Nathan Barry

That's twice today I've recommended this guy: http://nathanbarry.com/ Read some of his articles about how he marketed his books.

Submission I cannot stress enough the importance of reviewing the App Store Review Guidelines before submitting your app. My recent app got rejected because of a problem that I literally fixed in 5 seconds, but I have to wait another week before it will be reviewed again. Don't let that happen to you. https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guidelines.htm… Marketing Think about how you will market your app. For your app, I would research the marketing origins of startups like Uber and Lyft. A "Show HN" is a great place to get feedback, but it is unlikely that the HN community is your target market. Go to Twitter, Google+ Communities, and find forums tailored to carpooling and ride sharing. Hit the blogs!Often times, moderators of blogs will give you FREE advertisement, just because you made something that their readers will enjoy. Do not spam, and hang around in each community you post in for a while. Then, if you haven't already, start a blog. Start writing about your app, carpooling, and other things that you want to be known for. Here are some well-known blogs that are great for learning how to market your products: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ http://nathanbarry.com/ http://brennandunn.com/ - This one is focused more on freelancers, but Brennan provides really helpful advice that applies to almost all situations

(post author here): The team did not have equity but I paid out substantial bonuses voluntarily to all employees. There's a lot of work to be done on how to incentivize employees in bootstrapped startups tbh. Nathan Barry has some good posts on the topic but I don't think it's a problem with any best practices yet: https://nathanbarry.com/profit-sharing/ https://nathanbarry.com/equity/

Nathan Barry has a great article on this. https://nathanbarry.com/consumer-to-creator/ I'm just getting started creating a blog to share programming tips/tutorials things I learn that might help someone else.

Here are a couple of awesome examples: Affiliate Marketer https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ Patt is awesome, he actually shares his monthly income and expense statements. Started solo and now he hired a bunch of people. Nathan Barry (http://nathanbarry.com/) the guy who started convertKit https://convertkit.com/

Where are his e-books? Would love to check out what he's written about. Edit: Here: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

I love his book "Authority" (not affiliated with the author, just got a lot of value from it). It states that one of the best moves to make a claim of expertise is writing a book, and contains a framework to write a book about something you know in ~3 months. http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

> did they self-publish or went with some known publisher? My former boss self-published a book on Leanpub. For the "known publisher", I'm a little acquainted with the author of "Docker High Performance" (Packt). For the leanpub one, it was organically easy to get the word out through local meetups and clients. Packt reached out to the "Docker High Performance" guy, he reviewed a few books for them then they emailed him. > What kind money can you make on ebooks? For the people I mentioned, I can't say. But if you do get a good book out with a good following you can hit Nathan Barry's numbers: - http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/ - http://nathanbarry.com/designing-web-applications-2nd-edition/

I recommend the following: 1. Check out Jennifer Dewalt's project 180 websites in 180 days - http://jenniferdewalt.com 2. Free Code Camp is quite good (but the focus is more on coding rather than design) - http://www.freecodecamp.com 3. Nathan Barry's books are great - http://nathanbarry.com/books 4. [Plug] - I'm starting a new site for online courses and need beta testers for some HTML and CSS courses which go from scratch to pro level. Happy to give your friend early access for free - http://learnetto.com

Here's how to turn your "problem" into an advantage: Write. You love learning new stuff, but get bored quickly. Seize the enthusiasm you have for a new technology while you've got it, and make the most of it. Create books, online courses (e.g. Udemy), and blog about what you're learning. Build up experience and a reputation as someone who can turn lots of new and confusing technologies into stuff that helps other people learn. If you already have, or can develop, the skills necessary to write and present well, after 2-3 years you could have a pretty impressive portfolio of material. If you can successfully monetise that, you've got yourself a career that fits your working style. I recommend checking out the book "Authority" by Nathan Barry: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

I self-published a guide that helps junior developers dramatically improve their chances of getting hired at startups: https://kokev.in/hired-fast I'm glad I didn't do it solely for the money, because I think revenues so far works out to something around minimum wage. However, it was a pretty satisfying challenge and I enjoyed every minute of it. I've gotten some great feedback from people who have landed some great jobs, so it provides a sense of fulfillment. Like many others, I relied a lot on Nathan Barry's Authority (http://nathanbarry.com/authority) to write this ebook, which I'd recommend if you're looking to do the same.

You've made fantastic steps towards making money from your project. It's use in production shows that it has business value. http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ I think Nathan's book describes an excellent outline for success in this regard. Basically you can look into "tiers". You give away "free" resources. Blog posts and the liberally licensed open source software itself. You can also paid resources. A book, perhaps screencasts that accompany the book for a premium price. Workshops and onsite training provide another tier. At the very top is consulting at ultra-premium rates. This is oversimplified, but this is the idea. The "free" stuff is critical, and builds the basis and "proof" for the paid offerings.

Isn't monetization hard for most tools aimed at developers (rather than at companies with teams of developers)? I think that books and book packages that solve a certain problem for a reasonable price point (<$100) are the only developer tools that get bought by small developers--see Nathan Barry, etc: http://nathanbarry.com/

Buy this book. Read it. Implement it. http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ Doing those three things have directly led to me earning approximately $40,000 from book sales in the last 16 months from my book Mastering Modern Payments[1], and I'm not even Nathan's best case[2]. Writing and editing and publishing and promoting a book, even a short one, is a difficult thing. It's one of the hardest things I've ever willingly done. That said, it's been one of the most rewarding projects I've ever undertaken, both financially and for consulting and contracting prospects. [1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com [2]: http://nathanbarry.com/authority-case-studies/

Nathan Barry http://nathanbarry.com/ writes on his websites about writing and self publishing.

How are the sales of the book going? Do you have a "name" out there? I mean, have you built an audience that you know will give you sales? If someone trusts you to consult them I am pretty sure they will adapt to your own schedule and not the other way round. I have no such experience as I am still trying to make a standard good regular income but Nathan Barry (http://nathanbarry.com/) is a very inspiring example to look at, I think.

Teaching is not just great for learning a skill, it is also the best marketing method I know. By teaching you build a following that sees you as an expert and is happy to pay for a small portion of your advice. Here's a post I just wrote on the subject: http://nathanbarry.com/marco-polo/

Nathan Barry has been writing an articulate blog about the process of starting a SaaS business in this "e-mail first" manner: http://nathanbarry.com/ His product is (well, will be) to offer this as a service to others: http://convertkit.com/

I'm Jarrod, the guy behind Bootstrapping Design. Sorry I'm late to this thread, and thank you for sharing the book! There are a couple of other design ebooks worth a look: Sacha Greif's Step By Step UI Design: http://sachagreif.com/ebook/ Nathan Barry's ebooks: http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/ http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ If I can answer any questions, leave a comment here or send me an email: hello <at> bootstrappingdesign {dot} /com/

Agreed. These are great books, but "design for hackers" implies that these book will help you "hack" design, which they won't. These books will help you get a better understanding of the principles of good design at root level, but they won't do much if you're just looking to make your app look or work better. On the other hand, these books are much more practical: http://bootstrappingdesign.com/ http://designforhackers.com/ http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ And I also wrote a design eBook myself (not as good as the three above, but it's also a lot cheaper): http://sachagreif.com/ebook

It's really hard to find good concise help in this area, if Nathan's previous book: http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/ is anything to go by, this should be excellent. Purchasing now. I'm also looking forward to seeing the response from this landing page - Nathan's normally really kind about transparency when it comes to this sort of thing. Great job.

I would suggest you to look within yourself and understand why you're concerned about your intelligence. Is it because you want a good job? Tons of companies hire engineers that would fail an algorithm interview. There is a trend of simplifying interviews anyway, I think M$ is not asking algorithms or trick questions these days. Btw, I know people who failed a Google interview for 10 years. I don't think I'm very smart: I was always able to coast by academically putting the minimum effort I had to (did this until a bachelor in CS and that was it). I spent all my personal time working and starting businesses. I never bothered with companies requiring complicated interview and I'm sure I would bomb them completely; still I think I did pretty good financially (even missing out on incredibly rewarding investment opportunities). Wealth is not something you necessarily build by getting top grades, getting a top job and doing your top tech job for 10 years. Sure, that works, but there are tons of ways to get there. If you want to maximise money, knowing salaries in Russia and seeing the direction of your country, I'd recommend focusing on your spoken English, landing any job in a country with better salaries and getting a passport to move away. Then I would think more about climbing the [wealth ladder](https://nathanbarry.com/wealth-creation) instead of passing a very hard interview. It's a though time to find a new country, EU and USA are not looking super good with all…

This sales article [1] talks about focussing on a specific niche (Recipe blogs => Paleo recipe blogs => Paleo recipe blogs run by women), and then creating an echo chamber within that specific niche. This helps you spread by word of mouth, or you point to existing customers within that niche when selling to others. > Once you are the big fish in a very small pond then you want to jump over into a neighboring pond. The tendency is to immediately go mainstream, but you probably don’t yet have enough traction for that. Once we found success with a subset of fitness blogs I looked for others in a similar industry. So we went from interval training blogs, to running blogs, to powerlifting blogs. Then from there it’s easy to step into the diet/recipe blogs that have overlap. Instead of trying to become the best in "your corner of the country", you could focus on the corner of some specific niches. [1] https://nathanbarry.com/sales/

ConvertKit | Boise, ID | Full-Time | REMOTE only | CEST-PST timezones preferred ConvertKit is an email marketing platform that helps creators earn a living online. Read our full reason for existing here: https://convertkit.com/mission/ Here's why you should seriously consider working at ConvertKit: 1. We're bootstrapped. We're not on the VC train. We like growth and are growing, but answering to VCs, investors, and all the BS that comes with that is just not part of our world at all. 2. We default to transparency and working in public as much as possible. Feel free to browse all of our financials here: https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/ 3. We love side projects. I have my own side project that Nathan even referenced in his most recent blog post (https://nathanbarry.com/product-secrets/). I (me being the Director of Engineering at ConvertKit) personally view side projects as a fantastic, zero-risk way to learn new tech and keep up in the field. 4. Nathan is a kind, generous, nice, and trusting individual. Our culture reflects that. It's built on a foundation that we trust each other, and therefore we have a very positive, healthy culture. 5. We're growing. Our growth is accelerating, and we are needing to scale with our growth. Because of that, we're facing a lot of hard, interesting scaling challenges. For some engineers, these types of challenges are super fun. Those are the kind of engineers we're hiring. 4. Other cool perks like paid paid vacation, 2…

The most important thing you can do to increase your odds of success when releasing a technical book is to have multiple pricing tiers, adding additional content so you give people the option to pay you more than $30 or whatever you are charging for just the book. I released a book in May 2016 teaching PHP programmers how to refactor code with lots of loops and conditionals into collection pipelines. So far it's made about $180,000 CAD. ~$30,000 of that came from the "just the book" tier, at $29-$39 (depending on if the customer bought at the discounted launch price) ~$75,000 came from a "book + screencasts" tier, at $59-$79 ~$75,000 came from a book/screencasts/example application tier, at $135-$179 If I had only given people the option of the cheapest tier, I would've made less than half of what I made by adding additional tiers. The absolute bulk of the value is all in the cheapest tier, in fact the screencasts are the same examples from the book + just two bonus examples, and the example application is a project I already had that happened to use a lot of the principles in the book. You can take a look at the landing page here if you're interested: https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/ I think this sort of success is pretty achievable, I just followed the strategy outlined by Nathan Barry in his "Authority" book: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ Nobody is going to make a lot of money selling a $40 book through a traditional publisher. If you really…

- I'd recommend you look into Amy Hoy's writings, especially about her "Pain/Dream/Fix" approach to pitching products [1]. Sign up to her newsletter as well. - Colors and logo seem to be inspired from ProductHunt. It's fine to steal (really), but at least be a tad more creative with the logo. - If you're going for a simple page, I wouldn't hesitate to use larger font sizes. - "Designing Web Applications" from Nathan Barry may be a good investment of money [2]. He actually also took advices from Amy Hoy for his own products [3]. - I'd put a human face on this page, maybe of yourself. There are tons of studies showing that this helps building trust and rapport [4] (especially useful as it is a product in the making with no users yet). [1] https://unicornfree.com/2013/how-i-increased-conversion-2-4x-with-bett… [2] http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/ [3] http://nathanbarry.com/step-by-step-landing-page-copywriting/ [4] https://vwo.com/blog/human-landing-page-increase-conversion-rate/

I'll chime in... I developed my first game, Rocket Renegade [1], for iOS. Although I think that it was well-received (based on the reviews and emails I've received), it's made under $100 US since launching in January 2015. But, I did finish, and I taught myself Swift in the process, so I'm proud of that. I'm a classic example of a technical person that's learning the marketing side, so I have a lot to learn in that area. I think the game is a solid offering for its genre (80s/90s inspired shmup). For stories of much greater success than myself: 1. There was a user here (kreci) that used to post financial reports regarding his Android development efforts, but it doesn't appear that he has been active on HN for quite some time. However, you may still find his reports a useful/interesting resource [2]. 2. Nathan Barry (nathanbarry) has written about his experience developing his "OneVoice" app and the financials surrounding it [3]. 3. The greatest financial success story that I am aware of in terms of sales in the mobile space is Allen Wong. He really hit it big with "5-0 Radio Police Scanner". He did an AMA [4], which you may find interesting. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?mt=8 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:kreci%20%22Income%20Report%22&… [3] http://nathanbarry.com/how-i-made-19000-on-the-app-store-while-learnin… [4]…

Anyone running an online business will tell you that words are valuable. Text is the primary way we communicate with our customers. Carefully chosen words can have a massive impact on revenue. The author possesses a valuable skill but is not fairly compensated for it. What's going on? Inequality is increasing in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States) and many other countries. Technology is giving capital an increasing advantage over labour. A job as, say, a doctor, lawyer, or University professor, which used to guarantee you a position at the top of the social hierarchy, no longer does. Inequality is generally regarded as a bad thing, both socially and economically (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality) Addressing inequality at a macro scale is beyond my knowledge, but I do know how to address it at the micro scale: own your work. Technology contributes to inequality by allowing successful businesses to scale further with fewer employees. However, you can use the same infrastructure to scale out your microbusiness. Within our community, patio11, Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, Nathan Barry, and others have show how to do this. It is noticeable that many of the above have made a substantial chunk of change from publishing a book. (E.g. http://nathanbarry.com/2014-review/ ~$260K from book sales.) The OP is in a great position to replicate this -- they have all the skills, namely command over the written word, to produce…

Let me start this off by saying that I sympathise with you. But, you should start thinking outside the box. Software development is a craft - and as such, it plays a part in achieving outcomes. I don't consider the ability to program a super power - anyone with a technical background is able to learn programming given time and the proper resources. Start thinking more about what you are trying to achieve (the goal) and why you are approaching it in this particular way (the purpose). "Meaningless work" is often the result of decisions made on a whim - take the responsibility to investigate the goal and alternative methods to achieve the same result. In order to find your work more meaningful, you should become more focused on the business aspects. Sometimes the best approach to solve a problem is meaningless work - but at least then that would be a comfort. If you want to try something outside of your day job and you consider yourself good at web-related things, there's little stopping you from setting up an e-commerce store and selling things. Shopify is an e-commerce solution on a platter, but there are many alternatives. I've recently setup a Wordpress + WooCommerce website + bought a theme (Kallyas) for my wife - http://www.swartsbooks.com - still busy working out the kinks. Even though I could have built the store myself, I opted for the practical solution. My current side project focuses on addressing communication issues (e.g. complaints, notices, notifications,…

In my case, I was very focussed on long term revenue that would pay me whether or not I was working. Within my niche, that took the form of print book sales, e-book sales on my own site and through partners, and affiliate relationships. I'm up to about $4,000 a month from passive sources. You're in a good spot to have a full time job you enjoy and (presumably) pays well. For me, the hardest part was building capital. I'd recommend saving every penny you can. As for how to start, try lots of small things. Most of my ideas that worked took, at most, two weeks to test. Many started from writing an email or making a phone call. There are countless niches now, full of people prepared to pay money. I chose LSAT prep. I'm sure already there's thing you know how to do that people will pay for. Some ways you can monetize that: * An e-book guide to something, with free html articles as marketing for organic SEO and links * Some useful tool people will link to. Serves as marketing for either ads, a product, or a paid version * Videos on a topic. Can be marketing for any of the above, or lead to a paid video product. "Authority" by Nathan Barry is an excellent book for establishing yourself in a niche. Reading that convinced me to make http://lsathacks.com, which has free html versions of my books and draws many visitors which I've been able to monetize. "Start small, stay small" by Rob Walling is an excellent guide to bootstrapping a business. Possibly the best. It's aimed…