Launching My First Product

I’ve been interested in startups and the web industry for awhile now. Not only am I interested in startups, but I’m also very interested in the people behind them and their story.

I had been thinking of what I would do for my first “real” product or service. While sitting in my dorm room a few months ago I came across an ebook that was highlighting people in the design space. I thought it would be pretty cool and informative to have a similar ebook with startup founders. I got started that night.

It took a couple months to complete the project but now that it’s done I can say that I’m very happy with how it turned out. However, I learned a lot along the way and there’s definitely some things I would change if I were to do it again. Here are some of the major things I learned from launching Founders.

Deadlines come quick.
When starting the book we picked May 1 as the day we would “release” it.It seemed like an extremely doable date as it was months away at the time.

I had to create a list of ~20 founders that I thought would be a good fit for the book, contact them, conduct an interview via email, piece the interviews together, have the ebook designed, and edit the book all before it would be ready.

Going back and forth with all the founders in the book was extremely fun but also proved to be more work than originally thought. Some questions required some form of a follow-up and some founders simply got too busy to return the questions in the time provided. Going into the last few days before we were supposed to release the book I was still chasing down the last couple interviews.

Designing the book and editing everything in it was all done in the final day or two before launch. We released the book on May 1, on time, but barely. I think next time I will do more of the work before I state a release date just to make sure everything goes smoothly without any last second hiccups or headaches.

Don’t rely on one source for traffic.
I had a few ideas on where I would try to promote the book when it was finished. Since I only have about 200 followers on Twitter I knew I had to do more than simply tweet a link out.

The first thing I did was submit the book to Hacker News. This proved to generate a decent number of sales as well as pageviews as it hovered on the front page for about an hour. However, once it fell off the front page all that traffic came to a halt.

Most of the founders featured in the book also helped out by promoting it to their followers. This helped a ton and I’m very thankful for their help in spreading the book.

I planned on the book being featured as one of Sidebar’s top 5 links at some point. It never happened. Being featured on Sidebar would have definitely helped with sales and traffic but it’s something I shouldn’t have relied on.

This taught me that it’s incredibly important to not put “all the eggs in one basket” and to make sure to have a diverse way of promoting the product in case other options don’t work out.

Let people see what they’re buying.
When the book was first released and publicly announced, it was done so without a preview of any sort.

This proved to be a mistake as many people asked to see a preview chapter before they would decide whether to buy the full book or not. I ended up individually emailing a handful of people a section of the book. Later that day we added an actual preview chapter on the site.

I think the main reason for neglecting to have this available from the start comes back to my first point of deadlines approaching quickly. May 1 came much quicker than expected and having a preview ready was simply something I overlooked. It’s definitely something that should have been there from the start.

Listen to feedback.
Throughout the creation of the book I received suggestions on how things should be done or changed. I think it’s very important to listen to each suggestion and then later decide what to do with it.

Some of the suggestions that were made ended up being a large part of the success of the final product. You never know what the final product will look like when first starting so don’t write anything off when first getting started.

Launching Founders was an awesome experience that taught me a lot. When launching my next project I will do some things the same or similar to how I did them here but there’s also some things I will definitely change and be more aware of.

It’s easy to overlook some of the simple things when focusing on the large picture. I think it’s important to slow down at times and look at everything individually or in smaller parts to make sure everything is truly in order.

Founders has sold 84 copies at $5 as of writing this post. While this isn’t a huge amount of sales or revenue, I’m happy with it as it’s my first product and everyone who has purchased the book has had nothing but good things to say.

This book wouldn’t have been possible without the help from the awesome people at Shipp, Co. and each of the founders featured in the book.