Episode 64
· 42:05
Alright. Welcome back. Justin Jackson here, and this is the Product People Show. Today, I'm talking with Jared Drysdale. He's the author of the first eBook I ever purchased called bootstrappingdesignbootstrappingdesign.com.
Speaker 1:A few things before we get started productpeople.club. That's www.productpeople.club is going to launch very soon. I'm going to start inviting new members. This is the private community we've been running for over a year now. It's a community built specifically for solopreneurs, bootstrappers, people working on their own thing.
Speaker 1:And the results that people are getting have been really great. There's a lot of people that have shipped some incredible products. And this new iteration we have has been really helpful. We're doing daily stand ups for solopreneurs, and we're sharing our progress. So if you'd like to check that out, productpeople.club is where to go.
Speaker 1:Alright. Enough yakking from me. Let's get into the interview with Jared. You're gonna love it. All right.
Speaker 1:I'm here with Jared Drysdale. How are doing, Jared?
Speaker 2:I'm good. How are you, Justin?
Speaker 1:Doing well. Jared and I have become friends over the past few months and I've wanted to have him on the show forever because Jared, you wrote the first e book I ever purchased.
Speaker 2:Really? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 2:I'm very honored.
Speaker 1:Bootstrapping Design, if any of you have not seen Bootstrapping Design, it's bootstrappingdesign.com and there's something about this. There's something that happens with people, I think. They become eBook buyers. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So like, they go from saying, I'm never going to buy one of those eBooks. Like they're not my thing or they're too expensive or whatever.
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Speaker 1:And your book is what took me over that threshold.
Speaker 2:Well that's awesome. I made a convert out of you. It's true.
Speaker 1:Why don't you tell us a little bit about how did this book come to be? What's the story behind it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I actually wrote that book almost It's been almost two and a half years which is kind of hard to believe but yeah, so a few years back I read Getting Real by the thirty seven Signals guys and I was working in a full time job and I kind of got the itch to go and make my own product. So I had some consulting that just kind of fell into my lap and it seemed like a good time so I quit my job, took the consulting work and started building products. The first thing I built was an online grade book for teachers. Called Mac and it was like they pay $5 a month and they can use this thing and it has, know, they put their data in and it has analytics and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And I thought, okay, I'm gonna have my own products business. So I worked on that on and off for a year and it was just a miserable failure. I had like five people paying me for it. So I wrote a post mortem and was all panicked about what do I do, what do I do and I met Amy Hoy through that and I took her entrepreneurship class, learned a lot about business that way and bootstrapping design came out of that learning.
Speaker 1:Came out of that course. Yeah. There's definitely a trend, there's a lot of 30 by 500 alumni.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm one of them.
Speaker 1:So what do you think changed? What was the grade book called?
Speaker 2:It was called NAC, nacforteachers.com. It's actually still online if anybody's curious but
Speaker 1:nacforteachers.com.
Speaker 2:You do not have to show it to anybody.
Speaker 1:Okay, won't show it. I'm just gonna take a look here.
Speaker 2:I mean, don't mind but yeah so I think you know I wrote a post mortem about it and it hit the front page of Hacker News and I was saying all these things that I learned in that class about you know finding an audience that is a professional audience and that you can prove pays for things. People who make money and having a product that's attached to the way people make money, stuff like that. So I learned a lot about that and bootstrapping design was kind of you know is for a totally different audience. Know people who are building businesses, who are willing to spend money to make money, things like that rather than just teachers who at least in The US are not really always very well paid and don't have a lot of extra money to spend. So it's just a very different kind of audience.
Speaker 2:So I think back then, you know, I didn't know a lot of people who were writing e books and I was just like, okay, an e book sounds a lot easier than building a subscription software service. So I'll just try this and see how it goes. And I was pretty happy with the results. It did way better than I could have hoped for so I was very grateful for that.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's back up a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Why did you choose Teachers originally?
Speaker 2:I'm married to a teacher. My wife is a teacher, my dad was a high school teacher for a long time, my sister-in-law was a high school teacher so I felt like I had some inside knowledge about that group and what their struggles are, what their pain points were And I think I did in some ways but there were just some realities of just the economics and the reason people purchase product, teachers purchase products that I didn't realize because I think I was probably too close to it.
Speaker 1:And why do you think that didn't come out while you were building it? Like your wife was there and your dad was there. Why do you think you didn't get that information until it was too late?
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's probably several reasons. I think the people closest to you and your family want to be supportive and you know, it's really hard to get a real I mean they mean well but it's hard to get a real like objective answer out of them. They're always going to say, It looks good. You should keep doing it. You know, because they love you and they want to support you.
Speaker 2:So just relying on your family members advice is maybe not the best idea even if they mean well and they're trying honestly to help you. They're maybe not the best people to listen to because they're not going to give you a straight answer. And then also I just think that I was just so excited about my idea. I had kind of these just rose tinted goggles on or whatever the phrase is that you know I was just seeing things in a really positive light and I was like this is going go great and people are going to love this and I was just really amped about it. And I probably just wasn't willing to see the signals that were there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And what was the response in Hacker News when you did the postmortem? What were people saying in that community there?
Speaker 2:Oh, everything. It's like with Hacker News, there's a 100 different opinions and some people were saying I was an idiot to shut it down. Some people were saying you should look for an acquisition, you should open source it, you should do this, you should do that. I think there was very little actual business advice that made much sense in the thread. I think you know there are a couple like tech industry celebrities that commented on it and said you know, like you can follow all the gurus advice and still fail and you know, so I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think there were a lot of there was a lot of input there but I think what I learned after that just from other you know just one on one conversations was more useful and it was just about choosing the right kind of audience and building a product that you have data that people actually need that and they're willing to pay for it. Those were the biggest takeaways for me I think.
Speaker 1:So why did you choose Now first of all, who is the audience for Bootstrapping Design?
Speaker 2:So the audience is It's really specific. Programmers, developers who are building their own businesses.
Speaker 1:Okay and how did you choose that audience? Why did you choose that group?
Speaker 2:It was just through research. So just did a bunch of research on various audiences and that again that was something I learned from Amy's class and just kind of you you list out audiences and you go and see what they're doing online, where they hang out and what are their pain points and you try and get as narrow of an audience as possible so you can really hone in on their pain points and so was what I did. Originally I was just researching developers and you know, but then I discovered there were several places where there were these start up communities basically where developers were saying, Well, how do you get a design? I can't afford to spend $3,000 on hiring a designer. How can you get something?
Speaker 2:These themes are giving me a hard time. Are there any good resources? And so that was a really strong indicator that a book might be a good idea for that group.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And what about the Everyone's always saying that developers don't pay for things.
Speaker 2:I don't know why people say that. I don't think that's true at all.
Speaker 1:So I mean I think people say it because people say, developers are into open source and you know, they'll build something before they have to buy it. Mhmm. But that hasn't been your experience.
Speaker 2:No, not at all. I mean I think with code maybe it's a little bit different. Mean, you know how many developers have you heard, well I'll just roll my own, whatever. Roll my own service, my own shopping cart, whatever it is. But design is kind of different than that.
Speaker 2:It's not just about It's a skill. Know, you have to kind of work at it, you have to practice and it's not necessarily really intuitive just getting started. I think there you not only have to put a lot of work into building skill but you kind of when you're starting out, really need the advice of somebody who has more experience who can kind of give you some shortcuts and guide you towards the right things to try. And early in my career I had that and I was very fortunate to have that and that was what I tried to put into the book and why I think it's a little bit different than you know just going and reading blog posts about you know graphic design because they're really just tutorials and they don't really teach you how to develop your skill. If that makes How
Speaker 1:to kind of develop your own design palette so to speak.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So how do you describe yourself by the way?
Speaker 2:I call myself a designer but I kind of do everything. I don't know. People say there's no such thing as a generalist and I think kind of think of myself as one. I do front end coding, I'm a writer, I'm a designer. Even I've done a little bit of back end coding like I've used Rails a little bit.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you're you're basic you're mostly a front end guy. Yeah. But you're you and and when you were consulting and doing work, were you like an HTML CSS guy? Were you a Photoshop guy?
Speaker 1:What were you doing before that?
Speaker 2:Well, was a few years ago. It's actually been a few years since I've done any consulting work. I'm looking to get back into it now but a few years ago it was mostly you know, people weren't really talking about designing in the browser as much then so it was mostly Photoshop work was the kind of request I would get. But then I did a lot of front end you know building it out too you know doing WordPress themes, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And so did you have any challenges, you know, your audience isn't really a group you were a part of then, was it? Did you have any challenges reaching out to them?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I'm not exactly a part, yeah, because I'm not really a full I was never a full time developer at a job or anything like that so it is a slightly different skill set. But since I'm teaching design, I have experience, you know, I have experience as a designer so I can teach design so that played to my strengths I think. But yeah, I mean just reaching the audience because I wasn't part of it was interesting and I had to do a lot of research just you know where do developers hang out online, you know how do I reach them, things like that. And even just that kind of research teaches you a lot about what kind of language to use like if you're writing a landing page or even just the book, know, what kind of words does this audience use when they're talking about this topic.
Speaker 2:Research helps you so much for that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So take us through the launch now. You wrote the book which is hard Was that harder than you thought it would be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was. It took me four months to write the library. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you got done with the book. Did you have a mailing list or a waiting list from the time you started? When did that start?
Speaker 2:I believe, yeah, so I put up a landing page, I think it was in November and like early November, I think this was 2012 maybe, I don't remember the year. And it was just basically just your standard landing page with kind of a sales pitch on it and at the bottom it said, do want to know when this book is ready, put your email address in here. So I started up a mailing list and then as I was writing, I sent out a couple of previews. So I sent out a free chapter, I sent a couple articles just kind of testing different topics to see what people responded to, asking for feedback. That worked pretty well and I just kind of did that over four months as I wrote it and then I think it was March when I actually launched it, put up a new landing page with a purchase link and everything.
Speaker 1:Okay. And how did your list grow over time? Do you remember anything significant there or was it pretty steady?
Speaker 2:It was actually pretty steady. I was really fortunate when I put up the first landing page just to announce the project that it hit Hacker News and I got a lot of support from some really nice people who helped spread the word. So I think that first within the first week or so, I had about a thousand newsletter subscribers.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And over the next couple months, I think I got to about 2,500. So and that was mostly just residual, just gradual off of the initial announcement.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, gotcha. And was there any feedback while you were like was there anything that you got back while you're sending these things out that made you adjust the book or change the product in some way?
Speaker 2:Honestly, no. The feedback, I was really surprised by that but it was all really positive. The one thing that I did learn while I was writing it, I pretty much cut the book in half. I had this huge outline when I put up the landing page and just you know because I needed to have a rough plan of what I was gonna do. I hadn't written it yet but I ended up cutting about half of it out and I was a little bit worried when I started sending samples and stuff that people would say this looks kind of short, there's not very much in this but the first chapter I sent was on typography and people responded to that well so that gave me the confidence to say okay, I think I can launch this with less than I planned and people will still be happy with it.
Speaker 2:I'm table of contents and people seem fine with it so.
Speaker 1:Okay. And why did you decide to cut it in half?
Speaker 2:Because it would have taken me a year to finish writing it. If I had done every topic on my list, it was just too much. It would have been such a big book. So I had to launch it. Actually what I did was I launched it as a beta version because I was still a little bit nervous that people would say there wasn't enough in there and I think it was about 140 pages in the PDF and I launched it and just sent a request like, Okay, what do you guys think?
Speaker 2:This is the beta, know, tell me what you think and I'll revise it. And I did a revised version a couple months later but it was really just light edits was all it was. Just grammar and I think I you know maybe an extra couple pages or something but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Didn't need to change it that much so
Speaker 1:I was think I was on the beta. I'm trying to remember actually how I heard about it because I always think that discovery process is interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But I can't remember exactly but I think one thing that's important is that you were able to create some buzz whether that was luck or purposeful. I think one thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is you kind of have to get hit with something a couple times. I was even thinking maybe it's up to seven times. Seven times before you actually think, Hey, you know what, maybe I should get that thing. And if you only talk about it once or you only tweet about it once and you really don't want to push it too much, I actually see you apologizing for this all the time.
Speaker 1:I do it, you'll be like, I apologize, I'm going to be doing some promo or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm always thinking, man, you just wasted a tweet. Should
Speaker 2:Well, I try to be nice, know. I want to balance like the sales pitches with providing stuff that's valuable, you know, at least providing stuff that's valuable that somebody doesn't have to pay for, you know. Yeah. So I don't want people to think that I'm a spammer and that I'm always, you know, plugging my own stuff and
Speaker 1:not cheating. Yeah, that's good. In my experience, I'm this way too. We're often way too like I don't want to share too much but you were able to create some buzz for this. People heard about it.
Speaker 1:And Yes, I remember seeing it, and this is the purchasing process in my head. And you always have to go back, right? So there's things going on at work where I just can't get the Where we're slowing down, I was working for like a web app, right? Where we're slowing down is we always had to wait for the designer to build something even for really basic pages. And I thought, you know what, I need the developers to just know some basic skills.
Speaker 1:This was a dot net app and at the time we were using web forms. So the developer kind of owns the process and everything kind of has to start in .net and I was thinking man, if I could just have the developers understand some basic design principles they could do the first part and then the designer could come in later and clean it up. And that's why we bought it. I bought it for the office and was like the threshold that I got pushed over to actually buy. Is there other stories like that?
Speaker 1:Do you know other people that bought it for work or was it mostly people buying it for their own purpose?
Speaker 2:No, you're totally right. Since I launched that book, I have learned that the audience is really diverse actually. It's not all programmers who are building businesses but it's I even had designers purchase the book which shocked me because it's mostly about fundamentals. You know, it's like really basic design ideas rather than the advanced stuff. So there's a really I was kind of surprised that designers would be interested in that but it's been designers, marketers, just people who don't write code or design, just like product managers, know people who are project managers, developers as well, developers that are working at agencies or web shops, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:It's funny because the sales pitch for it on the landing pages really tailored really closely. You're a developer, you're building an online business but all kinds of other people have bought it. So it's been interesting to talk to those people and hear about that. It's kind of funny how your marketing can work in ways you don't expect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And real time update from the chat room here. Yeah. So Nathan says, I got on his list somehow after the tenth or fifteenth email I finally bought. I remember seeing it over and over again but I was interested enough to not feel like it was spam.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of interesting, know, he's saying it took him 10 to 15 emails before he bought.
Speaker 2:Well thanks Nathan, that's really nice of you. Yeah, 10 to 15 times is a long time. I mean I think part of that's I mean it's not just being reminded about that it exists because obviously people forget, know, when you need to remind them but it's also just building trust, know. $39 for a book is you know, I mean for some people that's not an impulse buy and that purchase is more than just spending $39 for some people it represents like a big decision about some work they're going to invest in. So you've got to convince them that it's worthwhile and build some trust and say, well okay, here's some previews of my writing, here's why I can really help you out with doing this.
Speaker 2:So I think you've got to build some trust there as well as remind people.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I've been talking to people about this a lot lately especially people that are following kind of like the what's become kind of like the launch sequence which is you know you do this and you do this and you do this it's usually like an email sequence. The challenge I'm seeing that they're having is that haven't built enough trust, even like the fact that you had done something before and you'd written a post mortem and all of those touch points all help create just an awareness of who you are, but also trust. Like this fellow has tried some things, he's built some things, he's written some things. Those all help, I think, more than people realize. It's why people can't just replicate the success of everyone else, like a Nathan Barry, just by following a launch sequence because Nathan was doing a lot of other things to create awareness outside of the launch sequence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree with that and I've had quite a few customers actually who told me that they found out about me from that first post mortem that I wrote and then they discovered my e book through that, know, by just checking back on my blog or whatever it was or following me on Twitter or wherever it was that they found those updates. But yeah, I agree. I think that you have to put yourself out there and share what you're doing and one thing that I've tried to do and I've been more successful at this at other times at some times than others but it's just being candid about how things are going. Know, sharing failures, sharing successes and just trying to share what I'm learning through all of it. And I think that wins you a lot of points.
Speaker 2:I think people come to respect you if you're willing to tell them more than just you know how you can help them but also you know what hasn't worked for you and things that they should avoid doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well and let's talk about the launch. So how did the launch go? Was it like you launched and what happened?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the e book launch went great. It was kind of funny, there was a coincidence that that same day, Sasha Grief launched his design e book and we had never even talked before. It just kind of happened that we both launched our books on the same day. So we both wrote some guest posts on a smart bear about pricing and stuff over the following week. But my launch went great.
Speaker 2:It was mostly just to my mailing list and I think it made about $8,000 within the first forty eight hours and I was just thrilled with that. I was hoping to make you know 50 sales and it just it was great. It was very encouraging and then over the following couple months, it reached about 30,000 in sales.
Speaker 1:Wow. So that's a different kind of launch actually. This is encouraging. So $8,000 in your first forty eight hours and then it just kept chugging along, didn't it?
Speaker 2:It did. Yeah, it kind had a mind of its I sent a couple of emails after that, know, just trying to remind people that it was there and just articles. But yeah, it kept going. I was really surprised. When you read about people's successes, usually you see a huge spike right up front and then it tapers off really slowly.
Speaker 2:But I had kind of a plateau for about two months and then it trickled off.
Speaker 1:Wow. So it was kind of steady for two months.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean I relatively steady. I mean I didn't have an $8,000 day but it was you know probably a few $100 a day for several for a couple months, something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah that's encouraging because that could have been like $4 your first day, $4 your next day and then continue continuing on. I think that's encouraging because I think one of the problems right now is we've got all these folks that are having huge, huge launches. And I mean a huge launch is great. But if, you know, some people I had one guy call me and say, you know, I had a $2,000 launch day.
Speaker 1:I said, well that's amazing. Like, you sold $2,000 worth of product in a day? Like, keep going man. You never know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:Right and people, I mean I've done the same thing, know. I relaunched that e book actually recently and I made about $2,500 in a day and I was saying, Oh man, you know it wasn't a huge spike of sales like I was hoping for but you've got to remember that's still you sold a product that you built and you connected it with people who wanted it and you made money. And I think it's easy to compare yourself to other people who have had huge launches like 30,000 in a day or something and say well, mine was a failure if I didn't make 30,000 in a day. But you know, nobody starts at that place. You've got to build to that point and just making money off of a product is a huge accomplishment, I think.
Speaker 2:Because so many people try really hard to do that and fail at it. So just making a little bit of money is I think a great, great accomplishment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we need to talk about this more and share this more because like I said, I think the folks that are doing really, really big, big launches are awesome and that's amazing. But there's also people, you know, like there's folks like me that on the side with very little time, I've been able to make $40,000 I think in the past twelve months, well more than that now. It's probably 45 or 50 now. And that's amazing. I think that's amazing.
Speaker 1:I think we should celebrate even like if someone launched tomorrow and sold $500 or sold $100 or sold $1,000 sometimes our expectations need to just come down a little bit to say, This is still awesome that you built something and launched it people on the internet actually cared enough to pay for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah and I actually just wrote a post about this that I will be sharing soon but there are other ways to measure success than just money you know. After I relaunched that book, I had there was this guy who recorded a video, thank you and posted it on YouTube and sent it to me and it was just like three minutes of him saying how helpful this video I made was. And was just so shocked by that, that somebody cared enough about this thing that I made to take the time to record a video and send it to me. And I mean that's the kind of success that's worth celebrating. Regardless of how much money I made on that, somebody actually got value from it and it really helped them out and that's great.
Speaker 2:Know I think it's so easy to overlook that but if you make 2,000 in sales, well people are getting value out of that thing you made and that's you should be proud of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah and I think one thing I like about Sasha Graf is he's always reminding me that you know, there's all these steps and checks you got to do and he's just okay with saying, Sometimes I'm not going to do those things.
Speaker 2:Like, I
Speaker 1:still haven't AB tested a page and sometimes I'm just okay with things not going perfectly according to plan. Like you've shown, you can have a $4,000 launch day and then you could have that great guest post sequence that you had with a smart bear and that might drive a bunch more people interested. Then you might have a bunch of customers that really appreciated what you did and then they create a thank you blog post or a thank you video and that drives more, you know?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:You never know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree with that. Just think you know and I think there's a temptation like I'm pretty cynical and you could almost call that self deception like you're just trying to say that it went better than it did. Know even though you didn't make money, it still helped people and you know like you're lying to yourself but I really do think that there's some meaning in that and that it's good to just you know be adding things and making products that actually make a difference for people's work and I think it's good to remember that and I think it's really easy to forget that especially when your sales numbers don't quite reach your expectations and you're hoping, well you know I worked on this a month and I wish I had made more money. But just remember you know those people who did buy it, they're getting value out of that and that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I like about that is that you stay focused on other people whereas sales numbers is all about you and if you get focused on that, you'll it's just a pit of despair.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 1:And I think if you stay focused on people, eventually, and you know, especially for someone like you that's a real craftsman, like you produce really good work. Your book I was still think your book is one of the best put together books I've seen.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:I think when people see that kind of care and attention to detail and the fact that you actually care about them and you're not just out for dollar signs, think people appreciate that and eventually, it comes around. I think eventually, all of the stars align and you'll get the big break.
Speaker 2:I hope so, yeah. I hope things work that way. You know it's hard to I've had some trouble reproducing that success to be honest, know. I think I wonder was it we were talking the other weekend, I was saying like I'm trying to find this formula, figure out what the formula was that worked for me the first time and I haven't been able to find it and then I think it was you who said maybe there isn't a formula. And I was like, oh, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know I think sometimes there's some luck involved and you just got to keep plugging away even when things don't go the way you expect them to or hope they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well let's talk a little bit about cascade.io, that was your next product. Right. Because you've shared with me that was a bit more of a struggle. Maybe talk about what Cascade is and kind of what's happened so far with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Cascade is, it was kind of the follow-up product to the e book and it's essentially a front end framework. I call it a design framework. It's built on top of Twitter Bootstrap and essentially it uses a CSS pre processor to switch between things like color schemes and font pairings and logo styles, stuff like that. Comes with some kind of customizable layouts.
Speaker 2:So kind of like a design theme on steroids where the layouts are kind of based on blocks and you can swap sections in and out based on what you need and then you see you can do a landing page and then it comes with a design for like a web app that would match the landing page. So the thinking there is that you can take the knowledge that you got from the book about you know how to pick colors that match your goals and what you're trying to communicate to your audience and just pick them and then rather than having to come up with it from scratch, you can just make those decisions, you get it all in code and then you can just connect it to whatever you're building. So I launched that, I actually announced that over a year ago and I launched it last November and it has been I don't remember the exact number of sales it's made but I think it's just slightly over $10,000 in sales and it's you know, I put about four to five months into building it. It was a pretty substantial project and it's the sales have been kind of slow for it.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of a puzzle I'm still trying to figure out. I'm not really sure what to do with it right now to be honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's where it and maybe just I know like especially after the first success, I know that was hard on you and I think that's just worth just talking about that sometimes get some sometimes something works and sometimes something doesn't work and sometimes something doesn't work yet.
Speaker 2:And Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's all challenging.
Speaker 2:It is and it's I think it's really hard to know if something's not gonna work or if it's just not working yet. So with Cascade, I think I've rewritten the landing page for it six times, maybe seven times. Completely rewritten and redesigned And I relaunched it once. I did a couple launch sequences on my email newsletter and I just haven't been able to figure out is there a combination here that's gonna make this work for people. You know, but I do have a handful of customers and the people who are actually using or emailing me saying, one guy said, this is like my secret sauce, know, I'm building a web application and I don't think I could have done it without this.
Speaker 2:And that was so cool to hear that from him. He's doing such a great job with it but I'm having a hard time selling it to more people. I tried different ways of talking about it, different types of sales pitches and emphasizing different aspects of the product like different features and stuff and it's been tough. Yeah, it's been really tough.
Speaker 1:I think that's just challenging and in some ways I think I just wanted to bring it up so we could just acknowledge that sometimes it's just tough and like, you I have talked about it and I don't really have any answers either. Yeah. There's this idea of just being able to like, like you said, I'm going to keep trying things and keep trying things and maybe try some other things too, aside from Cascade. But, know, I know there's other people like, maybe I shouldn't name names, but I know I've talked to other founders who were very successful and then they tried something else and it didn't work and
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:And that's sometimes challenging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is and I think, like I was saying a second ago, it's hard to figure out if you need to just keep working on it. I think that's your I mean, most of us were programmers or designers and that's kind of our instinct to keep working on it. Keep improving it, add new features, write about it a different way, whatever and that's kind of what we do because we're builders, know, we make things. And sometimes I think it's just okay to say, well I'm going to walk away from this, take a break and just you know get some perspective. So that's what I'm doing right now because you know I'm just out of ideas.
Speaker 2:I think it's okay to do that sometimes and just say, this isn't working and I don't know what to do with it and do something else for a little while. So that's what I'm doing. Have since launching that, there are some things that I think some mistakes that I've made along the way that I'm trying to remedy. So for example, I think for a long time, once I started working on this project, all I really talked about on my newsletter was this project and what I'm building. And if you really think about that, that's not super interesting to my subscribers because it's not like they can go and use it right now.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm just building it and I'm telling them what I'm they know what it's like to build a piece of software. Know, that's not really that interesting. So for a long time, most of my writing was just about me. You know, it wasn't really about stuff that my subscribers could really use or get much value from. So over that process of building Cascade, I've lost quite a few subscribers on my mailing list because of that.
Speaker 2:And really it wasn't like a huge people were leaving in droves or anything. It was just you know, the standard like every time you send a newsletter, 1% unsubscribes or whatever and you you send a dozen newsletters and you've lost 600 people, you know. So over time, I think you start to see the effects of that and I'm trying to take steps to you know, start providing value to people again. Yeah. Rather than talking about myself and what I want to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great. I mean that's great advice for a lot of us that have started newsletters. That is a challenge of like, what do we write? And I think the thing that we always seem to come back to is, okay, we just got to go back to people and how can we care for them.
Speaker 2:Right. That
Speaker 1:might take some work. We might have to rediscover like where are they at now? Who's on this list now? I thought it was developers but maybe it's a bunch of agency people or, you know?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah. I think that's another thing that I faced is my audience like we were talking about earlier is a lot more diverse than I expected. I just you know, I built this product for programmers and it turns out a lot of other people were reading that book and here I am, I built a product just for programmers. You pretty much have to be very competent coder to use it. So that could contribute to it too but I think one of the other things that I did over that period when I was building and launching that was I think a lot of times we feel this pressure to do things the right way, you know.
Speaker 2:Everybody says, you know, keep your mailing list warm. If you're not writing all the time then you're making a big mistake and people are going to forget who you are and they're going unsubscribe and you're to waste all your success and all this stuff. And so you feel this pressure to be writing all the time and I don't know about you but sometimes for me it's really hard to write. I just have a hard time coming up with something. So sometimes I would find myself just putting out writing just because I felt like I had to and it was just stuff that I threw together really quickly.
Speaker 2:And I think sometimes I think I phrased it to you this way the other day. Sometimes I'm just writing to fill the gaps between newsletters or between writing to fill the gaps between sales pitches. And I just think you know, I'm trying to focus on getting back to value. Know, making sure that when I write something that it's good and that there's a reason somebody would want to read it rather than just sending things out because I feel like I have to, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When I write something, I want to make sure it's good.
Speaker 2:It sounds obvious, right? But I think it's something that you can fall into just as part of your efforts in marketing a product or you know writing a newsletter that you just feel this pressure to be shipping things constantly and it's maybe not totally conscious that you're just writing just because you feel like you have to write, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah exactly, Exactly. So where can people find you on the web right now? Where can they catch your writing? Where can they see you know what you're doing with your next projects? Where should they go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so right now probably the best place to go is just bootstrappingdesign.com. It's just the site for my e book and there's a newsletter sign up on that site as well. In the next week or so, I'm gonna be launching a new site for myself that I'm gonna be giving away a free e book. The next e book I'm doing is free and it's gonna have a bunch of new stuff up there. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll see that.
Speaker 1:Sweet. What's the new e book on?
Speaker 2:It's really just a collection of articles that I've written over the past couple of years. So it's called Designs Iron Fist. There's a title of one of those articles and it's just like the writing that people have responded to the best over the past couple of years and I've kind of gone through and edited and put it together into a nice custom PDF design.
Speaker 1:I love it. Design's iron fist.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright, so you heard it here first. You're going to need to hear about it six more times. Yeah. But make sure you sign up for the list so you can get it. So bootstrappingdesign.com and thanks again Jared for your time.
Speaker 2:Thanks Justin.
Speaker 1:Hey, I'm back. Thanks for listening to the show. Really appreciate all your nice reviews on iTunes. If you haven't given one of those yet, go to iTunes, search for Product People, click five stars. It's just that easy.
Speaker 1:Also on Stitcher, you can leave a review as well. And tell your friends. We're Product People TV on Twitter. And again, head over to productpeople.club. Sign up for that waiting list.
Speaker 1:And I'll be inviting people in small batches, probably five people at a time. If you'd like to check me out on Twitter, I'm at m I Justin, and I write a newsletter every Saturday morning, justinjackson.ca/newsletter. It's all about marketing, building products, launching products. So if you're into that stuff, and you must be because you're here, subscribe to that. Justinjackson.ca/newsletter.
Speaker 1:And that's it for this week. You, as always, have been a great audience. We'll see you again next Thursday.
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