Episode 74
· 47:21
Hey, product people. Have you ever wanted to launch a successful Kickstarter, create your own web application, and write your own book? Well, you're gonna love this episode because Tracy Osborne, today's guest, has done all three of those things. First, I think we need a little update from me, Justin Jackson, because it's been a while since we've had an episode. I just flew to Barcelona for MicroConf Europe.
Speaker 1:Mike and Rob invited me to speak. I opened up the conference there, and I just had an incredible time, hanging out with all these folks from Europe that I've never met in person before. These are people that have been listening to this podcast since day one. These are people who have, you know, bought a lot of the things I've made. These are people who I've developed good friendships with just talking on email or on Twitter or in Slack.
Speaker 1:And it was just a pleasure to get to know them, to be able to talk to them face to face. I I asked my wife booked my travel for this this trip. And I told her, you know, just book me three or four days for the conference, and then I'll fly home. And she ended up booking me twelve days. She wanted me to go and enjoy being in Barcelona, and I was a little bit worried about that.
Speaker 1:I haven't taken a break in a long time. And it's sometimes I feel like, you know, if I stop working, if I if I stop slow down the train, that everything's gonna kinda fall apart. And everything didn't fall apart. I took a lot of time off. I ended up hanging out with Mark Kuhlberger from Beta List almost every single day.
Speaker 1:After the conference, we went in. We went to Sagrada Familia, which is that big crazy cathedral. We went on a bunch of hikes. We took photos of us overlooking Barcelona. And, yeah, it was just a very relaxing time.
Speaker 1:And I highly if you can I I mean, I I felt like I couldn't afford to to take that much time off, especially with my book coming out, Marketing for Developers? I managed to get the beta out right before I left. There's about 70 people in the beta right now. And, I'm hoping to have the final launch in October now. It's pushed out a little bit.
Speaker 1:Working on the video tutorials right now. If you want more information on that, justinjackson.ca/marketingfor developers. But anyway, I thought, man, I can't afford to take time off. And I I'm just really glad I did. It it was really great to just not think about work, to let my mind recharge.
Speaker 1:And I've been talking to a few folks since then, and a lot of people seem to have this strategy of taking time off, individually even if you're married, to to go off, without your family and just have some time to renew yourself. One of my favorite moments of the trip was sitting in this coffee shop in Barcelona called Satan's Coffee and just reading these magazines. The the coffee shop didn't have Wi Fi. And so I was just reading these magazines and these interviews with interesting architects. I read an interview about Dan Wyden from Wyden and Kennedy, which is a big ad firm in Portland.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, just an incredible time. Glad I'm back. Getting back on the train and finishing off marketing for developers. I also have an announcement coming up for a new thing I'm working on that'll probably yeah. I'll probably release some some things about it in October.
Speaker 1:That's all I'll say for now. It's another podcast. And in the vein of this podcast product people and the other one I did, build and launch, it kind of incorporates both of those elements. Alright. That is about four minutes of yakking from me, which is way too much.
Speaker 1:Let's get into this interview with Tracy Osborne. You're gonna love it. Here it is. Tracy, why don't you give us a little bit of background on you? What have you been making lately?
Speaker 1:And, you know, how did that kind of all get started?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Okay. So this kind of all started about five and a half years ago. I was working at a startup and it started in college. It was really cool.
Speaker 2:We were working in a garage, just a bunch of me and a bunch of dudes, and I was a designer. I worked with them for four and a half years. And after four and half years, I kind of learned everything I was going to learn at this startup and, realized that I kind of really wanted to not have a boss for a while. So as a designer, I quit and I started freelancing. I did freelancing over the summer.
Speaker 2:My husband was buying through YC. And so I actually worked with a bunch of YC startups designing their websites, which was a good experience. Yes. But it
Speaker 1:was Your husband is in this space as well?
Speaker 2:Yes. He works for himself as well. His YC company, he ended up leaving that company, but he started another company, which he then got acquired by Google. And then he left Google and now he's working on companies just with me as we travel. He's a cool inspiration.
Speaker 2:He's been actually helping me a lot about all this Cause when he was in YC, I watched him go through that. And I'm like, dude, that looks so cool. I want to be a startup founder as well. And freelancing was fun, but it was still like, as a designer, I had to go to these people and be like, hey, this is what I recommend. And they're like, nah.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, Oh, they kind of drove me nuts. So I got into my head that I really, really truly wanted to work for myself and build something and get into YC and all that.
Speaker 1:So you started off as a designer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you about that because if you look at Tracy's stuff, folks, if you go to Hello Web App or Wedding Lovely, it is very well designed.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:And the book itself just looks beautiful. So I was wondering, that was one of my questions is, did you do the design for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you did.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I have a kind of a tech background. I mean, I've been working on websites since I was 11, which is like 1995. My, both my family has worked in tech. My uncle used to work at apple.
Speaker 2:My grandfather worked at IBM. So I've always was around computers. I just started building HTML websites. And when I went to college, I thought, oh, I'm doing HTML websites. That obviously means I'm a programmer.
Speaker 2:And I went into computer science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and it was an awful experience. Not a education like a computer science in a academic setting with all the theory and everything just did not jive with me. And I did not learn. We were learning Java too, which I've heard is not the best for learning your first programming language on. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I and I had this awful experience with one professor, which kind of led me to rage quitting. I switched over to an art degree so I can do graphic design instead.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Mhmm. Can we can we stop right there for a second? Because, obviously, women in tech is a topic that comes up quite a bit. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And also, you know, people are talking a lot about women in STEM and and things like that. So what specifically about was there anything specifically about the course? Like did you feel like that was the program was just more not for you? Or was there something about being a woman in that setting that was not working?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was lucky. There's a lot of other chicks in my classes with me, which is cool. I mean, it wasn't like fiftyfifty. I want to say it was maybe 20, twentyeighty women in my classes.
Speaker 2:I don't want to say it was me because I'm such a visual person. My our school is on semesters and quarters. In second quarter, I took a class where we started learning GUIs. And I was like, oh, this is exactly what I want to do. Like, this is really cool.
Speaker 2:I can, like, press a button and then write the thing to make the thing work. But computer science is really not about that. It was like, you know, you get to know this, but then I moved into the third quarter. This was the awful class. And it was more about theory.
Speaker 2:Like a good half of the class, a half of the quarter was dedicated to a project where we had to go through sorting methods. Had to, like, reverse engineer sorting methods or something like that and write this whole paper on, like, why ones are better, ones aren't, and, like, how I run these tests. And it was, I just bombed it. It was, I mean, for me working with a real life application, which is why programming really works well for me when I can see the results live and work with customers, it's like everything started clicking at that moment. Computer science, that professor in that one class, I was not getting it.
Speaker 2:And I sent him an email about it. And he sent me back this rant saying how I never study, which is not true. About how I was being a terrible student and it's getting through life. I don't know why he did that. And it was a where I'm like, can't be in computer science anymore.
Speaker 2:This guy is awful. So, I want to go back to him and be like, Hey, you thought I could be a programmer. Look, I'm writing books about this. I really fantasize about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because that's pretty antagonistic on his half. Horrible. Yeah. It's funny because that brings up a lot of questions about what is programming and what's required to become a programmer.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:actually, that would be interesting to know, in terms of theory, how did you approach theory in your book? It
Speaker 2:Never really.
Speaker 1:You find like it's just really about the hands on, like building Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, my goal with the book was basically a lot of other programming books, they throw in the theory. And I feel like for a person who's not a programmer that's jumping into programming for the first time, like me in college, they need to see the actual results about what's going on. And theory can come in like step two. But step one is to get that moment of success, like this is what we're doing. And then we can build that in afterwards.
Speaker 2:So in my book, I very much, avoid a lot of technical explanations. Try to, I don't want to say dumb it down because it's not dumbed down, but it's definitely two real words. I don't use acronyms. I don't try to throw in fancy pants words. I try to be really goofy in the book to make it seem more real, like more friendly.
Speaker 2:And, you know, it's just, I hope that, you know, the book will get people inspired and say, oh, this is what it can be like. And if they want to be an engineer and they need to know that theory, they need to know some of that really deep dive information, then they can learn after that. But it's definitely the book is is just literally like step one to deployment of building a web app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I I was reading some of your stuff and I think a lot of people can identify with this. You said you were you're reading other tutorials and there was things that just you're like, why are they explaining it that way? Can you think of an example of a way that it was being explained one way and you decided to explain it another way?
Speaker 2:Yes. The big thing right now in Django is class based views. Okay. And, you know, and it's for excellent programmers, class based views where you can like make a piece of code that is so reusable and you can just tie it into a billion places and makes your code like so efficient. My husband often says to me when I'm talking about how to do something, he's like, oh yeah, you can do that in like five lines.
Speaker 2:Because that's like the big thing you do. You have to like cut it down to like the most perfect little piece of code. I feel very strongly that does not work for a beginner. Hello web app is taught, I guess, function based views where like, literally the it's like a view per page kinda. And it just, you know, top down in the code walks you through everything that's happening.
Speaker 2:So the code is not efficient. It's not pretty. And this is still the code I use for wedding lovely. It made sense to me to write it this way. It means that when I need to figure out what's going on, I don't have like think really hard about like what's tying in and what's gonna break if I move, change one thing that's tied to five other things.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, there's, you know, other beginner tutorials for Django still to this day that are just like class based views are the way to go. And I'm just like, that's, I totally disagree with that. Hello about teaches Django web programming. It doesn't necessarily teach Python. So the first chapter says, hey, if you're learning Python, I recommend a few resources, including Zed Shah's Learn Python the Hard Way.
Speaker 1:All right. I want to go back a little bit and talk about how you promoted the book because it sounds like an interesting kind of timeline. I don't know a lot. I know that you started with Kickstarter and then you went from there. So maybe just walk me through, you had the idea and then what happened next?
Speaker 2:The first thing I did is actually reached out to a few publishers just so I can have that idea of publishers who would think it would be interesting. I reached out to my ideal publisher in the whole world, which is A Book Apart. Do a lot of books for designers. And I was thinking, oh, Django for designers. Cause they have like HTML5 for designers.
Speaker 2:Like Django for designers, this will totally fit in. I sent over, I think I wrote maybe like 3,000 words, like the basic introduction to the book. Sent it over to the editor and editor's like, this is too big of a scope. And I'm like, no, the book is going to be the size of your books. I'm pretty sure I can do that.
Speaker 2:And I, you know, this is pretty small.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like a book apart book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really my inspiration, seriously my idols. But there was no way I can convince her of that until I had the book completely finished. So they turned me down. And I ended up talking with, No Starch Press, which has all of their royalties online, and they accepted the book. They told me they would accept it.
Speaker 2:But the royalties were like, I'm going to screw this up, but it's something like $8,000, advance for 10% royalties or something like that.
Speaker 1:Wow. Okay.
Speaker 2:Which is actually fairly standard in the industry. And I was looking at that, I'm like, okay, I could do that and have an $8,000 advance or I could work with Kickstarter and get that advance because as I went through design school and I have editorial design experience. And so a lot of the things that a publisher would give me, which would be formatting a book, actually, I'm probably more irritated if someone else is formatting it than I was because I'm really opinionated. I wanted to do that anyways. So decided that Kickstarter, hopefully, would be the way to go and hopefully would get funded.
Speaker 2:So that's I got to that decision.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Did you use that idea of, I could go to a publisher and get an advance or I could go to Kickstarter? Did you ever use that as a way to promote the Kickstarter?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I didn't really use it as a to promote Kickstarter. The biggest thing for Kickstarter is actually I launched it in time for Python, Canada. Yes. This was last summer.
Speaker 2:And I have a lot of friends in the Python community already. I was actually giving a tutorial on what I was hoping to have the content on. The book wasn't written, but the tutorial was called Django for designers. I was getting tutorial there. So I got to test out the writing, the material I had.
Speaker 2:And then throughout the tutorial, I was like, support by Kickstarter. And then I'd be at the conference, and I'd find, like, the big wigs that have the 8,000 Twitter followers. I'd be like, tweet out my Kickstarter. And I basically just ran from person to person getting Wow. To promote the the Kickstarter.
Speaker 1:So you were doing some hustle. Like, you went to the conference, and you were going up to people. That's great.
Speaker 2:I think they're mostly my friends and they mostly knew of me already. So it makes it easier. It wasn't like complete strangers off the block. They're like, Hey, you don't know me. But I could be like, Hey, remember me?
Speaker 2:Now I have a Kickstarter and you really should tweet this out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, that's actually a topic I bring up in the book. How did you build those relationships? How did they kind of know who you were before I
Speaker 2:love the Python community. And, you know, I don't know about much about other communities, But when I first started learning Python, well, it helped that my husband, does Python as well. He is a contributor to a lot of, of big Python projects, including, I guess, technically as a contributor to requests because he wrote an underlying library that requests use, which is a really big library in Python. Oh, cool. So a) he does know a lot of people in Python.
Speaker 2:So when I said, hey, I'm going to learn Python as well, I got access to a few people. But then when I started we can start talking about wedding lovely as high as it in. When I first started wedding lovely, I wrote a few articles on learning or how was the order of this? I wrote, oh, yeah, wrote an article about finding a co founder. And I was like, I'm quitting my job.
Speaker 2:I'm running a web. I want to launch this website and want to find a co founder. This is before I decided to learn how to program. And I actually got a ton of votes on Hacker News. And I got a ton of Twitter followers because of this post, which is really strange.
Speaker 2:I don't think a post like that would ever get anywhere near the top on Hacker News nowadays. So I had some Python resources, but my husband does not do Django whatsoever. And I knew I needed to do Django because I needed all that stuff that's built into it for beginners. So I tweeted out being like, hey, I'm learning Django. Does anyone have resources whatnot?
Speaker 2:And a few people were like, hey, I would totally love to help you out, people I never met before, which was super cool. Wow. Kenneth Love, he's a big he works a lot with Django. He's currently in Portland. He was running as just, like, some tutorials online, like blog.
Speaker 2:It was like learn how to make a blog, which I eventually used to build wedding lovely. He I got him on I'm and I was able to ask him questions, really stupid questions. And then I met another person in the Bay Area, just randomly met up at a co working space and he walked me through the major things in Django, like Django packages and Pinnax, all these other things are built on Django to help out for beginners. So the community definitely I had some Twitter followers and I was really lucky to have a community reach out to me to help out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Although it also seems like you were willing to ask for help.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love bootstrapping off other people. Yeah. You know, because there's people everyone's smarter than me. I kind of feel like that sometimes.
Speaker 2:And it works for Wedding Lovely. When I ask for help with marketing and SEO and everything like that, people love being opinionated. You can tweet it out and people are like, Raj, this is the way you do it. I'm like, alright, check. You know, there's one answer I have.
Speaker 2:It definitely helped out for the book, you know, asking people for help with, promotion. It's bootstrapping off other people, you know, not taking advantage, but, you know, being willing to ask for help has been such a boon over the last five years for both of my ventures.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it sounds like that's how you were able to build a lot of those relationships is to ask for help. And maybe that's even counter to some of our natural instincts, which is to want to appear like you're in control and maybe to appear like you are in more control than you really are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, sometimes it's not just asking for help. Sometimes it's just saying what's going on, like being honest about your experiences, like some things for wedding lovely, I've written some posts about things I wish I did differently, marketing and all that, which does people like reading about that. I like being honest about my experiences because wedding lovely hasn't been a running runaway success. You know, it's kind of, it's been in the middle, which has been, you know, enough to keep it running, but not enough that I can get funded funding for it or, you know, hire a bunch of employees.
Speaker 2:So I like to talk about the things like why I think that's happened, Talk about the troubles I'm having and people do reach out on their own without you necessarily asking directly for help.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that vulnerability is interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, kind of the women in tech thing. It's the being self deprecating, which I get in trouble with all the time. Cause I'll have some meetings with some awesome people and I'll be like, they'll be like talking about wedding lovely. I'm like, oh yeah, that's terrible. Like I, that's what I do.
Speaker 2:I'm like, wedding lovely is not a runway success. I always do that. And it's not always a good thing because I have to be like, Hey, wedding lovely has made, I look on Stripe and it'll be like $50,000 that I've accumulated the last four years, which is peanuts for startups, but it's a huge amount of money. Sometimes I feel like I've conned it out of people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's a huge amount of money if you looked at every startup ever created and how many of them are still at revenue zero. That's a huge amount of money. I think the vulnerability is still The most successful interviews I've done, the most successful blog posts I've done is when for whatever reason I just felt like, Okay, I'll just let people know what it's really like. I think maybe you can overdo it, more often than not I think vulnerability in saying this is what happened and this is what I learned from it, that's interesting to people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the things I hate most about startup founders, when I've run into people like this, is the people where everything is amazing. And it's just like they are awesome, they are killing it, nothing is going wrong, they're going to be you know, rocket ship to the moon next week. And it's exhausting. And you know, that's not right.
Speaker 2:You know, that's just that's their personality. Just like brag, brag, brag. Everything is amazing. And especially for startups, it's probably not amazing. It's probably like they go home and they open a corner.
Speaker 2:That's what I do.
Speaker 1:Know, really hard. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's just kind of exhausting to hear that people like to hear the real stories. And that has also helped me with Binding Lovely. I work with small businesses. And when I send out emails so that I'm being honest, hey, I'm just, you know, I'm one person working from home, I'm building this website to help you out. I'm really passionate about your business.
Speaker 2:And so it's like a me and it's what I'm working on. And I'm honest sometimes like, oh, I'm trying to get funding or things. I don't try to necessarily ever say things aren't going well because I don't want to worry. It's more being human with them. And it's definitely helped out compared to some wedding startups out there, which are very corporate.
Speaker 2:They're very like, we're a big organization, blah, blah, blah. It's helping them stand out from the crowd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. You know who else does this that I love, and he's the one that kind of inspired me to try to be more like this, is Nate Cotney. Do you know Nate Cotney? Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Nate from the beginning was like when he was running draft, was like, you know, here's me and my dog. And every time you pay for a draft membership, it helps me feed my And now he's working for essentially he's
Speaker 2:Highrise. Right?
Speaker 1:Highrise.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But he just hired his wife as the chief operating officer.
Speaker 2:I know that.
Speaker 1:And, you know, there's this transparency and personability about that that I think a lot of other people would shy away from. I
Speaker 2:don't think my husband and I could work together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But even that he's sharing it like this because you know it's like, well, if it's just a husband and wife, that makes it seem like not as professional. And I just love his personability, I think, is the big thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The app is still a great product, even though he's not 100 working on it. I use it for writing my Hello Web app.
Speaker 1:Oh cool. Yeah, I use it all the time too. That's awesome. So let's go back to that Kickstarter. So you decided to do this Kickstarter serendipitously.
Speaker 1:Is that a word? Serendipitously? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think so. At least it should be.
Speaker 1:Feels like I'm saying it wrong and there's a Canadian Canadian
Speaker 2:I make up words all the time.
Speaker 1:But you know, you had this you launched it and then you had Picon at the same time.
Speaker 2:Well, launched it for Picon. I launched it early because of Picon. It wasn't necessarily serendipitously planned. Yes. It was I moved it forward, and it was kind of stressful because I had to get everything ready.
Speaker 2:And the book wasn't in any finished state in terms of the Kickstarter, but I was like, oh, wait, this is such an opportunity that I need to move things around to make it happen.
Speaker 1:And is that did that really move the needle having all those people share it? Like, you think that was
Speaker 2:a key It's to hard to tell, you know, what would happen if I didn't do it. You know, a lot of Kickstarter Kickstarter is kind of like the nice way of asking your friends for money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is
Speaker 2:a little like, hurts a little bit. I'm like, oh, you know, support my Kickstarter. And then a friend sends over $50 and I'm like, oh, hi. Thank you, friends. If I feel real bad about that, I'm hoping strangers on the internet will take care of that for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It definitely helps. I think a lot of Python it's like, I don't know offhand exact numbers, but feeling wise, I want to say like 60% of the donations probably came from people in the Python community. They were super supportive. It wasn't like newbies looking for the book.
Speaker 2:It was people who want to support the book, even though they didn't need it, which was really awesome. I had a big contribution, I guess, a sponsorship from a startup that was in the Django community, just want to reach other Django people. So there was that. There was the Python community. I did get a lot of backers through Kickstarter, which was cool.
Speaker 2:I think overall, it was over 500 backers. But I think a lot of it was just like the support of the Python community and ergo launching at PyCon really helped out with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that story because I think the challenge we often have as makers is that we want to stay in our basement and build things. And this idea that you to get out there and actually talk to people face to face, and maybe there's even some hesitancy to share what we're working on. And I think regardless of of why people were supporting the Kickstarter, what I like about Kickstarter is that it's it's way different than taking angel money or venture money. It's like people are saying, like, I believe in this, And maybe the whole whole job to be done is just that they want to have an investment in whatever the project is.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and to this day, people still I mean, I I bought a lot of I bought both thirty seven Signals books just because I wanted to invest in the movement more than the content, you know? So there's always these other kinds of jobs that people are are kinda hiring products to do or hiring, know, in this case, a Kickstarter sponsorship to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you but meeting people face to face and saying, you know, I've got this idea to launch this book. What do you think? And then you can get the direct reaction.
Speaker 2:It's more persuasive because I could send an email to that same person. Emails are so easy to ignore. When you go up to them, again, as a human being like, hey, this Kickstarter would Love it if you could, you know, tweet it out. I think it's just vastly more likely that the person will go ahead and do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you can also get their direct, feedback. Yeah. Yeah. Because I wonder if it would have been different if you were talking about kick starting Wedding Lovely.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I probably would have. Because, you know, Python talking to Python people working on a project that's gonna be improving the Python ecosystem It's very aligned. Kickstarter for wedding loving, that's such a fascinating idea. The wedding industry kind of drives me nuts because I guess I working with developers and launching a book, marketing and running all that has been so much easier than working in the wedding industry.
Speaker 2:The wedding industry is different because there's a $1,000,000,000 different wedding startups out there. They're all vying for attention because a lot of people jump into the industry thinking, oh, it's a wedding. People are spending $28,000 on average on a wedding. I'll just launch my product and just rake in the cash, which isn't at all. And bloggers, there's so many bloggers out there.
Speaker 2:Like you try to get your product out and get people talking about it. And bloggers just like, well, I'll talk about it. If you pay me $800 Yeah. Because lots of posts are the way that they make, they all make money. Whereas the book was like, you know, I launched a book and people were excited about talking about it.
Speaker 2:You know, they didn't ask for money for me for, you know, putting it out there.
Speaker 1:To talk about it.
Speaker 2:Stuff like that. Yeah. So it was totally different. It's honestly more refreshing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now you have a post. I didn't want to read it because I wanted to hear it from you. You said it was basically saying what you wish you would have done what you wish you would have done with your Kickstarter campaign. So tell me, how did it go?
Speaker 1:Because it seems like you raised a fair amount of money. What would you do differently if you did it next time?
Speaker 2:Yes. I think it was the book and post was like the book in general. I'm not sure. One of the biggest thing was launch on time. Kickstarter campaigns are often they often run long and a lot of people are expecting expect that.
Speaker 2:But there are some people who launched or who support my campaign that had never supported a campaign before and was looking at it as like, we're ordering this and it's coming out on the date, which is my fault. I was actually a year delayed.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Lots of I can probably fill up the rest of this podcast or this time here, I'm telling you all the reasons why, but essentially it was a year late. And I would get emails like near daily from backers being like, Hey, I don't understand what's going on, but I haven't gotten my book yet. And I'd be like, Well, it's still being worked on. I'm sending updates like every two weeks being like, This is what's going on. The funny thing is that I just announced yesterday on Twitter, I'm actually working on a follow-up book.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Uh-huh. Yeah. It's kind of scary. This time I'm actually finishing the book before the new Kickstarter comes out.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I
Speaker 2:haven't mentioned that yet, but I'll be doing another Kickstarter. Just because printing a book costs me several thousand dollars. And that's pretty much only way I can pay for printing the book is if I have some money on hand. So Kickstarter is kind of the way I can do that. So I'll be doing a Kickstarter again and kind of applying these lessons.
Speaker 2:So A) is having the book finished, like the first draft finished before I run the campaign, because at least then I have a good idea in terms of how long it's gonna take. And I think I mentioned a few other things, like one of them was a video you wanna be, a video is crucial. Had that. And my video is professionally done by a friend of mine, which was awesome, who's a professional videographer. But I was sitting and I, every time I watch a video, can't watch it because I'm just like leaning forward and I'm so static.
Speaker 2:And I should have been standing and more I think that was one of the tiny regrets. I just can't watch the video. I just wish I was like, yeah, not, you know. But that was, that's like the one big thing. And the one small thing.
Speaker 2:I can't recall anything else right now. It's probably more
Speaker 1:It of sounds like you would do it again. Like the Kickstarter experience overall was positive. Well, you are doing it again.
Speaker 2:I am doing it again. Yes. I don't know when what we're recording is going to be live. So but it'll be running for the month of September. Okay.
Speaker 2:And I am launching I actually the same thing as before I'm launching it earlier than I thought because timing, I'm going to be speaking at DjangoCon US in Austin in early September. And then I'm running a workshop in San Francisco on the book's content in collaboration with Hack Ray Academy in the September. So I was just like, well, shoot, if I'm maybe running a Kickstarter campaign, I'm already going be at this conference, I'm already going to be at this, like, this really big event. I think something like 50 people have signed up for the workshop so far, which is frightening.
Speaker 1:Wow. Awesome.
Speaker 2:So having the Kickstarter out during these two conferences, I'm doing that same tactic again. So I can go run up to people in person and be like, yeah, please promote.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you would do Kickstarter again. Yeah. Let's keep going now. And actually, let's get into a few things that you felt slowed you down because that's, I think, something all of us makers
Speaker 2:struggle is
Speaker 1:sometimes we can't ship on time. This book I'm writing, Marketing for Developers, I put on the shelf for a year or something like And so what are a few things that happened that delayed the launch?
Speaker 2:The biggest thing was that I ran a Kickstarter and in my Kickstarter description, I said, you know, the money is gonna help me take full time, like take time off of Wedding Lovely and support myself so I can work on the book full time. What actually happened is Wedding Lovely all of sudden had an investor who wanted to invest. And I was like, oh, crap. Is this the time this is a good time for me to fundraise for Wedding Lovely? Because I never had investor come to me and like, give me money, which is cool, you know?
Speaker 2:But what happened is I got like one other small investor and I spent the summer being like, okay, cool. I'm actually gonna fundraise for wedding lovely because it's something I've thought about doing for the last four years. Yeah. And so instead of spending the summer on working on my book, I spent the summer fundraising instead. I never actually talked about that publicly because I felt really embarrassed about running a Kickstarter and then not fulfilling that promise to work on it full time.
Speaker 2:But the opportunity potential opportunity for Wedding Lovely was too great, with this investment. What happened is I completely face planted with fundraising. I went to a billion beating meetings and a billion meetings all told me no, but they didn't tell me no immediately. It was over a series of months. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I ended up finishing like stopping fundraising in November after my last no. And then I spent December just like in depression because it was just like such a fundraising is so hard. Yeah. And so like mentally straining. So that vastly slowed down the book, during that time.
Speaker 2:And I regret it. If one of the least fundraising was successful, it'd be a better story. But the fact that it failed and then I was the lay on the book was just this awful period of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Creator's guilt. I think we get creator's guilt a lot. And the challenge is that on one hand, you want to be able to give people some sort of idea when you're going to be done with whatever, a new feature for Wedding Lovely, your book, anything. You want to be able to tell people, Well, it's not going happen in ten years.
Speaker 1:It's going to happen in this I think the challenge, especially for us when we're independent, but even teams struggle with this, is stuff happens. Could be I've actually heard
Speaker 2:it's a side project, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And your real life suddenly wallets you on the face. Ah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think the vast majority of people are understanding. I think, you know, there's
Speaker 2:Yeah. No one got mad at me. They asked me, was the delay? And I'd be like, Oh, I feel horrible. This is what's happening.
Speaker 2:And they're like, Oh, okay. It's just nice.
Speaker 1:So again, that idea of being honest and, you know, just being straightforward with people.
Speaker 2:Well, I wasn't honest about the fundraising. I, you know, I did have a slew of excuses, but I don't think I ever mentioned the fundraising because it's just like such a conflict of interest.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it kind of weighs on me now. And there's other things that were that I did talk about that did delay the book. Like one of the things is the fact that I did an actual book as compared to an ebook. It's just like designer, like in me, just had to have a real book because it's too cool to be able to pull it out when I'm being video. Like, at my book.
Speaker 2:This is so cool. But you know, designing the book, I hadn't done editorial design forever, creating an accurate, you know, creating a nice cover. And then printing, I ended up going with a printer in China because they as compared to one locally, I always want to support local businesses, but the one locally was going be $10 per book. And if I wanted to sell on Amazon, I would not I'd be losing money on every book if I was selling that. This
Speaker 1:book I've talked to a number of people who have looked into the same thing. And right now for printing anything, it's really hard to do anything other than China if you actually want to recoup your costs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the problem with China is that I worked with PrintNinja. They're amazing. Highly recommend them. The quality is awesome and their support is so great.
Speaker 2:But you know, unless you pay a ton of more money for air shipping, the books are being shipped on a boat, which takes two months. I had no idea it was going to take two months for the prints, for the books to come to me. And apparently there was this whole thing with the shipping lane traffic happened during the time of release still going on right now that delayed it further. But I had no idea. That was like a two month period I had no idea about.
Speaker 2:So with this book that I'm working on right now, which should be out by December, I know I have to be completely a 100% finished with it with early October in order to reach that. Like I'm aware of those challenges now, which makes it a lot easier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You learned from the process.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's so much easier when you do it once, you figure out where you failed. It makes things easier the second time around, but when you're going into the first round, it's a little scary.
Speaker 1:So what else did you do for promoting the book? Did you do anything while you were writing it? Did you have a mailing list? Were you still blogging?
Speaker 2:The Kickstarter is also huge for building up a mailing list. I, before I ran the Kickstarter, I immediately put up a, you know, what do you call it, landing page. So I can start collecting email addresses. So both on the Kickstarter side, but then people can also go to the webpage, not, you know, support the Kickstarter, but still give me their email address. I can keep them informed of updates.
Speaker 2:I think before I ran the Kickstarter, I actually did this a little bit earlier on. I probably had like a 100 people on the landing page because I did launch it to like my Twitter followers. Like, I'm writing a book. And then I was able to be like, I'm running a Kickstarter and send that to the small list and kind of watch both of them grow. I kept, you know, kept that page up as I was working on the book.
Speaker 2:So anyone who's asking what I was working on, I'd be like, Hey, go to this page and sign up. Total big help. Yeah. The second huge thing that really helped out in terms of marketing a book, again, by having a physical book was getting, I want, I'm not gonna say professional photos because that's, I did the photos and I'm not a professional, but I took real, I got a preliminary copy of the book printed. It was like with the first draft copy, it was, you know, all the main spelling errors and all my grammar errors and everything.
Speaker 2:The cover is the only thing that was done, not the spine or the back cover. But I got that done. I, through print on demand, just got one book printed. And then I started taking, lovely, beautiful photos of it because it's like, whoo, this is a real book. I put that on the website.
Speaker 2:Put it on the Twitter feed. I actually created a Twitter account for held web app. I didn't spam my personal followers with all of my updates. So, someone really wants to know that they take me follow this other one. So, I put these photos everywhere, which is a huge help because I don't think anyone came to me necessarily directly, like I love these photos.
Speaker 2:But when you can see a product that looks real and it looks especially if my photos like they're taken at DSLR and they had like the lovely like fading out background and whatnot. Looked very professional. Kind of instills confidence in that project. Yeah. People say, oh, this is going be good quality because the materials surrounding it are good quality.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's actually two things that I'm going to just pick up on, because we're talking really about building trust. I think whenever you're selling a product, people want to trust you. It sounds like you did a couple of things. One is that you didn't just show up one day, you already had been writing blog posts before you decided to do a book.
Speaker 1:You'd done these tutorials. You were obviously going to conferences. I think having that kind of a lot of people won't see the long road of content behind somebody, and they assume that the trust was instilled instantaneously. But that's not true. You were doing things beforehand.
Speaker 1:And then also, you know, you were teasing out things that helped people trust you even more. Like this is going to be a really well put together product.
Speaker 2:I definitely hope that I had the skills of designer and I kind of have tried to frame my design eye to kind of pick up on those things as healthy both with wedding lovely and the book, because I can just, I don't have to outsource that I can just, you know, work on it myself. And I know that I can provide a pretty good looking product. And definitely, I mean, especially for wedding lovely too, like having a professional booking website. You know, people are just like, oh, okay, they're more likely to sign up they see that's that visually looks professional, like this is a professional service, they'll take care of me as compared to say, a bad web design where it looks unprofessional. And that will kind of instill in their mind that you put their interactions and what the service is going be like is going be unprofessional or not as great.
Speaker 1:The truth is I think a lot of great products do get launched that don't get noticed because there's no reach. And the reach comes from people talking about it and sharing it. And a lot of that is on the story, right? The story is interesting when you have some sort of narrative that people can share.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think. Writing about your experiences, blog posts have been so helpful to me for expanding the amount of say Twitter followers I have, which I feel is like a fairly good, like feel for how big your reach is. Again, just like being real, talking about my experiences, writing about things that have gone well, writing things that don't go well with Wedding Lovely and the book. I always regret not blogging more.
Speaker 2:I never regret blogging. It's always, if I haven't blogged in a long time, it's actually worse for my career. Because for a long time with Wedding Lovely, I just went a 100% Wedding Lovely. This is before the book. I had to stop blogging altogether.
Speaker 2:And I think, you know, my connections with people I made before and my ability to make new connections, everything just went stale because I wasn't writing and I wasn't reaching out and trying to expand my network. And I really regret that period of time because I kind of I knew some really cool people in the Bay Area and I just lost complete connection with them. So when I was launching these new products, was like, ah, why didn't I continue this? Like, it was a huge regret.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've now I'm going to forget his name. Is it Gabe Weinberg? He suggests fiftyfifty. 50% product development, 50% kind of blogging, marketing, networking, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:That's exhausting, but necessary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's a good mix. So what's next for Wedding Lovely? What are your plans for that? Are you going to keep working on it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Continue working on it. Like I said, it's not a runaway success. I tried fundraising, it didn't work out. But it kind of runs itself because the way I built the company, vendors join my vendor directory, they send out an email to be approved, I can disapprove it pretty easily.
Speaker 2:And then there's a whole slew of automated systems that kind of take care of sending emails and welcome emails and getting started. And I have a planning app pretty much the same thing. So it kind of runs without my involvement, which is awesome for when I need to take time off to work on the book. But things always improve when I jump back into it and I work on it full time. Right now.
Speaker 2:My biggest thing is how do I improve? Cause wedding lovely I run is like both a planning guide to walk people through wedding planning, but I also have a public facing vendor directory where I try to showcase awesome small business, local vendors near a person. And my biggest thing right now I'm working on is actually how to improve those results, which has been really fun because I, you know, before building web app, I just like display information. I mean, that's all I was focused on for first three years or so of working at wedding lovely, but now I'm looking on how to improve information. And then I actually was working last night on an algorithm for ranking vendors in terms of their quality based on factors on their profile.
Speaker 2:But then I also have to pull that into the search results when it's, you know, you're trying right now, search results are ordered by just location where it's like closest, next closest, next closest. So when I have a ranking for these vendors, how do I up that update that locations search? So it's not necessarily by location, but still relevant to them. But then the best vendors float to the top. So this is where the computer science stuff, I think that if I had those that degree, there'd be a lot more stuff I would know at this point in how to do that kind of algorithmic type stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is little frustrating, but it's fun.
Speaker 1:Well, now you actually have that first platform built. Yeah. So, yeah, it might be a challenge to build that next piece, but now at least you have that first part built. You've got something running that people are using.
Speaker 2:And that's what I say with the book is that you don't need a computer science degree to get that first part out. Just to get a web app out and start accumulating information. It's really simple. You don't need crazy theory, computer science, engineering type stuff in your web app. And just like me, people can learn it as they go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's awesome. I think that's a good place to leave it, Tracy. Thanks so much for your time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you for having me. This has been really fun.
Speaker 1:Alright, folks. That's it for this week. I just realized listening back to that track that I was bumping my microphone a ton during that interview. I'm really sorry about that. Hopefully, it did not drive you crazy.
Speaker 1:I'm going to make sure that I adjust this mic setup so that doesn't happen again. Please go and follow Tracy on Twitter at lime daring. You can also follow me. I'm at m I Justin. And check out Tracy's projects as well.
Speaker 1:Hello webapp.com. She's in the midst of her new Kickstarter. Hello webapp.com/kickstarter. Alright. I'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:I've got a few more interviews in the bag that are gonna be coming out in the next probably three weeks. So keep an eye on that, and also go check out justinjackson.ca/marketingfor developers. The final version, the big launch is coming up in October. Talk to you soon.
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