month or so after our debut at ROFLCon, he had produced his own version. These kits are smaller and cheaper, but it turns out we even shared the same supplier, who confirmed that these had been ordered shortly after our own.

Well, that’s business for you. We knew we had to make up for lost time and S.I.’s brother Ben (another breadpig partner) finalized our 384-word corpus while S.I. wrote up the instructions and I created some suitable box art (story of our first model-cat here – with pics!).

We’d long ago registered the LOLmagnetz.com domain and Chris Slowe (the 4th partner) hacked our open-source reddit code into a site where anyone could submit, vote, and comment on photos of LOLmagnetz creations.

It wasn’t long until the first kits were ready to ship — we just had no idea where to. Distribution of shirts has no problem starting from one’s apartment, but the weight and scale of all those LOLmagnetz kits posed a problem. Furthermore, we didn’t have the market strength of icanhascheezburger, a community of rabid LOLcat fans. And that’s when S.I. had his next great LOL-idea: ThinkGeek.

It started with a few emails and maybe even a voicemail, but I got in contact with a buyer there who loved the idea. ThinkGeek made their first order near the end of the fall, just as global economies were collapsing and the world needed LOL more than ever. They would make a number of subsequent orders, much to breadpig’s delight.

ThinkGeek’s support was invaluable, going so far as to feature LOLmagnetz twice in their much-anticipated catalogs and sales have continued well past the holiday season. I wish there were more time to focus on growing it, but things like a LOLmagnetz.com redesign will have to wait. In the meantime, maybe we can encourage someone to try something equally as zany.

As appealing as digital is for most of us, there’s still very much a place for tangible stuff. And it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got any experience making it or selling it (though it doesn’t hurt). A good idea, some work, and a bit of Googling is enough to bring something to fruition.

Let us know if you’d like elaboration on any of the above or share a related story of your own in the comments.